The Blind Side

The reason Michael Oher was so interesting to college football coaches was that he fit the idea of a left tackle perfectly: big and quick. But why had left tackles suddenly become so important to the game?

To answer this question, Lewis goes back to December 28, 1975, in the final minutes of a game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Oakland Raiders. The Bengals quarterback Kenny Anderson has the ball; he’s about to pass to his teammate when the Raiders pass rusher, Ted Hendricks, tackles him, effectively winning the game for the Raiders. Next, Lewis skips ahead to January 3, 1982. This time, the San Francisco 49ers are facing off against the New York Giants. The Giants rookie, Lawrence Taylor, poses a big threat to the 49ers’ chances, but the 49ers coach, Bill Walsh, who was also an assistant coach for the Bengals, has an idea for how to beat Taylor.

Bill Walsh was an intelligent, creative football coach. He played college football and later became an assistant coach for the Bengals. However, his players weren’t particularly good. Walsh adjusted his strategy to his players’ limitations, showing them how to move horizontally and pass strategically, cutting down on the risk of interception. Largely as a result of Walsh’s ingenuity, the Bengals quarterback, Virgil Carter, led the league in completion percentage, and the Bengals won their division.

After being passed over for head coach for the Bengals, Bill Walsh left to coach for the 49ers. With the 49ers, Walsh transformed the quarterback, Steve Deberg, from a mediocre thrower into one of the best in NFL history. In 1980, however, Walsh replaced Deberg with Joe Montana, who proceeded to lead the NFL in completion percentage, and become, by many estimates, the single best quarterback in NFL history.

By the late eighties, Walsh was known for being a brilliant coach, who applied tactical strategies and mathematical efficiency to the game. His success changed football: after Walsh, coaches began focusing more on passes than runs. Between the sixties and the eighties, the average pass in an NFL game yielded an increasing distance, suggesting that quarterbacks were getting better at passing. By the 2000s, quarterbacks completed sixty percent of their throws, versus less than fifty percent in the sixties. The rise of the quarterback and the “pass game,” Lewis says, was critical to the success of Michael Oher.

Back on January 3, 1982, Bill Walsh prepares for the Giants game. At this time, Walsh has already used some creative passing strategies with his quarterbacks. If Walsh represents the “brains” approach to coaching football, his opponent coach, Bill Parcells of the Giants, represents the “brawn” approach. Parcells uses his secret weapon, Lawrence Taylor, to decimate the other team. At times Taylor doesn’t follow Parcells’s directions, but he performs well on the field anyway.

When facing Taylor, Walsh has a problem: get Joe Montana to throw a pass a split-second quicker than usual, before he’s tackled. His left tackle, Dan Audick, is 250 pounds and poorly equipped to deal with Lawrence Taylor. Walsh had a better lineman, Ron Singleton, but he dismissed Singleton for demanding more money. Walsh decides to use a left guard named John Ayers for the Giants game.

During the January 3 game, John Ayers has one job: protect Joe Montana from Lawrence Taylor. Ayers weighs 270 pounds, and every season he trains by pulling a tractor tire across the field. Ayers successfully stops Taylor from getting to Montana; largely as a result of this, the 49ers win. Although Bill Parcells later finds a way to beat Ayers’s strategy by blitzing the line, on January 3, brawn loses decisively to brains. After the game Walsh decides, first, that he needs to get his own version of Lawrence Taylor. Second, he decides that he’ll use his first draft pick next year to get a good left tackle to protect his quarterback.

For the rest of the 1980s, John Ayers plays left tackle for the 49ers. At times, he’s unable to deal with players like Lawrence Taylor because he’s not fast enough; he also has to deal with injuries, and his own aging. By 1987, Walsh pressures Ayers to retire, and in 1995, Ayers dies of cancer. At the funeral, Joe Montana serves as a pallbearer, and a tribute from Bill Walsh is read aloud.