With the passing of former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh, much has been made of his strategic contribution to the game, most obviously the development of the horizontal passing game now commonly called the West Coast offense.
But I think that Walsh's impact on the NFL in terms of the game's popularity at that cultural point in time -- meaning the 1980s -- when pro football really began to separate from the rest of American sports went far beyond diagrams on a blackboard.
It was in that era when the NFL definitively became corporate America's sport, a huge thing because of the enormous amounts of revenue that would flow into the league as a result. Certainly there were big sponsorship deals prior to that but nothing like the sophisticated "strategic partnerships" of today that merge sport and business.
And no figure in the league better advanced the comparisons between sports and business management than Walsh (pictured here with quarterback Joe Montana). Before him, the coaching icons -- Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, Bud Grant and Chuck Noll --- were certainly admirable leadership role models but their milieu was clearly sports. Don Shula, to an extent, more approximated an executive figure. But it was Walsh, with a clearly identifiable management style -- by imposing a revolutionary tactical plan (the West Coast offense) and taking a hands-on approach (by scripting the first 20 or so plays) -- who really embodied the emerging concept of the corporate manager as a change agent who could almost single-handedly control the destiny of an enterprise.
And it didn't hurt that the trim, silver-haired Walsh, seemingly perpetually dressed in smart business-casual, fed the self-image of business executives. And Walsh had the added good fortune of doing it in a attractive part of the country, San Francisco, at the dawn of the high-tech age.
Admittedly, much of this speaks to a subtle -- even subliminal -- sociological influence that Walsh may have exerted. And I have no doubt that the NFL would still be the 800-pound gorilla of American pop culture even without Walsh's considerable presence. But I am also certain that because of what he did and how he did it, Walsh deserves a huge amount of credit for the game's appeal to an elite demographic that determines how American capital is spent.
Photo credit: Associated Press
