Thank you, Coach Walsh

Any number of sites will be treating this passing at length, many of them better qualified to do it than me. When Walsh was in his glory, I was 3,000 miles away, wishing that my team could be like his.

Perhaps the best way to remember Walsh is to read Michael Lewis's fantastic book about football, "The Blind Side." In it, Lewis examines the chess match between Bill Parcells and Bill Walsh -- and in that chapter, you get to the point of really understanding and appreciating both men, and what they brought to coaching.

Walsh, simply, made you feel like it was OK to think about football. The way his offense worked, at its height, didn't look like a one-time gathering of world-changing talent, though of course they had that as well. It just looked like they were ahead of the game, smarter, more sophisticated.

In a time when offense looked like World War I-esque tests of wills to run it up the gut, or the same old Al Davisian deep outs and bombs, Walsh devised slants that looked like they should get their WRs killed, and yet they never did. Even when they were beating my team, it was hard to really work up a good hate on them.

His defenses were some of the most underrated in NFL history. His secondaries defined shutdown, to the point where an ordinary pass rush generated constant and effective pressure. His safety was Ronnie Lott. That, alone, made them not a finesse team. Since his offense usually provided a lead, his defense could play downhill all game -- and they did it well. For a "cerebral" coach, you rarely saw his line get trampled. Just because they were smart didn't mean they also couldn't play a little smashmouth.

His offense was not as revolutionary as you might be led to believe. Hints and touches of it were around as early as 1960, with an Eagle team that won a championship without being able to run the ball worth a damn. The AFL also had tons of stuff that Walsh used later.

But the mystique that he brought to it -- the hubris of scripting plays in advance, the simple but relentless mastery of the same sets, and the play-calling mix that always seemed to be on point -- was remarkable.

When the Niners came to power, I rooted for them as my back-up team, as did most of America, it seemed. There was a simple reason to this: either you rooted for the Niners or you rooted for the Cowboys, and rooting for the Cowboys was like rooting for a holier-than-thou version of the Yankees.

Besides, there was never a time, before Walsh, that the Niners created any kind of animosity around the league. They just weren't very good very often.

Since Bill lost the fastball and moved on, the Niner faithful have looked and behaved like the rich kid whose family hits hard times -- unable to accept that the glory years have gone forever.

There will also never be, I am certain, a coach that gets this far in front of the game, and maintains his lead for as long as Walsh did. The league is more competitive now, and the race to imitate any innovation is much faster.

He also, and this is true no matter who you root for, made the game better -- simply because he made it OK to think about pro football in all new ways. There isn't too many people who you can say that about.