Leave it to Coach Musselman to find a great article from the "vault" at Sports Illustrated on the late Bill Walsh. Jim Murray is the author and here are a few of exerpts:ON ATTENTION TO DETAIL
Walsh describes various underpinnings of the 49ers' success, including the attention to detail, his trying to instill each day with a sense of urgency, the need to challenge his players intellectually. "How you look at your opposition is important," he says. "Rather than being obsessed with others, we work instead for a standard of performance. We didn't talk about winning at first, in 1979, when we were 2 and 14. We talked about improving our standards. The social and financial things in life are distractions. In football the distractions are the crowds, the travel, the officials, the weather, the odds. But if the standards are there, performance will be able to rise undistracted by all that."
COACHING YOUNG COACHES
"I feel an obligation to young coaches," he says. "At a clinic, for example, I'll go rapidly through a lot of technical football until they can't follow me anymore—until they know for sure that there is more to this than they know. Then I'll talk about the thoughtfulness that is needed in coaches. In the classroom it is sad, but not killing, if you're dull or negative. The kid can go to the next class. But on the field, his physical well-being, his ego and his basic character are at your disposal. Strong young men, with the chemicals flowing, are as emotionally charged as young men at war. It can be a tremendous experience, or it can leave permanent scars. We don't always entrust the responsibility for that experience to the right people. Young high school coaches, young college assistants—of every 10 you meet at a clinic or camp, maybe two or three are too hungry, think too much of themselves. They relate to the youngsters, know the buzz words, have the clothes, make a bright impression on parents, but the ambition is there, and with it the chance for recklessness, or misleading a player. They may be O.K. later, but not at that point."
MORAL CONTENT OF COACHING
Walsh also maintains that intelligence is related to the moral content of coaching. "You have to live with yourself," he has said. "If you are a reflective person, things stick in your craw. Misusing, misleading people, every instance affects you until you can't go on. The most sadistic are often the least intelligent. That's the extent of their reasoning."
THE COMFORT ZONE
A favorite phrase of Walsh's, one Wyche has found himself using almost involuntarily, is "comfort zone," by which he means the natural tendency of a player or coach to be so happy with attaining a certain level of achievement that he fails to strive to improve himself. Now Walsh is asked whether he, whose job it is to shake people out of such stagnation, himself has reached a comfort zone.
DECISIVENESS
This leads more or less logically into a short study of one ingredient of coaching he hasn't addressed—decisiveness. "It's not always best to be decisive, you know," he says, sitting up in the Tahoe condominium couch into which he has sunk. "Decisive shades into spontaneous, which goes right away to impulsive, and then you're in trouble."
FOOTBALL AND WARFARE
The idea, he says, is to have a plan and still allow for the unforeseeable. "I've been reading about Nelson's battle with the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805," says Walsh. "He had 25 days to make his plan. He was outnumbered, but his plan worked. He had steps prepared for the contingencies, and the plan left a certain flexibility in the choices of his captains. That is the basis of football.
"The goal is to attack the other side with clean, sharp blows while you're moving faster than the opposition. That was Wellington. That was von Clausewitz. I don't relate football to warfare other than in those dynamics, but the military axioms of von Clausewitz about people under stress, about the individual soldier, make the best book on football."
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