Air Coryell and The “Mid-West” Offense
After departing from his long tenure and founding of the Cleveland Browns, Paul Brown started an AFL expansion team, the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968. In this first Bengals season, Paul Brown would put together a staff that included a young offensive assistant coach by the name of Bill Walsh. Bill Walsh was an early product of the Sid Gillman/Al Davis coaching tree, having worked on the Oakland Raiders coaching staff two years prior.
After the 1968 veteran expansion draft and the common draft, the new Ohio team still lacked talent similar to competing teams. The new roster included 3 QBs who would split time, John Stofa (Technically the first ever Cincinnati Bengal. he was acquired in a trade from the Miami Dolphins.), Dewey Warren, and Sam Wyche. Coming from the Sid Gillman tree, Bill Walsh ran a variant of a vertical pass offense, but all 3 QBs on the team were not great fits for this style of offense. At the time, football was still very run-heavy, so finding a strong-arm QB who was ideal for a vertical passing system was rare. The Bengals would go on to have back-to-back losing seasons in their first two years of operation, only winning a combined 7 games and losing a combined 20.
In 1970, the Bengals 3rd year of operations, the team acquired QB Virgil Carter from the Chicago Bears. Just as the other OB’s the Bengals had rostered in the past, Virgil Carter did not have the strongest arm. However, Carter excelled at throwing accurate short passes, as he displayed during his college career at BYU. This ability inspired Bill Walsh to make some offensive changes. If you keep track of the coaching cycle each season, you will quickly realize that coaches do not change schemes very often, but in 1970, Walsh did the unexpected and changed the offense to fit the players he had. Specifically, Walsh designed an offense that could control the ball through short passes rather than runs, with the occasional long pass to get out a sticky situation. This style of offense was designed to open running and longer passing lanes by forcing the defense to focus on the short pass over and over again. At the time, this type of scheme was unheard of, leading the Bengals to make their first playoff appearance on the shoulders of mediocre players and a good scheme. The Bengals would continue to ride this “dink and dunk” offense until 1975, winning 48 games and making the playoffs in 3 of the 5 seasons.
Fast forward to 1979, Walsh was hired as the Head Coach of the San Francisco 49ers, after the Bengals surprisingly did not hire Walsh as the successor to Paul Brown. By this point, Walsh had solidified his offensive philosophy and had full control of a team to implement it. He would go on to draft Joe Montana (and eventually trade for Steve Young), implement his short passing offense, and win 3 Super Bowls (1981, 1984, and 1988). After Bill Walsh left in 1988, the 49ers would win 2 additional Super Bowls with the team and scheme he built.
This highly successful west coast team gave way to the nickname West Coast Offense, although technically it should be the “Mid-West” Offense due to its start in southern Ohio. Today, the West Coast style offense is ran by every team in some form. Mike Shanahan won back-to-back Super Bowls running the West Coast offense. Mike Holmgren won a Super Bowl with the Packers running the West Coast offense. Jon Gruden won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers running a West Coast style offense. Most recently, Doug Pederson won a Super Bowl with the Eagles running a West Coast offense. And every team needing to tie a ball game up in the last 2 minutes runs a West Coast style offense. Needless to say, Bill Walsh revolutionized the way offense is ran in pro football.
Rewind back to 1978, another innovative “West Coast” offense was under construction: “Air Coryell.” Air Coryell was the nickname given to the vertical passing offensive scheme of Don Coryell’s San Diego Chargers. While the league looked much more like a passing league than it did in the 1960’s, almost all passing came through a scheme called the pro set. At a high level, the pro set was a running offense that occasionally used play actions to open up deep passes. This heavy run formation force defenses to stack the box, eventually leading to open men down the field. At the time, this was one of the only successful ways to get receivers open due to the heavy contact allowed by the defensive backs during route running. However, in 1978 things changed with the Mel Blount rule (illegal contact downfield), which prevented defensive backs from contacting the receivers outside of five yards from the line of scrimmage.
This rule change gave way to new methods of getting passing lanes open down field. Don Coryell, a coach again from the Sid Gillman tree, took advantage of this new rule by putting receivers in motion, meaning WRs, RBs, and TEs moved around in the formation pre-snap.
This motion made it very difficult to jam a receiver at the line (the only point of contact between the DB and WR with the new rule), as defensive backs had very little time to get set if they had to move. Another advantage of this was the ability to quickly read if the defense was playing man or zone. If the defensive back following the motion man, it was a man defense, if they didn’t it was a zone. Even more strange, the offense didn’t have clear cut formations. After the motions were set, the receivers had multiple options of routes to run based on the coverage that was read. But no matter the routes chosen, the first read by the QB was the deep pass. In fact, the core goal of this offense was to get multiple receivers deep down field. If the deep route receivers were covered, this stretched out the field of defenders leaving space for the mid-range passes. If extra defensive backs were put on the field to stop this, you run the ball down the middle.
With a strong arm QB and fast receivers, this offensive scheme was extremely successful. From 1979 to 1982 the Super Chargers led the NFL in passing yards per game, passing touchdowns, rushing touchdowns, and points per game. This scheme would also give the Chargers 3 AFC West titles, but sadly never a Super Bowl appearance. However, the offensive coordinator under Don Coryell, Joe Gibbs, would later win three Super Bowls as the Head Coach in Washington running this same offensive scheme.
Don Coryell’s offense, due to both its similarity to Bill Walsh’s offense and its success on the west coast, has also been nicknamed the West Coast offense. Yet, despite both these offenses growing up on the west coast and being from the Sid Gilliam tree, they are actually quite different. Walsh’s offense focused on short passing, while the first read in Coryell’s offense was the deep ball.(Luckily, if you are playing Madden or any other football simulator, these offenses are differentiated: the west coast offense is Bill Walsh’s short passing offense and the vertical offense is Coryell’s long passing offense.)
Although the nicknames can get confusing, both west coast offenses had significant impact on the game. Many parts of today’s game came directly from these two offenses. From Coryell: pass catching Tight Ends, receiver motions, and stacking receivers on one side. The Coryell offense caused defenses to change, defensive backs became highly valuable and linebackers had to cover the pass instead of just the run. From Walsh: the two minute drill offense, many horizontal passing routes, and scripted plays. The Walsh offense changed the way teams viewed QBs, it wasn’t just about athletic ability, but intelligence and the ability to memorize plays. Today, both schemes are used in some capacity in almost every offense.
So, next time you see Tom Brady lead a precise 2 minute drill in the 4th quarter at age 41 or you see Baker Mayfield launch a deep touchdown to Jarvis, remember where those plays and QB archetypes came from: Bill Walsh and Don Coryell.
