SAN FRANCISCO - Bill Walsh took great chances on the football field and with the people who worked for him.
Take Jerry Rice, the superstar receiver he plucked from tiny Mississippi Valley State in the first round back in 1985.
“He gave me the opportunity to come to a winner, San Francisco out of Mississippi Valley State University,” Rice said. “I was the 16th player taken in the first round. It was all because of Bill Walsh and what he stood for. I think that was very unique for him, because he could see talent.”
Walsh died at his Woodside home Monday morning following a long battle with leukemia. He was 75.
Walsh changed the NFL with his innovative offense and a legion of coaching disciples, breaking new ground and winning three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers along the way.
“This is just a tremendous loss for all of us, especially to the Bay Area because of what he meant to the 49ers,” said Joe Montana, San Francisco’s Hall of Fame quarterback. “Outside of my dad he was probably the most influential person in my life.”
Walsh didn’t become an NFL head coach until 47, and he spent just 10 seasons on the San Francisco sideline. But he left an indelible mark, building the once-woebegone 49ers into the most successful team of the 1980s.
The soft-spoken Californian also produced an army of proteges. Many of his former assistants went on to lead their own teams, handing down Walsh’s methods to dozens more coaches in a tree with innumerable branches.
Walsh went 102-63-1 with the 49ers, winning 10 of his 14 postseason games along with six division titles. He was the NFL’s coach of the year in 1981 and 1984.
Few men did more to shape the look of football into the 21st century. His cerebral nature and often-brilliant stratagems earned him his nickname, “the Genius,” long before his election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1993.
Walsh created the Minority Coaching Fellowship program in 1987, helping minority coaches get a foothold in a previously white-dominated profession. Tyrone Willingham and Marvin Lewis were among those who went through the program.
Walsh twice served as the 49ers’ general manager, and coach George Seifert led San Francisco to two more Super Bowl titles after Walsh left the sideline.
Even a short list of Walsh’s adherents is stunning. Seifert, Mike Holmgren, Dennis Green, Sam Wyche, Ray Rhodes and Bruce Coslet all became NFL head coaches after serving on Walsh’s San Francisco staffs, and Tony Dungy played for him. Most of his former assistants passed on Walsh’s structures and strategies to a new generation of coaches, including Mike Shanahan, Jon Gruden, Brian Billick, Andy Reid, Pete Carroll, Gary Kubiak, Steve Mariucci and Jeff Fisher.
In 2004, Walsh was diagnosed with leukemia - the disease that also killed his son, former ABC News reporter Steve Walsh, in 2002 at age 46. He underwent months of treatment and blood transfusions, and publicly disclosed his illness in November 2006.
Walsh was coaching a high school team in Fremont, Calif., when Marv Levy, then the coach at the University of California, hired him as an assistant.
Walsh did a stint at Stanford before beginning his pro coaching career as an assistant with the AFL’s Oakland Raiders in 1966, forging a friendship with Al Davis that endured through decades of rivalry.
He moved on to the Bengals in 1968, where he stayed through 1975 and built a reputation as an elite quarterbacks coach under the legendary Paul Brown. Although Walsh and Brown were cordial, they were neither close nor shared the same football philosophies. So when Brown retired in 1975, he appointed another assistant, Bill “Tiger” Johnson, rather than Walsh to be his replacement.
“The way it was done was not as civilized as it should have been,” Walsh said. “(Brown) didn’t tell me. The TV people came to my house and told me. So that wasn’t very good.
“We really loved Cincinnati. We enjoyed it thoroughly, and our kids were in school, and we had good friends. But the minute that happened, my wife and I knew that we’d have to leave and go someplace to start over. And we did.”
The Walshes left for Southern California, where Bill took a job as offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers. He spent less than a year there before accepting the position of head coach at Stanford, where in two seasons he turned around an average program with victories in the 1977 Sun Bowl and 1978 Bluebonnet Bowl.
Walsh built a playbook that included short dropbacks and novel receiving routes, as well as constant repetition of every play in practice. Though it originated in Cincinnati, it became known many years later as the West Coast offense - a name Walsh never liked or repeated, but which eventually grew to encompass his offensive philosophy and the many tweaks added by Holmgren, Shanahan and others.
By the 1990s, much of the NFL was running some version of the West Coast offense, with its fundamental belief that the passing game can set up an effective running attack, rather than the opposite conventional wisdom.
The 49ers chose him to rebuild the franchise in 1979.
The long-suffering team had gone 2-14 before Walsh’s arrival. They repeated the record in his first season. Walsh doubted his abilities to turn around such a miserable situation - but earlier in 1979, the 49ers drafted Montana from Notre Dame.
Walsh turned over the starting job to Montana in 1980, when the 49ers improved to 6-10 - and improbably, San Francisco won its first championship in 1981, just two years after winning two games.
Championships followed in the postseasons of 1984 and 1988 as Walsh built a consistent winner. He also showed considerable acumen in personnel, adding Lott, Charles Haley, Roger Craig and Rice to his rosters after he was named the 49ers’ general manager in 1982 and then president in 1985
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