The West Coast Offense EXPLAINED

Bill Walsh completely changed the NFL with his West Coast offense but in order to understand how he had so much impact in the NFL we have to go back to his very beginning and tell the tale of history about how he came up with the West Coast offense in 1957 Bill Walsh takes over as the head coach at Washington High School in Fremont California and this team that he's taking over is bad they haven't won a league game in three years so Bill Walsh has a lot of building to do now when coach Walsh's first year his starting quarterback hero koratory great athlete but he ends up going down with a collarbone injury and then Bob Hidalgo needs to take over as the backup quarterback now this is a significant part of the story because it forces Walsh to innovate his offense around his new player and every great coach should do that they should take what they have and innovate around what quarterback and receivers running backs that they have in order to be successful and this is exactly what Walsh did and that's exactly what he does later in the story here when he's at Cincinnati but this is the foundation of coach Bill Walsh and how he was able to adapt to his new systems now Walsh has some success in 1958 he ends up winning a league title and and then 1959 he ends up going out to Berkeley under Marv Levy and working for him but in 1959 Walsh actually leaves the high school rankings to get into the college rankings and then eventually will end up in the Raiders in 1966 as an offensive Assistant two years later after joining the Raiders in 1966 he ends up joining the Cincinnati Bengals and Paul Brown in 1968 and this is where we can see the West Coast offense start to formulate and come together now when Walsh joins Cincinnati the quarterback that he has is this guy named Greg Cook Now Greg Cook is six foot four 220 pounds and Coach actually called him Steve Young but just a bigger body so he could move he could throw he could do everything you need from an NFL quarterback to do but unfortunately like he saw in high school Greg ended up getting hurt ended up tearing up his rotator cuff so coach had to adapt again like he did in high school and he brought in his backup Virgil Carter now for those who know and have seen Virgil Carter play he didn't have the biggest arm but he was super athletic and he was very accurate with his passes and this is where the term nickel and Diamond came from that's all often associated with West Coast offense and Bill Walsh's offense in particular is because of the short throws to the running back and short throws to the tight end that came out rather quickly and because of the lack of arm strength from Virgil Carter this is where we start to see the horizontal passing of game start to formulate that the West Coast offense is famous for and not so much the vertical stretch that coach Walsh was able to do with Greg Cook who had a bigger arm here so we don't want to volunteer very long people don't practice against it very well and we can get different kind of patterns we can develop in close to other people that that just aren't there for you when that guy split way up but the whole basis of the West Coast offense is high percentage throws and get your athletes in space and get them running after the catch and this is why receivers like Jerry Rice Roger Craig all those guys were so successful because they were able to get the football and they were able to run after the catch I really think the West Coast offense it's a very specific sequential approach to football the essence of it is that ball control passing game combined with a complete fully dimensional running game another Staple in the West Coast offense is just the rhythmic timing of the quarterback's footwork as well as where the receiver is going to be in relation to what coverage the defense is playing so Bill Walsh could famously tell you what route was going to be open when it was going to be open if the quarterback just had the proper footwork so that's why if when you dig through the offensive Playbook from the 49ers you'll see you know five steps and throw five steps in the hitch seven step drop seven step in a hitch everything was timed out perfectly so by the time the receiver had a certain area of the field against a certain coverage the quarterback could then put his foot in the ground and deliver the football so if you ever watch Joe Montana he knows exactly when the ball is going to be thrown based on the coverage the defense has given them and of course the rhythmic timing of the footwork now during this time with the Cincinnati Bengals it was a huge growth opportunity for Bill Walsh because he coached under one of the most Innovative coaches that we've seen in football under Paul Brown this is where he learned to watch film practice situational football and of course what he's most famous for is scripting plays now Joe Montana famously said that it started with right around 10 plays when he got to the 49ers and then ended up being around 20 to 25 plays that Bill Walsh would script before the game meaning he could tell you what play he was gonna call what defense they were probably gonna line up in and how that play call would work you see colleges and NFL teams all the time to usually script the first 10 plays because they're going to see what the defense is going to be running how they're going to react to certain sets certain motions and certain formations so a lot of teams will script the first templates but Wallace would script the first 20 to 25 plays so now back to the story in 1975 Paul Brown decides that he's going to retire but instead of promoting Bill Walsh he promotes another assistant to head coach Bill Walsh ends up leaving the same time that Paul Brown did it does a short stint with the San Diego Chargers he does a short stint at Stanford where he brings them back to a winning record and then right around that time the NFL team that's right in their backyard the San Francisco 49ers calls and ask them to revive their program because San Francisco did struggle for a little bit and this is where the 49ers actually start to take life because coach Walsh takes his system that he's been developing over the years this West Coast system and implements it with two Hall of Fame quarterbacks with Joe Montana and Steve Young okay now we're gonna do a deep dive into the San Francisco Playbook that way you can see what's going on behind the curtains and see formationally passing wise running wise what the West Coast offense was trying to do and what Bill Walsh was ultimately trying to accomplish so first thing you want to look at is just a couple bass formations you're going to notice that in most of Bill Walsh's formations he's gonna have a two back set whether that be lined up and split backs what you're seeing right here or in an eye formation which you can see with these dotted lines or offset which you can see with the F and the H offset which coach calls Ace but you're going to see a variation of two different backs that are in the backfield now Bill Walsh says that he wants to run the ball first and I know when people think of the West Coast offense they think of the horizontal passing attack uh intermediate to shallow passes but he wanted to run the ball first and everything was set up off of play action if you notice here on the left hand side that there are a ton of combinations that of play action that coach is trying to accomplish here and this is what you're seeing here is the quarterback had to know where he was protected in each protection so nowadays in the NFL coaches might just have a half slide or a full slide or dual read protection they'll have four to five different maybe more protections but you can see here on the screen there's close to nine there's another page of this as well so close to 15 protections that he had and this is all based off of the flow the formation and what they were trying to accomplish when the quarterback dropped back to pass and we mentioned too about the footwork and why it's so important if you see here all of these past protections look is tied to the quarterback's footwork so if he is taking that five-step drop he has to know where he's protected uh and where he's left vulnerable so if you look here at 72-73 you'll see that the Y is in the protection but if he gets beat to the outside there's no running back to save him so the quarterback has to know that if he's doing a play action or drop back and look into his left that if that tight end who's technically not a great blocker as they are pass catchers might get beat to the right side so he's gonna get that ball out quick if he does feel pressure next we're going to look at the passing attack and how everything was layered from first read second read to third read slash check down and this is what Bill Walsh is most famous for is his ability to layer the defense horizontally okay he wanted to stretch you out that way he can throw the football and make it easy for the quarterback so well first we'll look at this play right here in the top left hand corner if you notice the three reads one is the go ball two is the flat route to the running back and then three is this third here so the quarterback can look deep to outside to back to inside and get rid of the football if we're looking in the top right here this page you'll see one's the curl ball two is the out route by this player and then three is going to be the flat route by the fullback coming out of the backfield so the quarterback doesn't need to look left doesn't need to you know scan the entire field he has to look right find the read and then deliver the football so it was easier to process for the quarterback of course tied to the footwork of taking a three-step in a hitch and letting the ball go five step in the hitch let the ball go whatever was tied to this certain play this isn't to say that Bill Walsh didn't take his shots downfield you can see here in the top right hand corner his number one read is going to be that shot ball in the top left and then if not if it's not there he's going to come back to 2-3 and then get rid of the ball for his check down read so again it is a horizontal passing attack but you do see guys like Jerry Rice get through the middle of the field and the ball be delivered on time if the quarterback does decide to go there and the last thing we wanted to look at was just a route tree and how coach Wallace coached up his x and z receivers being the most outside receivers and the different routes that they were going to run so a typical route Tree in high school or college is going to be one through nine and the coaches will have variations off it but here you can see that there's a ton of routes that break off of this route tree and you can see in the bottom right corner they're all layered by steps to and how many yards so coach Walsh didn't want his guys pushing it past any certain points everything was choreographed to be beautifully thrown at a very particular point at every yardage and even the step being calculated to time up with the quarterback's footwork and when the ball should be released I and the last thing we have to talk about if we're talking about the west coast is the verbiage of the actual play call it is a mile long and the reason why coaches do this is because they can take out and tag every piece of the play that way you can turn one play into multiple plays just by removing a phrasing Adam phrase right and uh you know Chris Sims and John Gruden are famous if you go and type those names into YouTube you'll find a famous video where Jon Gruden tells him hey we're going green right x shift the Viper right 382 X stick lookie on one and you know Chris Sims has trouble processing all that because for a newer quarterback if you're not in the system it is a lot to process but we're going to break down one of the play calls here just to show you exactly what each piece means and why coaches tag it so long so the example play call that we have here is strong right slot Z right spider 2 y banana Z over now what does all this mean so strong right slot is actually the formation that we're seeing here Z right just simply tells the Z receiver You're Gonna Go In Motion to the right side that's pretty simple spider 2 to why banana is the concept that they're actually running out of the backfield so you see the bee back going into the flat the Y running the banana route and then the Z running the over route in the back side now you're probably asking yourself what does The X receiver do typically teams will have built-in rules where if they're on the back side of a realm they're going to run a drag a dig or a backside skinny post whatever it may be but they have rules built into if I'm not in the initial concept I have to do this other thing here but that's how typically the West Coast play call structure with the formation the protection the Motions the shifts and then each individual route that's tagged in the back end so that's the West Coast offense to learn about more offenses we recommend you check out this video here which goes over all the offenses that we've covered on this channel

Channel: 🏈 Learn Football With vIQtory Sports

Views: 20,596

Keywords: what is the west coast offense, west coast offense explained, west coast offense play calling, west coast offense concepts, west coast offense playbook, west coast offense bill walsh, west coast offense scheme, west coast offense terminology

Id: EwN-0LvcaY8

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023