Take Joe Montana, for example. He is a perfect combination of the two vital aspects that are necessary for developing greatness as a quarterback.

The formula for the success of the 49ers offense was a highly disciplined, very structured form of utilizing the forward pass. To make our system work, Joe had to master the disciplines to know which receiver to throw to, when, and why. The success of the team depended on Joe’s ability to work within that framework. Consequently, the job of the coach was to use drills and repetition so that Joe developed almost automatic moves and decision-making ability.

But there is an extra quality that it takes for a quarterback to become a world champion—or, in Joe’s case, the best ever. And that is an instinctive, spontaneous, natural response to situations that arise in games. Part of Montana’s greatness was that 10% to 15% of the time his spontaneous instincts would break loose and make a phenomenal difference in the outcome of a game.

It is the job of the coach to find the best of both sides. We had to have a very structured system of football, and we also wanted instinctive and spontaneous play.

How do you go about the job of coaching a player like Montana to develop that kind of balance?

Early on, we had to encourage Joe to trust his spontaneous instincts. We were careful not to criticize him when he used his creative abilities and things did not work out. In practice, we worked with Joe repeatedly on specific plays. When he was placed in a game, we called only those plays because we knew that he should be confident that he could execute them. But we didn’t jump him the minute he would break the pattern. Instead, we nurtured him to use his instincts. We had to allow him to be wrong on occasion and to live with it.

Of course, with different players the problem takes on a different look. In the case of quarterback Steve Young, it was almost the opposite. We had to work with him to be disciplined enough to live within the strict framework of what we were doing. Steve is a great spontaneous athlete and a terrific runner. But we found that we had to reduce the number of times he would use his instincts and increase his willingness to stay within the confines of the team concept.

For example, we would be at a point in a game where we had designed a special play to break the defense wide open and score a touchdown. In his early days, Steve might not have had the discipline to wait for that play to develop. Instead, he would see an opening and run with the ball for a five-yard gain. He would let his instincts and emotions affect his patience with the play and his confidence that the entire team could execute.

As a coach, how do you know what it takes to bring out the best in a young player’s abilities?

Unfortunately, there is nothing exact about it. Experience is really the only teacher. I was 47 years old when I became an NFL head coach. Typically, that job comes to people when they are between the ages of 35 and 40. I was in a subordinate role as an assistant coach for a longer period of time than most, so I was forced to analyze, evaluate, and learn to appreciate the roles that other people play more than I might have. In retrospect, I was lucky.

College Football: The Professional Approach


But if developing your players is an inexact art, there are bound to be mistakes. How do you deal with them?

Again and again in the development and selection of personnel, you have to account for miscalculation. In professional sports, the person who is best at dealing with personnel is the person who recognizes his or her errors and deals with them the quickest and most effectively. That could mean adopting a long-term approach, or it could mean the release of a player.

Take our drafting of John Taylor in 1986. John came to the 49ers as a wide receiver from Delaware State. He had great physical talent, but not a lot of background in playing sophisticated football. We simply miscalculated how long it would take John to be ready to play in the NFL. Consequently, we were disappointed in him. John was not adapting well to the competition, he appeared confused and frustrated, and he had lost his enthusiasm.

But instead of giving up on him, we took a longer term, more patient approach. We waited an extra year to allow him to mature and grow into this level of competition and into the role we wanted him to play. Now he is an All-Pro and one of the great receivers in the game.

The other side to that would be the decision I made with Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson. He was a very bright, articulate, charming person, but he also had an uncontrollable drug habit. I made a calculated choice that involved a high risk when we acquired him from Dallas—that I could personally nurture and rehab and influence Thomas into once again becoming a great linebacker. It was a miscalculation on my part. I gave it every chance to work, but finally I had to decide that it simply was not going to.

When you reach that point, you have to make a controlled and well-planned retreat. You regret the decision that you made, but you have to live with it, and you have to work yourself out of it. That is one important facet of good management: deciding how to acknowledge your mistakes.

Do you simply gloss over them? Do you blame someone else? Are you so insecure that your ego will not let you do anything but maintain that your original decision was correct? I could have kept Thomas Henderson on the team, but then the 49ers would not have become world champs. Or I could have had the public blaming Thomas or blaming an assistant coach. But none of those approaches would have helped the team.

In this case, I did not want to publicly embarrass Thomas, but I did want to show the team that I was still in control and that drug abuse would not be tolerated. We simply had to move as smoothly as possible to release Thomas for any number of reasons, remove him from the picture. I made a mistake, acknowledged it, and decided what to do about it.

If the personnel issue is so overriding, do you have a methodology for the way you evaluate players?

We use a five-bracket ranking system to categorize people we are looking at. The first is the star player who cannot miss. The second is a player who will someday be a starter and play for a number of years. The third will make the team, and the fourth has an isolated specialty—covering kickoffs or fielding punts. The fifth is someone who will make the squad and help you by playing solidly in a backup role.

You want as many superstars as you can get. The more stars, the better. But the difference between winning and losing is the bottom 25% of your people. Most coaches can deliver the top 75%. But the last 25% only blossoms in the details, in the orchestration of skills, in the way you prepare.

When you go into a draft, what are the particulars you are looking for in a player?

It is always a combination of factors that add up to the right person. It’s his level of natural ability. It’s his competitive instincts. It’s also the history of that athlete; his ability to learn, retain, and apply what he has learned; and his ability to work under stress with other people.

Then you have to be able to project those qualities into the slot or role that athlete would play for your team. And you have to do that over time, thinking about the short, middle, and long term. For example, a player could come in and play a certain role in his first year, and then in his second year that role could develop or be enhanced. After a number of years, that player might end up in a feature role, and then revert back to the role in which he started as the wear and tear of the game begins to take its toll.

You have said that one of the most important attributes of any organization is the way it treats its people. In pro football, with frequent trading and the yearly competition from rookies for veterans’ jobs, cutting a veteran player or convincing him to retire is a big part of your job. How do you handle that part of the personnel issue?

Any good coach or manager has got to be responsible for phasing his people through the organization. It may be the most emotionally difficult part of the job. When you do it, you often end up as the most unpopular person in the organization. Yet it is part of the role that the leader must play. It has to be done and done continually. You have to be prepared to use your own professional judgment as to when and why it is time for one of your players to call it quits.

As the head coach, I forced myself to deal with this process rather than turn my back on it or hand it off to the assistant coaches. In fact, in this area you can only listen to the assistant coaches so much because, typically, they would rather have veteran players on the team. It makes their coaching job easier. Subconsciously, I think assistant coaches feel much more comfortable with ten-year players than with the rookies. The coaches have become friends with the veterans, they have great faith in them, they understand each other. And the veterans already know what the coaches want done out on the field.

In sports, there is an arc of utilization that describes most athletes’ careers. By that I mean a curve that a coach can use to project what a player can do now, next year, and ten years from now. A player may be a superstar this year, but with minor injuries nicking at him and starting to add up, he won’t be a superstar three years from now. And then in the next phase you have to begin thinking about replacing him.

Most people don’t realize it, but the players who get all the attention are usually the ones on the downside of their careers. Ironically, the organization is often paying the most money to the team members who are on the descending curve as players. When players are starting to wind down their careers but are still playing effectively, you have to remind yourself how to use them. You have to gauge how they practice, what you ask them to do on the field, what kinds of situations you use them in, how much playing time they get. These are all factors that ultimately lead to the point where you judge that a younger player could do the job as well. That younger player is on an ascending curve on the arc. That is when you have to make your move.

How do you go about making that move without dealing the veteran player a crushing blow?

There will be some suffering, and there is no way to avoid it. It’s simply part of the process. There will be agonizing, frustration, and anger. But the coach has to make the decision to improve the team. The real danger is if the decision aimed at improving the team leads to so much bitterness that the fallout causes other players to take sides. When the team becomes divided, the decision has done more harm than good.

That is why managing people’s emotions is such an important part of the coach’s job. You begin by acknowledging that your decision will cause some suffering. Then you do whatever you can to soften the edges, to reduce the anguish and frustration, to communicate your own sensitivity, and, in a sense, even to manipulate the player.

You recommend manipulating people rather than being honest?

The easiest thing is to be truly honest and direct. In fact, it sounds just great to say that you are going to be honest and direct. But insensitive, hammer-like shots that are delivered in the name of honesty and openness usually do the greatest damage to people. The damage ends up reverberating throughout the entire organization. Over time, people will lose the bonding factor they need for success. And over time, that directness will isolate you from the people with whom you work.

The real task is to lead people through the troubled times, when they are demoted or find themselves at the end of their playing days, and to help them maintain as much of their self-esteem as possible. These are the tasks that really define the job of the manager. A manager’s job is not simply having a desk filled with family pictures and a wall covered by plaques for good behavior. It’s developing the skills to understand and deal with people.

You have described a variety of tasks that the coach has to be sensitive to, including the ability to make tough decisions and the need to soften the edges when it comes to dealing with people. What has made your system so successful?

The bottom line in professional sports is winning. Everything has to focus on that product: winning football games. Other offshoots—the public relations, the merchandising, the high-sounding philosophical approach—mean little compared with being successful on the playing field.

But winning does not necessarily mean being a victor in every game. It’s not winning every game at any cost. We have to remind ourselves that it’s not just a single game that we are trying to win. It is a season and a series of seasons in which the team wins more games than it loses and each team member plays up to his potential. If you are continually developing your skills and refining your approach, then winning will be the final result.

But I have seen coaches who are simply too sentimental, who allow themselves to be too maudlin about “breaking up the old family.” They are going to lose sight of the bottom line. And there is another kind who are severe, tough, and hard-hitting. But they sacrifice the loyalty of the people around them. In that situation, people are always afraid that they are going to be the next to go. These coaches rarely have sustained success.

Somewhere in the middle are the coaches who know that the job is to win, who know that they must be decisive, that they must phase people through their organizations, and at the same time they are sensitive to the feelings, loyalties, and emotions that people have toward one another. If you don’t have these feelings, I do not know how you can lead anyone.

I have spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out how I was going to phase out certain players for whom I had a strong feelings, but that was my job. I wasn’t hired to do anything but win.


I thought this interview with, Bill Walsh was apropos given the choice between, Mac Jones and players like, Lance and Fields. Reactionary instincts in 10-15% of games is a quarterback trait that makes winning in this league so much easier. Mac Jones is Nick Mullens 2.0.  PFF's decision chart gave, Jones a 73.8 passing grade when forced to go beyond his first read the past two seasons. That's the lowest of the top 5. Davis Mills is closer to Mac Jones than Mac Jones is to Fields or Lance.  I can't believe they traded up for him. I just can't. 

Shanny, might have chosen Mac Jones.

Lynch, should be asking him, can a quarterback be great in 2021 and beyond in this league, Tom Brady aside, by being an efficient executor and ball distributor, without any playmaking dimension to their game?