New Believers on the Coast

By Tom Callahan

For the 49ers, Walsh's best offense is a good defense

These days O.J. Simpson, who grew up and grew old with the San Francisco 49ers (unfortunately, U.S.C. and the Buffalo Bills came in for all the good stuff in between), is sounding like the boy who cheered the 49ers in the '50s, not the man who left the ruins of his team for retirement two years ago. "I don't know about depth," says O.J., "but the 49ers have championship-quality front-line players. I mean it. I'm saying the first 25,26 guys are the best in football. Can you believe it? My team."

On both sides of the bay, San Francisco is "my team" again, and nobody around the National Football League can believe it. After winning six games and losing ten last season (two and 14 for the two years before that), the 49ers suddenly are running away with the Western Division of the National Conference. Rather, they are passing, and defending against the pass.

A team completely without logic or losses for two months, San Francisco is a defensive power under an offensive coach, a sensitive inventor named Bill Walsh. The defense is founded on two known mercenaries (ex-Charger Fred Dean and ex-Ram Jack Reynolds), who argued their way out of other towns over money and who now "lecture" on motivation in San Francisco, and three unknown rookies (Cornermen Ronnie Lott and Eric Wright, and Safety Carlton Williamson). When was the last time anyone heard of an all-rookie secondary in the N.F.L.?

Or a Notre Dame quarterback who was winning as a pro (Joe Montana)? Or a play in which the quarterback dashes off the field at the last instant and leaves the wide receiver to take the snap from center? Montana and Freddie Solomon pulled that one. Solomon rolled out for seven yards, and the 49ers rolled on to a 17-14 victory over the Atlanta Falcons, the seventh straight 49ers victory, pushing their division lead to three games with only a third of the season left.

"There isn't anything flippant about our offense," says Walsh, although four non-quarterbacks have passed or threatened to pass this year. "We don't have a gifted all-around offense: our longest run is 23 yards on the last play of a half. We have to be resourceful and fully dimensional." And what does fully dimensional mean? "There is basic, rock-solid, block-and-tackle football. Then there is crazy, circus-play, flea-flicker football. We fit somewhere in between."

Where Walsh, 49, fits among coaches is not easy to tell, either. His pedigree is complicated. Walsh is not just a pup out of Paul Brown, as people say. He is by Brown out of Al Davis with a touch of Sid Gillman (since Davis is really Gillman taken to the nth degree). "Al gave me the taste for offense," Walsh says of the year (1966) he assisted the evil genius of the Oakland Raiders. "He opened vistas."

Then for eight seasons after that, Walsh sketched vistas and drew plays for Brown's Cincinnati Bengals. "The coaching atmosphere under Paul was almost clinical. Let's say, you were assured of the players' absolute attention." Brown put more than a chill in the players. He put the classroom into pro football. Still, his best students (Don Shula, Chuck Noll, Walsh), all have been different. No great coach is like any other, really.

After the Bengals, continues Walsh, "I coordinated the offense in San Diego one year for Tommy Prothro, with even more freedom to express myself." Then he turned around, and he was middleaged. Whether or not it blew in from Brown, sore at losing his Xs-and-Os man, Walsh felt a definite coolness in the marketplace. "I was 45 before I even had an interview for a head coaching job in the N.F.L." He could hear teams thinking: "Why hasn't he been a head coach before now? What's the flaw?" And whispering: "A good technician, not a head coach." To be somebody's head coach, not to mention his own man, Walsh went back to college football, to Stanford, where he had assisted John Ralston in the mid-'60s.

His way with quarterbacks had always been his most obvious gift. In Walsh's time with the Bengals, Ken Anderson was the top-rated passer in the league twice, and Greg Cook once. At San Diego he made Dan Fouts one of the best passers in the league. All of his quarterbacks speak warmly and a little wondrously of Walsh. At Stanford, he touched Guy Benjamin and Steve Dils. They moved to the head of the N.C.A.A. passing charts, and Stanford won bowl games, and Walsh won coaching awards, and he was happy, except. . .

hy do I need the N.F.L.?" he asked himself when the 49ers called two years ago. "Stanford is the ideal atmosphere for coaching football--the most brilliant people, one of the honest, legitimate programs. There is dignity to it, playing against machines and beating them." All the same, Walsh did need to be a head coach in the N.F.L.

"We're going to tactically approach offense while building defense," proclaimed the new coach and general manager. Probably nobody understood. But that is exactly what Walsh has been doing.

It is advisable in pro football to sneak new men into the secondary one at a time, not to change three of the four spots in one year. But Walsh has been in a hurry. "The moment we drafted the three, we released our veteran starters," he says. "That's Paul Brown too: don't vacillate."

At 34, Veteran Linebacker Reynolds (a.k.a. "Hacksaw") has not allowed the younger players to get carried away. "Play with emotion, but don't show it outwardly," he lectured in the clubhouse after the Falcon game. "Stay reserved." This from a man who, when he was in college at Tennessee, reacted to a loss to Mississippi by hacksawing a 1953 Chevy in half.

Fred Dean dissects quarterbacks instead. "He has set a whole new standard here," says Chuck Studley, the defensive coordinator. "If you don't hurry to the quarterback now, Dean will be there waiting for you." Not since Alan Page's M.V.P. year for Minnesota in 1971 has one lineman's impact on the league seemed so profound. Dean is a seven-year veteran, merely 230 Ibs., but brutally strong, and quick. He arrived in San Francisco in the season's sixth week, when the 49ers dispatched Dallas (45-14) and then in quick order, two other Super Bowl teams, Los Angeles (20-17) and Pittsburgh (17-14).

"It's going to get harder on us, but we're going to get better," Walsh says. The thought of teams gunning for the 49ers still seems a bit strange, but it does not worry Walsh. How far does he think they can go this year? Walsh smiles and offers the most unlikely answer. "I haven't allowed myself to think." --By Tom Callahan

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