The Greatest Assistant Coaches in NFL History

The Greatest Assistant Coaches in NFL History originally appeared on Athlon Sports.

Throughout football history, head coaches have been the relative superstars, and their fates are aligned with their own successes or failures. Things are far more nebulous for assistant coaches, though they're frequently just as crucial to any success as any head coach you could name. Even the best assistants can get swept out in head coaching purges, and it's not uncommon for legends to change cities far more often than they should.

These vagaries also show up when it comes to deserved recognition for innovation. We all know the names of the most important head coaches in pro football history, from Paul Brown to Sid Gillman to Bill Walsh to Bill Belichick. But the guys behind the curtains who are just as responsible (if not more so) for what ultimately happens in the NFL in a schematic sense? It's crickets, especially when the Hall of Fame comes calling... because it rarely does for assistant coaches of any stripe.

The Hall of Fame did create the Awards of Excellence in 2022 to recognize significant contributors to the game in “behind-the-scenes” roles. But that program honors career assistant coaches, athletic trainers, equipment managers, film/video directors, and public relations directors.

All well and good, but the truly important assistant coaches deserve more. It's a common complaint that is heard every year, and after the 2025 Hall of Fame ceremonies on August 2, it remains a problem. In no way do assistant coaches get the lifetime recognition they deserve for their contributions to the game, and sadly, that isn't going to change anytime soon.

Here at Athlon Sports, we'd like to do our part in turning the tide with this list of the most important assistant coaches in pro football history. A few of these men went on to become great head coaches, and found their trips to Canton ensured thusly. But here, we are really trying to narrow it down to the coaches who did their most impactful innovative work as assistants, whether they later gained fame in other areas or not. So, that's why Bill Walsh and Bill Belichick are on this list (spoiler alert!), while Brown, Gillman, and Tom Landry are not.

Bill Arnsparger

Don Shula is rightly recognized as the mastermind behind the Miami Dolphins of the early 1970s that went to three straight Super Bowls and finished the 1972 season as the NFL's only undefeated team, and the Dolphins of the early 1980s that made two more Super Bowls, and were always in the hunt for a championship.

Like any coach, however, Shula didn't do it alone, and defensive coordinator Bill Arnsparger was Shula's most able assistant. Arnsparger and Shula first met on Blanton Collier’s Kentucky staff in 1959, and Shula made Arnsparger his defensive line coach when he became the Baltimore Colts' head coach in 1964. When Shula moved to Miami in 1970, Arnsparger went with him, and that's where the 53 defense was born. When most defenses were fairly static, the Dolphins of the time used linebacker Bob Matheson as the moveable chess piece between the first and second levels of a defense, throwing offenses into confusion. Arnsparger also combined man and zone defenses expertly when such things were very much under development for most coaches.

After a run as the New York Giants' head coach from 1974-1976 that ended with his mid-season firing, Arnsparger re-joined Shula in Miami just two days after that termination. Over the next few years, Arnsparger re-built the Miami defense from the "No Name Defense" to the "Killer Bs." The 1972 Dolphins and the 1982 Dolphins defenses each ranked first in the NFL in points allowed, and Arnsparger was the man behind both.

Arnsparger's influence went far beyond his own teams. When Dick LeBeau wanted to expand his own defenses with the zone blitz, he knew who to call.

"As I got on into my coaching career, I was with the Bengals, and we were a big part of the scouting crew in the earlier days of the NFL," LeBeau told Athlon Sports last November. "I would travel around a scene with the top college prospects coming out getting ready for the draft. Bill had retired [as a coach] and was the athletic director at Florida. So anytime I would get anywhere near people that I had any prior association with when I was working out players, I would always drop in and say hello to them. I stopped in to see Bill, and we had a nice conversation. There wasn’t any Xs and Os to speak of, but I told him I was watching what he had done at Miami with those great teams and what they called the No Name Defense. They were tremendous, and he was the first guy that I saw putting bigger people in different areas. I just told him that I thought that that was very ingenious, and a huge step in the right direction for defensive football.

"His reply to me was, 'Well, Dick, I was looking for a safer way to blitz.' And I said, 'Well, you know, I’ve been following the stats on pressure defense for several years now, and that’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.'

"It wasn’t any particular defense, it was just the phrase where when he said, ‘Safer way to go.’ It lit up a light bulb. I was going from Florida to California for my next draft preparation trip, and I just got on the airplane, got a bunch of cocktail napkins, took my pen out, and started drawing different stuff around. By the time I got through with the draft, and back at my desk, and creating defenses for the upcoming season, I started going off the diving board on some of the stuff.

"It was … I’m not going to say an instant success, but no one [else] was doing it."

No one else was doing what Bill Arnsparger did when he was in the NFL, and he kept moving the goalposts successfully. That's the ultimate arbiter of schematic genius.

Bill Belichick

Obviously, you know this name. And you probably know that before Bill Belichick became the most successful head coach in pro football history, he was one of the best assistant coaches around. Belichick joined New York Giants head coach Ray Perkins' staff as Defensive Assistant/Special Teams in 1979, and worked his way up to defensive coordinator for the team under Bill Parcells in 1985. Obviously, it helped that the Giants' defenses of the 1980s and early 1990s had a ridiculous amount of talent, but the ways in which Belichick arrayed those defenders would become hallmarks of his style as a head coach — never static, entirely opponent-specific, and variable from week to week.

The most famous example of this when Belichick was an assistant came in Super Bowl XXV at the end of the 1990 season. The Giants were facing a Buffalo Bills offense that finished first in points scored that season with the "K-Gun" offense, and Belichick had to be the only one to actually stop it.

Belichick did so by means that bordered on heresy. As I wrote in my 2018 book, The Genius of Desperation:

Belichick’s strategy sounded crazy to his players. He theorized that it was perfectly acceptable to have [running back Thurman] Thomas run for more than 100 yards in the game [which Thomas did, gaining 115 yards and scoring a rushing touchdown on just 15 carries] while the real emphasis had to be on Buffalo’s quick passing game.

“I thought it was a collective brain fart—like what the hell are you talking about?” linebacker Carl Banks said years later. “We were a team that prided itself defensively on not giving up 100-yard rushers, not even giving up 100-yard games for a total offensive rush stat. But he said it, we are all in an uproar, and we’re thinking Bill is just conceding that Thurman is just this good of a football player that we won’t be able to stop him. And then he reeled us back in and kinda gave us a method to the madness.”

The Giants went with a two-man front for most of the game, alternating between five and six defensive backs years before nickel and dime defenses as base concepts were the norm. The method was clear—Belichick didn’t want Buffalo’s receivers to catch [Jim] Kelly’s short passes and gain huge swaths of yardage after the catch while lining up in their signature no-huddle and exhausting New York’s defense.

Instead, allowing Thomas to gain what he gained altered Buffalo’s strategy, and Belichick slow-rolled the Bills into doing exactly what the Giants wanted them to do.

“I didn’t feel like we wanted to get into a game where they threw the ball 45 times,” Belichick said years after the fact. “I knew if they had some success running the ball, they would stay with it. And I always felt when we needed to stop the run, we could stop it. And the more times they ran it, it was just one less time they could get it to [receiver Andre] Reed or get it to [receiver James] Lofton or throw it to Thomas, who I thought was more dangerous as a receiver, because there’s more space than there was when he was a runner.”

If you want to know what drives Bill Belichick as a master strategist, his career as an assistant coach is a very good place to begin.

Bud Carson

If you're aware of the NFL's two-high revolution in recent years to at least limit the preponderance of explosive plays in the passing game, you have Bud Carson to thank for at least some of it. Carson wasn't the first head coach to put two safeties in the deep third, but with the Pittsburgh Steelers of the early 1970s, he certainly forwarded the thought with the Steel Curtain defense.

Carson originally came up with what became the "Cover-2" defense during his time as Georgia Tech's head coach from 1967-1971, and when Steelers head coach Chuck Noll hired Carson to be his defensive backs coach in 1972, and defensive coordinator from 1973-1977, Carson brought the entire playbook with him. The Steelers had already put together one of the NFL's best defenses through the draft from a personnel perspective, and Carson's iterations of the Cover-2 allowed those specific defenders to be at their best — a truly scary thought when you have guys like Joe Greene, Dwight White, Ernie Holmes, L.C. Greenwood, Jack Lambert, Jack Ham, Mel Blount, Donnie Shell, and Mike Wagner on the field.

The Cover-2 then and now allowed the front four to get after the ballcarrier, while the linebackers flared into coverage, and the defensive backs could respond to what the offense was doing with multiple concepts from pre- to post-snap. With it, the Steelers sported all-time defense after all-time defense, winning two Super Bowls during Carson's tenure, and putting the 1976 defense together, which may have been the greatest in pro football history, with 138 points allowed in a 14-game season, and five shutouts in eight games to end the regular season.

Carson left the Steelers in 1978 to become the Los Angeles Rams' defensive coordinator. One year later, those Rams were in Super Bowl XIV, facing the Steelers. Carson later had success running the defenses of the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles, but it's the Cover-2, and those 1970s Steelers teams, for which he is rightly remembered.

Alex Gibbs

It's not that Alex Gibbs invented zone blocking — that goes back decades, and Vince Lombardi back in the 1960s was a primary purveyor of the "do-dad" schemes that aligned blockers with a section of the line as opposed to a player. But it could certainly be said that Gibbs perfected it. A defensive backs coach early in his career, Gibbs started coaching the overall offense and the offensive line for Ohio State in 1975, moved on to Auburn in 1979, and Georgia in 1982.

It was really with the Denver Broncos in 1984 that Gibbs' zone blocking concepts started to take hold in the NFL. In conjunction with a young receivers coach and offensive coordinator by the name of Mike Shanahan, Gibbs started to put together schemes for running backs that would make those running backs about as fungible as possible. It didn't matter who was in the backfield for the Broncos, as long as they could hit the hole in a "one-cut-and-go" fashion, making Gibbs' elevated playbook come to life.

After stints with the Los Angeles Raiders, San Diego Chargers, Indianapolis Colts, and Kansas City Chiefs from 1988-1994, Gibbs returned to the Mile High City in 1995 as assistant head coach/offensive line, and stayed until 2003. With Shanahan as the head coach now, the Broncos won two straight Super Bowls (XXXII at the end of the 1998 season, and XXXIII at the end of the 1999 season), and finished top 10 in offense eight times in nine seasons from 1995-2003, when GIbbs left to become the Atlanta Falcons' assistant head coach/offensive line.

All Gibbs did from 2004-06 with the Falcons was help construct the "DVD" running game with Warrick Dunn, Michael Vick, and T.J. Duckett that finished first in rushing yards in all three of those seasons. The ways in which modern running quarterbacks are able to exploit defenses take a lot from those schemes, whether they know it or not.

Salty until the end of his career, Gibbs demanded (and usually got) complete autonomous control of the offensive line and the run game wherever he went, especially when it came to personnel. One example of that not happening was in 2010, when the Seattle Seahawks signed an offensive lineman Gibbs hadn't approved, and Gibbs quickly resigned.

There are a handful of offensive line coaches who are celebrated in an all-time sense, and Gibbs is the most prominent. For good reason.

Joe Gibbs

From 1982-1991 with the then-Washington Redskins, Joe Gibbs became the first and only head coach to win three Super Bowls with three different starting quarterbacks, and good luck to anybody else who thinks he has a shot at breaking that record.

But Gibbs did a lot as an assistant coach before any of that happened. He got his start at San Diego State in the mid-60s as the Aztecs' offensive line coach under the tutelage of head coach Don Coryell. After stops at Florida State, USC, and Arkansas as an offensive line and running backs coach, Gibbs reunited with Coryell in 1973 when Coryell was the St. Louis Cardinals' head coach, and Gibbs became the architect of an offensive line that was famous for refusing to allow sacks, and a run game that featured the nightmare duo of Terry Metcalf and Jim Otis. In the five seasons Coryell and Gibbs worked together in St. Louis, the Cardinals put a top 10 offense on the field more often than not.

In 1978, Gibbs became the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' offensive coordinator, and it was Gibbs' championing of Grambling quarterback Doug Williams that eventually had head coach John McKay agreeing to select Williams with the 17th pick in the 1978 draft. That pick, and Gibbs' transformation of Tampa Bay's offense, had a lot to do with the Bucs turning quickly from the joke of the NFL to one game away from the Super Bowl in the 1979 season.

By then, Gibbs had moved on again — back with Coryell, who was now the San Diego Chargers' head coach, In 1979 and 1980, Gibbs was Coryell's consigliere when it came to the creation of the legendary "Air Coryell" offense. Everything from the revolutionary ways in which tight ends were detached from the formation to the ways in which option routes were used to bedevil opposing defenses has nearly as much to do with Gibbs' big brain as Coryell's.

So, by the time Gibbs became Washington's head coach in 1981, there was absolutely no question that he had earned it.

Dick LeBeau

Dick LeBeau is one of the rare legendary assistant coaches without prominent head coaching success who has made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, though his path was a bit different. Before he became one of the best defensive minds ever, LeBeau used that mind as a defensive back for the Detroit Lions from 1959-1972. In a 14-year career that included three Pro Bowls, LeBeau amassed 62 career interceptions, which to this day ties him for 10th all time in league annals.

After his playing career, LeBeau got his coaching start as the Philadelphia Eagles' special teams coach in 1973. He then became the Green Bay Packers' defensive backs coach in 1976, and the Cincinnati Bengals' defensive backs coach in 1980, but his real genius didn't flourish until he became the Bengals' defensive coordinator in 1984.

At this time, Bill Walsh's West Coast Offense was starting to take over the NFL, and LeBeau wanted to counter this with defenses in which no quarterback could predict from down to down who was covering, and who was pressuring. We've already detailed how LeBeau learned from Bill Arnsparger how to put together the basics of that concept, but here's how the zone blitz became a prominent invention:

"Defensive backs and safeties had blitzed [before], and I’m not saying that it was new, but there was always man coverage, and the offenses had it figured out," LeBeau told Athlon Sports. "They were just cutting you up every time you blitzed. They would break off the route, and they trained the quarterbacks and the receivers. The blitz was hurting you more than it was helping you. Of course, the purpose of blitz is to get pressure on the offense and to force them into some mistakes.

"The game of football is not going to change. There’s 11 people on the field on offense and 11 on defense, and there’s only so much you can do with them. But the concept is going to be, the offense knows the play. They call the play. They know what the snap count is. They know who’s getting the ball, where they’re going to try to throw it, and where they’re trying to run it. The defense has to diagnose all that and react, so all I was trying to do was level the playing field and make [the offense] have to diagnose rather than put the onus completely on the defense to figure everything out.

"In doing that, I thought that if you had an area player who could be in the spot where they were breaking their routes off to, you could create a lot of problems. That, plus [it was] a big surprise for that receiver who was used to running away from his coverage — he’d be running right into his coverage. It took a while to work the P’s and Q’s out of it, and as I’ve used the phrase a lot of times, I went off the diving board into an empty swimming pool. But over a period of time, we worked it out, and that gave us an advantage, because we were the first ones to start doing it a lot."

LeBeau became the Pittsburgh Steelers' defensive backs coach in 1992, and the team's defensive coordinator in 1994, which gave rise to the legendary "Blitzburgh" defenses of the time. After a return to Cincinnati in 1997 that included three seasons as the team's head coach from 2000-2002, and one year as the Buffalo Bills' assistant head coach in 2003, Lebeau returned to Pittsburgh as defensive coordinator in 2004, a position he held through the 2014 season.

And that's when things got really interesting.

LeBeau had certainly expanded his zone blitz ideas over the years, but with the talent he had in the Steel City, he decided to create complete and total anarchy with his fronts at a time when most NFL defenses were more traditionally either 4-3 or 3-4 at their base. I asked LeBeau last November why it seemed like his Steelers never had the same front from down to down in all the years I watched them, and he had a ready answer for that.

"That’s why it caused so much trouble," he said. "We spent a huge amount of time each week in the preparation of what look we were going to tie in with the actual pressure, and how we would work it into our other defenses. Again, just creating hesitation in the quarterback’s mind. You know, there’s an old saying — in card games [when you’re] trying to diagnose what the other guy is holding, and if he does the obvious thing, he’s a simpleton. You can figure that out. But if he does like you were saying right there he’s moving here and there, and always going to move, then he’s once removed from a simpleton.

"If I ran a pressure more than three times in the last couple games, I would change it. That was the true advantage of the zone blitz. You get a pattern established, and once the players have learned that, you’re almost unlimited with the variations that you can put in it without a whole lot of change of detail for the players. You only got so much time to get ready for the next ballgame, and [the opponent will] look at the same films as you. You’ve gotta give them credit — that’s not an empty chair sitting over there with the team you’re playing. So, I would never let them get the same look. A lot of times, you would attack the same area but it would never come from the same place. That’s where, starting at ground level, I had a huge advantage because I could short-cut a lot of stuff, and I knew it wouldn’t work, because I’d already failed trying to do it well."

Everything you see modern defenses doing, Dick LeBeau was doing decades ago. Plain and simple.

Buddy Ryan

Buddy Ryan is best-known as the creator of the "46" defense that helped the 1985 Chicago Bears field perhaps the greatest defensive unit football has ever seen, but there's much more to Ryan's story than that. First of all, the "46" was a subpackage of Ryan's 4-3 defense in Chicago — the Bears didn't use it all the time. Second, Ryan's obvious defensive greatness started long before the Monsters of the Midway became a thing.

Ryan became the New York Jets' defensive line coach under defensive coordinator Walt Michaels in 1968, just in time for the Jets to shock the world by beating the Baltimore Colts (widely regarded before then as maybe the best pro football team ever) in Super Bowl III. Ryan's pressure concepts allowed three different Jets players (Gerry Philbin, Verlon Biggs, and John Elliott) to amass 10 or more sacks in a 14-game season, and though Colts quarterbacks Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas were never sacked in the Super Bowl, it was ceaseless pressure that led in part to the four interceptions those quarterbacks threw.

Ryan moved to Minnesota in 1976 to become the Vikings' defensive line coach, though head coach Bud Grant has said that Ryan basically ran the defense. Here is where Ryan started to put together the basics of the 46 defense, which sent a seemingly senseless overload of pass-rushers at the quarterback, without enough time to exploit what should be obvious coverage voids.

Hired as the Bears' defensive coordinator in 1978, Ryan started putting his 46 in place as a 5-1-5 defense that showed bizarre blitzes and coverage from all over the field, and few opposing quarterbacks had any idea how to counter it. By 1983, Ryan had the base personnel to do what he wanted, and in 1985, his defense tore through the rest of the NFL like the proverbial hot knife through butter.

Ryan became the Philadelphia Eagles' head coach after that 1985 season, and though things never worked out in a competitive sense (Ryan's Eagles had a 43-35-1 regular-season record and never won a postseason game in five years), the defenses Ryan put on the field were predictably dominant. To this day, the "Bear Front," in which defenses put a tackle head-over the center, and two more defenders to the outside shoulders of either guard to force single teams, is Ryan's elemental creation, and you see it all the time in today's NFL.

Every time you see a defense do something atypical to the norm, you have Buddy Ryan to thank to a greater of lesser degree. This includes the defenses of Rex Ryan, Buddy's son, and one of the best defensive minds of his own era.

Clark Shaughnessy

You may not know his name, but Clark Shaughnessy is one of the most innovative coaches in football history, and the modern game would not look like it does without his influence. In a coaching career that spanned from 1914 (!) to 1965, Shaughnessy proved to be one of football's great and effective innovators at all levels.

Shaughnessy started his career as an assistant coach at Minnesota before World War I, became Tulane's head coach in 1915, and got his first shot at the then-young National Football League when he was the University of Chicago's head coach from 1933-1939. Chicago Bears owner George Halas got to talking with Shaughnessy at a football dinner in 1937, loved his theories on the game, and hired him as a consultant for $2,000 per month — a massive amount of money at the time. Shaughnessy re-tooled Halas' T-Formation concepts to the point where the 1940 Bears could annihilate the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the NFL Championship Game at the same time that Shaughnessy was leading Stanford to a 10-0 record with the same ideas.

“After the Bears beat the piss out of us in that ’40 Championship game…well, you could literally see the game changing before our eyes,” Redskins Hall of Fame quarterback Sammy Baugh said later. “By the next season, almost everybody in football started messing with the T. Since then about every form of pro-style offense has been a cousin of the T. The triple option, the wishbone, the veer — you name it. So, whenever you see what Johnny Unitas and Fran Tarkenton and Dan Marino and John Elway and all those great passers were able to do, you can trace it back to 73–0.”

That wasn't the end of Shaughnessy's innovations. In 1948, Shaughnessy signed on with the Los Angeles Rams as an advisor to head coach Bob Snyder. During the 1948 preseason, Rams owner Dan Reeves (not that Dan Reeves) was so impressed with Shaughnessy’s football acumen, that he made Shaughnessy the head coach. At first, Shaughnessy ran the same formations he always had, but during that first season, he realized that speed runner Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch would be a better receiver than a running back. He converted Hirsch to a flanker, and thus created the three-receiver formation as a base offensive concept. Yes, the same one you see all the time in the NFL today. Over the next few years, the "Point-a-Minute" Rams had the NFL's most explosive offense, and it was years (decades, perhaps) ahead of its time.

He returned to the Bears in 1951 as Halas’ schematic advisor and defensive specialist. In that capacity, he shut down the early version of the shotgun formation so well that the shotgun would not return to prominence in the NFL for decades. San Francisco 49ers head coach Red Hickey — another eccentric innovator — had his quarterbacks running all manner of option stuff against static lines, and for a few weeks in the 1950 season, he seemed to have the NFL by the tail.

Shaughnessy’s counter was both old-school and new-school. He put middle linebacker Bill George at the middle guard position, something the league hadn’t used in years. With George playing to the center’s shoulder and blasting through the line of scrimmage on nearly every play, Hickey’s shotgun quarterbacks couldn’t run through their options. Shaughnessy also devised a 5-3-3 base defense that presented multiple fronts and was very tough to diagnose, let alone stop. At times, the Bears brought pressure with seven at the line; at other times they’d drop linemen into coverage to deal with the short passes prevalent in Hickey’s offense.

Again, years (perhaps decades) ahead of its time. If there's one name on this list who should have been a lead-pipe lock for the Hall of Fame long before this article publication, it's Clark Shaughnessy’s. That he doesn't have a bust in Canton is a singular embarrassment.

Steve Spagnuolo

Before we get into Steve Spagnuolo's greatness, and his influence on the game, we can't mention Spags without mentioning the great Jim Johnson, who was Andy Reid's defensive coordinator with the Philadelphia Eagles from 1999-2008, and made life complete hell for opposing offenses with his creative and destructive blitz and coverage concepts. Spags was Johnson's defensive assistant, then defensive backs coach, and finally linebackers coach from 2000-2006, and Spagnuolo then left to become the New York Giants' defensive coordinator in 2007.

Boy, what a difference that made. The 2007 Giants ranked 17th in points allowed in the regular season, and were severe underdogs to the previously undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, but Spags saved his best for last. In that Super Bowl, Spagnuolo unleashed his Nascar package, which had all four of his defensive linemen standing up at the same time at times, making it nearly impossible for Tom Brady to step up in the pocket and demolish defenses as he had done all season long. Brady completed 29 of 48 passes in the 17-14 Patriots loss for 266 yards, a touchdown, and five sacks, and Spags' star was officially on the rise.

After a three-year stint as the St. Louis Rams' head coach from 2009-2011 that was a disaster for a lot of reasons that were not his fault, Spagnuolo spent time with the New Orleans Saints, the Baltimore Ravens, and the Giants again, before taking 2018 off entirely and spending a lot of time with Greg Cosell, watching tape at NFL Films and refining his practices.

In 2019, Spags reunited with Reid in Kansas City for one of the most dynastic runs in pro football history. The 2019-2024 Chiefs were in every Super Bowl but one, never failed to make it as far as the AFC Championship game, and won three of six Super Bowls during that time.

At age 65, Spagnuolo is far from done. His legacy will be as a coordinator who never took the common way — while other defensive coaches are preaching safety against the modern passing game, Spags is perfectly happy blitzing with alacrity, and calling more press coverage than most coaches would ever find comfortable. He is the only coach to win Super Bowls with two different teams as either an offensive or defensive coordinator, and the only coordinator to win four Super Bowls overall.

Jim Johnson would be proud.

Bill Walsh

Bill Walsh is recognized as one of the greatest head coaches of all time. But long before he turned the San Francisco 49ers into the Team of the 1980s, Walsh was making his name as an offensive innovator.

Walsh got his start in pro football as the Oakland Raiders' running backs coach in 1966, which is where he got a full dose of Al Davis' vertical passing concepts, and the multi-dimensional "Field Balance Theory" stuff Davis had learned from the great Sid Gillman when Davis was Gillman's receivers coach with the San Diego Chargers from 1960-1962.

After a year as the San Jose Apaches' head coach in 1967, Walsh was hired by the legendary Paul Brown to be his offensive coordinator with the expansion Cincinnati Bengals, and Brown's return to pro football after Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell had ousted Brown from the team he formed in 1963. In title, Walsh was Brown's wide receivers coach from 1968-1970, and his quarterbacks coach from 1971-1975, but in truth, Walsh was the one charged with building Cincinnati's offense from scratch.

The historic detour in Walsh's plan happened in 1970, when quarterback Greg Cook (who Walsh liked to say was "like Steve Young, but better") found his NFL career but short by a shoulder injury in 1969. Walsh had to make his offense go with backup Virgil Carter, and as Carter didn't have Cook's arm talent, Walsh couldn't just go with the Gillman/Davis three-digit system that was in vogue. Instead, Walsh used Carter's arm limitations to develop what later became the West Coast Offense, but should really be called the Midwest Offense, because that's where it was formulated.

With Ken Anderson as the Bengals' quarterback starting in 1971, Walsh further developed an offense that was built for ultimate efficiency and consistency at a time when 50% completion rates, and quarterbacks who threw more interceptions than touchdowns, were the order of the day.

It wasn't until a blowup with Brown over who would replace him as head coach in 1976, and Brown's subsequent attempt to blackball Walsh from getting any head coaching opportunities, that Walsh was eventually able to take his genius to the Bay Area in 1979. That's where Walsh would do as much as anyone to create the modern offense in any era, but he had already done the groundwork as a relatively unheralded assistant elsewhere.

Related: Coaching Legend Dick LeBeau On His Life in Football, the Zone Blitz, and the 2008 Steelers

Related: One Big Question for All 32 NFL Teams Before 2025 Season

This story was originally reported by Athlon Sports on Aug 4, 2025, where it first appeared.