Football Politics

One of the nicer points in the great Michael Lewis book "The Blind Side" is that football fandom falls on a continuum. If you are more into offense and innovation, you fall towards the Bill Walsh side of life, which Lewis refers to as a kind of football leftism. If you like the smashmouth defense approach that's more in line with a Bill Parcells team, you are a right-winger. (Realizing, of course, that Walsh's teams were more physical than you remember, and that Parcells' best teams were smarter and more innovative than given credit for.)

Now, I'd like to take this farther.

If you're a football leftist, you are, I submit, in the majority of the audience, and definitely in the world of fantasy sports. (Perhaps this is even part of the reason why many fans have such an antipathy towards it.)

You can, of course, just say that network execs are more leftist, which, of course, falls into a standing litany of Red State America. However, the ratings also back it up. Ravens-Giants, also known as the worst Super Bowl in the history of the universe, tanked in the ratings. Pats-Giants, not such a problem. The XFL, a league of low scoring and hard hitting, tanked in a year, despite being closer to actual NFL product. Arena Ball, with pinball scoring and a near-total lack of meaningful hitting, will soon be in its second decade of existence.

Most people, of course, don't fall into one clear distinction, and will mostly follow their own team more than a kind of team. But I'd also submit that the kind of team that you have when you are growing up helps to inform your place in the continuum. For me, the Eagles were a right-wing club, with a defense that really seemed to prefer smashing mouths than preventing points. This might also help to explain why the fan base has been so snarly towards the Andy Reid Experience, because his defenses have never been like that.

I have no greater point to make here, other than to wonder if it makes you a better or worse fan to change your orientation depending on your team's talent. Steeler Fan last year had to feel some sort of cognitive dissonance for having a team that did best with Ben Rothlisberger throwing for his life. Niner Fan has been made even more miserable by their recent failures to score, in addition to, well, sucking. When your team stops playing in the way that it's always played, it feels like a betrayal.

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.