California's Cradle of Coaches Shaped College Football History

Tucked away in the mountainous part of northeast Los Angeles County is a cluster of smaller universities, renowned for their academics. These are schools known for producing celebrated professionals in a variety of fields — among them former presidents Barack Obama (Occidental) and Richard Nixon (Whittier).

The region’s more renowned contributions to football haven’t always shaken out on the gridiron: Students at Caltech, for example, perpetrated one of the greatest pranks ever in the 1961 Rose Bowl Game, carefully swapping flip cards meant to spell out support for the Washington Huskies that instead celebrated Caltech.  

Likewise, arguably the most famous member of one of the area’s football teams never played a down. A 2014 New York Times retrospective on Nixon’s love of football recounts one Whittier College teammate’s labeling of the 37th president as “cannon fodder.”

Nixon was a practice-squad offensive lineman who never earned a varsity letter, yet remains the most famous Poet in program history. That’s off the field. In the annals of football history, Whittier hosted one of the most influential minds to ever coach the game, more influential than the 37th president — even if Nixon did take it upon himself to declare a national champion after the 1969 Arkansas-Texas game.

A young coach named Don Coryell earned his first opportunity to head up a program there in 1954, beginning a transformative odyssey that changed the sport without ever leaving Southern California.

The system that came to be known as Air Coryell gained acclaim both at the college level and in the NFL was not yet the coach’s approach when he arrived at Whittier. Like an academic in Los Angeles’ cradle of universities, Coryell broadened his coaching horizons through study, and trial-and-error.

From his 2010 eulogy in Sports Illustrated:

“At Whittier, Coryell endlessly ran the power I, yet he was fascinated with the possibility of diversifying his offense and read a book by TCU coach and athletic director Dutch Meyer titled Spread Formation Football. In his third year Coryell moved a tailback to quarterback, spread out his wide receivers and began throwing.”

After his success at Whittier landed him the job at San Diego State, Coryell’s new-found formula began to take shape into the high-flying brand of football celebrated a half-century later. The Aztecs introduced an exciting style that deviated from much of what was common in the era, and turned the program into the College Division (the predecessor to today’s Div. II).

The thing about making history, though, is one rarely has any idea they are in the moment. Take Brian Sipe.

“At the time, I didn’t know it was unique,” Sipe said. “I did notice other teams weren’t doing it, so I just assumed we had a clever offense.”

Before he won NFL Most Valuable Player as quarterback of the Cleveland Browns in 1980, Sipe was filling the stat sheet for Coryell at San Diego State. He passed for 44 touchdowns in two seasons and change and totaled more than 5,000 yards — Herculean numbers in the era. He ranked second in the nation in total passing yards in 1970, and first in passing yards per game.

And while Coryell’s system may not have struck Sipe as particularly unique when he was in it, he came to understand how different it was upon arriving in the NFL.

“One thing I noticed, the pros weren’t as inventive as I thought they’d be, they weren’t as creative,” Sipe said. “It seemed like everybody kind of ran the same thing. Everything I learned there was pretty basic as far as the passing offense.”

San Diego State would often line up two receivers wide with either a tight end or a slot, and a halfback and fullback — a conservative look by today’s standards with four-and-five-wide. However, Coryell used four of them, sometimes as all five, in routes.

The wheel route, a crowd-pleaser today, takes root from Air Coryell.

Coryell’s innovative scheme smoothed San Diego State’s transition to Div. I, which included two Top 20 finishes in the Aztecs’ first four years as members of the Pacific Coast Conference.

His success at San Diego State earned Coryell an opportunity in the NFL, first with the St. Louis Cardinals and then back in San Diego with the Chargers. Air Coryell electrified fans in the Southern California at both levels.

“It was the most excited our family ever has been about football (even our mother, who was not known as a great football fan would come into the living room yelling, ‘That's pass interference!’),” Connie and Lynn Baer wrote in an email. The Baers are museum directors for the Grossmont High School Hall of Fame, of which Sipe is an inductee.

“It wasn't a question about when they would score, but how much they would score. The only team that could stop them was themselves,” they wrote.

Describing packed houses at the old Aztec Bowl, that elation carried over when Coryell took the Chargers job in 1978. The Baers called it “a dream.” With Dan Fouts at quarterback, San Diego rewrote NFL record books.

Air Coryell marked a continuation of the Chargers’ identity under Sid Gillman during the AFL days. The AFL welcomed innovation in its pursuit to establish an identity and challenge the NFL as America’s premier football league. Thus, Coryell did not exactly have to completely start from scratch.

On the contrary, Coryell studied Gillman closely while developing his own potent passing attack at San Diego State.

Gillman’s contributions to popularizing passing offenses are more renowned in the pros than at the college level. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983 following a career that included an AFL championship.

Although he’s more so known for his time in the AFL, Gillman’s impact on college football in general, and the passing revolution specifically, is undeniable — even if it took some time for his due to come.

“He was probably overlooked for so long because he got his coaching career started at Miami (Ohio) and Cincinnati and those programs were mostly non-entities for much of their history,” Josh Katzowitz wrote in an email. Katzowitz wrote a 2012 biography on Gillman entitled Sid Gillman: Father of the Passing Game. “It was almost like, ‘Well, who cares what happens there?’”

The last season before the death of Eddie Cochems, who oversaw the first-ever pass in a college football game, was 1952. The 1952 co-national champions Georgia Tech and Michigan State attempted a combined 363 passes for the season. They completed 173 in total.

Cincinnati, meanwhile, was much more open with its playbook. In fact, the Bearcats quarterback from this era — Gene Rossi — still ranks seventh in program history for passing yards ahead of the 2020 season.

Rossi’s playmaking gave life to Gillman’s vision, much like Tobin Rote a decade later. Rote quarterbacked the Chargers to the AFL championship in 1963, culminating in a 51-10 deconstruction of the Boston Patriots in the title game. The Chargers rolled up more than 500 yards, 292 of which came on a mere 17 pass completions from Rote. 

“Most [typical fans and media] started noticing him in the 1963 and beyond when he had some of those great San Diego Charger teams with [Hall of Famer] Lance Alworth, John Hadl, and Paul Lowe on offense,” Katzowitz wrote. “Winning an AFL title really put Sid on the map as a guy who could be known as a damn good coach.”

It may have taken some time both during his career and after for Gillman to get his due, but plenty in the coaching ranks appreciated his forward thinking on the forward pass.

Like Coryell, Bill Walsh ranks among those who took direct influence from Gillman when developing his own passing attack. In a 2000 Associated Press profile of Gillman, Walsh called him, “one of the great offensive minds in football history.”

And as head coach, the inspiration Walsh took from Gillman laid the foundation for another revolutionary turn in the progress of the pass: the West Coast Offense.

Walsh coached the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl titles from 1981 through 1988. In two separate tenures in two different eras at Stanford, Walsh led the Cardinal to three Top 20 finishes.

Among them, the 1978 team finished 8-4 with a Bluebonnet Bowl win over Georgia, while quarterback Steve Dils led the nation in passing. While the wins that season were impressive, one of Dils’ most eye-catching performances came in a loss that contrasted the era’s present vs. the game’s future.

Stanford lost to eventual national champion Oklahoma, which ran the Wishbone under coach Barry Switzer, 35-29. But Dils went 32-of-48 with three touchdowns for 299 yards.

“It didn’t take long to figure out [the West Coast offense was special],” Dils said. “When Bill showed up [in 1977], from day one, he started talking about things and you go, ‘Whoa! This is different.’ After you were around him for a while, you knew you were doing something that wasn’t even close to what other people were doing.”

The West Coast system oftentimes utilized a formation similar to Coryell’s, with split backs, two receivers out wide and a slot or tight end — any of whom could and would operate as pass-catchers out of the “50 possible formations” Dils described.

Walsh’s scheme remains influential well into the 21st century, in part for its innovative route tree and naming conventions. At a world-renowned university like Stanford, the field became Prof. Walsh’s classroom.

“Bill took the time to get to know the professors and get himself involved in the university — not just as a football program,” Dils said. “He would have dinners where he’d invite over the athletes with some of the professors and would facilitate conversations.”

In this sense, Walsh took the approach of coach-as-teacher to heart. It showed in how he implemented his strategy.

“So many coaches back in that day, you’d ask them something and they’d say, ‘Eh, just be an athlete,’” Dils said. “But he was so detailed in everything he did, whether it was the quarterbacks, the offensive linemen, the formations, everything we did was so intricate and so much fun.

“It was challenging,” he added. “We accepted it really quickly. Most of us liked that it was challenging.”

As most can attest either in football or in education, the impact a teacher makes may not always be evident until after class is over. The lessons that resonate years later add a new perspective.

“I just appreciated Don a whole lot when I got away from him than when I was with him. I assumed I was just playing college football at a high level,” Sipe said of Coryell. “He was fearless. He was always wanting to stretch and take chances.”

A willingness to take risks is indeed at the heart of the passing game’s evolution, particularly at a time when few were doing it. From Gillman to Coryell to Walsh, going against conventional wisdom unlocked a new element to the game and influenced it forever.

That’s on a large scale. At a more micro level, their innovations made individual impacts.

“It’s not often you can point to one person that really changes the trajectory of your life, but that’s what Bill did for me in so many ways,” Dils said, equating Walsh’s coaching to the former quarterback’s approach now at Avis Young Global. “So much of what I do in leadership is based on what I watched him do, and it’s in how you motivate people. One thing Bill never did is tell you you couldn’t do something.”