Bill Walsh played football and was a boxer in college.

Walsh began his coaching career at Washington High School in Freemont, California, where he also coached the swimming team.

Bill Walsh began his collegiate coaching career under NFL Hall of Fame and Buffalo Bills Head Coach Marv Levy at the University of California, Berkley.

He was then an assistant at Stanford, before beginning his NFL coaching career as an assistant with the Oakland Raiders.

He then worked under Hall of Fame Coach Paul Brown for the Cincinnati Bengals and moved up to become his Offensive Coordinator. He coached All-Pros in QB Ken Anderson and WR Isaac Curtis for the Bengals high-powered attack. It was here that Walsh developed the West Coast Offense that emphasized shorter passes.

Paul Brown used his powerful influence to work to keep Walsh from becoming a Head Coach in the NFL, and when Brown retired, he named someone else as Head Coach.

Walsh then left the Bengals and worked one year as an assistant with the San Diego Chargers before moving down to the collegiate level to get his first Head Coach job in his second stint with the Stanford Cardinal. He coached NFL Hall of Fame WR James Lofton while at Stanford.

After two years at Stanford, Bill Walsh got his opportunity to become a NFL Head Coach with the San Francisco 49ers, and the rest, as they say, is history.

He coached arguably the greatest Quarterback and Wide Receiver to ever play the game in Hall of Famers Joe Montana and Jerry Rice.

He coached three other Hall of Fame players: QB Steve Young, FS Ronnie Lott, and DE Fred Dean.

He won three Super Bowls with the 49ers on his way to a ten year NFL Hall of Fame coaching career.

Bill Walsh served as a consultant with the 49ers and then worked as a football broadcaster with NBC and in before going back to Stanford for a third time. He served as Head Coach for three years before retiring for good from the game of football. Walsh then worked in an athletic administrative role for Stanford and San Jose State before finally retiring altogether.

Bill Walsh died of leukemia in 2007, but his legacy will remain. Perhaps motivated by the way Paul Brown treated him, Walsh helped many of his former assistants to become Head Coaches (see the Bill Walsh Coaching Tree). The West Coast Offense and the organizational approach that Walsh made prominent is still as strong as ever in the NFL.

Walsh was viewed as a strong advocate for African-American Head Coaches in the NFL and College Football. Former assistants Ray Rhodes, Dennis Green, and Tyrone Willingham became Head Coaches. Tony Dungy, Lovie Smith, and Mike Tomlin later came from the Bill Walsh Coaching Tree.

The term "West Coast Offense," as it is now commonly used, originated from a remark made by then New York Giants coach Bill Parcells after the Giants defeated the San Francisco 49ers 17-3 in the 1985 playoffs. Parcells, a believer in strength over skill told writers, "What do you think of that West Coast Offense now?" Bernie Kosar was then quoted in 1993 by Sports Illustrated writer Paul Zimmerman (or "Dr. Z"). Originally the term "West Coast Offense" referred to the "Air Coryell" system (after Don Coryell) used by the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders in the 1970s. A reporter mistakenly applied Kosar's quote about the "West Coast Offense" to describe Bill Walsh's 49ers. Walsh originally resisted having the term misapplied to his own system, but the name stuck.

Chris Brown describes the West Coast Offense on his site, http://smartfootball.blogspot.com/: "To my mind, however, the West Coast Offense, or maybe more appropriately the Walsh Offense, has nothing to do with formations, nothing to do with routes or pass plays, and only a notional bit to do with 'passing to set up the run.'

Instead, the Walsh Offense is about two interrelated ideas: (1) A meticulous and thorough approach to building a gameplans, and (2) a calm, planned out approach to calling the actual plays in the game so that your gameplanner is actually useful on gameday. Walsh didn't revolutionize Saturdays or Sundays, he revolutionized Sunday night through Thursdays. He figured out what would work when the pressures weren't on, he had his players practice those plays they had determined would work best, and then he actually ran those plays they practiced in the games they played, as opposed to some seat-of-the-pants calls made by other coaches." Check out Chris Brown's site for more information about Bill Walsh.

Walsh wrote a masterpiece book, Finding the Winning Edge that details the organizational strategies that helped his San Francisco 49ers to achieve such great success. The book is popular among football coaches today, but it is hard to find.