Bill Walsh, known in football circles simply as “The Genius” for taking his San Francisco 49ers to three NFL championships and designing the “West Coast offense” that has attracted countless devotees in both college and professional ranks, has died. He was 75.

Diagnosed with leukemia in 2004, Walsh had been in failing health for several months, according to Stanford University, where he served as coach and athletic director.

Cerebral, introspective and innovative, Walsh had an uncanny eye for scouting players and designing refined game plans. His offensive scheme — predicated on short, horizontal timing passes — fueled a dynasty in San Francisco with Super Bowl victories after the 1981, ’84, and ’88 seasons.

George Seifert, Walsh’s defensive coordinator who retained the same offensive system after Walsh retired, led the 49ers to two more Super Bowl victories after the 1990 and 1994 seasons.

Instantly identifiable on the sidelines with a shock of white hair under his headset, Walsh amassed a remarkably consistent record as an NFL coach. His 49ers were the winningest franchise of the 1980s. Even more astounding was that, in 1978, he took over a rudderless club, a perennial doormat that had won just two games the previous season.

“The one thing that sticks in my mind about playing for Bill was how unfair it was, because we had such an advantage over the people we were playing,” said Randy Cross, a mainstay on the offensive line throughout Walsh’s coaching career in San Francisco. “Not everyone wanted to admit that. Some people had to come around to it grudgingly.”

Unlike many in his profession, Walsh wasn’t a wild-eyed screamer like Green Bay’s legendary Vince Lombardi, who struck fear in the hearts of his players. Instead, he was almost scholarly, and at times plagued with selfdoubt. Jim Murray, the late Los Angeles Times sports columnist, wrote that Walsh “baffles longtime coach-watchers. He is least coach-like of anyone in the profession. He could be anything from an Elizabethan poetry teacher to an opera critic.” Walsh was fully aware that he didn’t fit the standard NFL mold.

“I know there were coaches who were certainly more intelligent than I was,” he told the Times in December. “There were firebrand coaches who fired up their teams and all that kind of thing. But we basically understated everything publicly. We never talked about, ‘We’re going to the Super Bowl,’ or, ‘We’re the best; come and get us,’ all that kind of thing. We just quietly went about our business, and I do think people resented that. They wanted confrontation, and they didn’t get it until we played.” Walsh retired from the National Football League in 1989, after leading his 49ers to victory over Cincinnati in Super Bowl XXIII. In doing so, he joined Lombardi as the only NFL coaches to step down immediately after winning a Super Bowl.

William Ernest Walsh was born November 30, 1931, in Los Angeles. It was the height of the Depression, and Walsh’s father worked as a day laborer on a series of difficult, low-paying jobs.

His family moved often, and Walsh graduated from Hayward High School in the San Francisco area. A left-hander, he played quarterback and participated in track and field.

Although he had hoped to attend the University of California, Berkeley, or Stanford on a football scholarship, he had neither the grades nor the athletic ability for admittance. He played two seasons at San Mateo Junior College before transferring to San Jose State. He played offensive and defensive end for the Spartans.

He was never approached to play pro football but was determined to stay in the game. He took a job as a graduate assistant under San Jose State coach Bob Bronzan and immediately excelled.

“I went into coaching with the resolve that my coaching career wouldn’t be a disappointment to me,” Walsh once told the Saturday Evening Post. “So I worked doubly hard at it.” Walsh’s first job as head coach was at Washington Union High School in Fremont, Calif. There, in two years, he transformed a team that had lost 26 of 27 games into a 9–1 powerhouse. That led to assistant coaching jobs at Cal and Stanford over the next five years.

In 1966, Walsh was introduced to pro football when the Oakland Raiders hired him as a backfield coach. He often questioned leaving Stanford but said he was “attracted to the technical, artistic part of the pro game.” He moved on to the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968, where he stayed through 1975 and built a reputation as an elite quarterbacks coach under the legendary Paul Brown. Although Walsh and Brown were cordial, they were neither close nor shared the same football philosophies. So when Brown retired in 1975, he appointed another assistant, Bill “Tiger” Johnson, rather than Walsh to be his replacement.

The Walshes left for Southern California, where Bill took a job as offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers. He spent less than a year there before accepting the position of head coach at Stanford, where in two seasons he turned around an average program with victories in the 1977 Sun Bowl and 1978 Bluebonnet Bowl.

In nearby San Francisco, the 49ers had hired and fired four coaches in two years. DeBartolo, who at 33 had owned the team for three years, was looking to make his mark by turning around a losing franchise. In 1979, he hired the 47-year-old Walsh as coach and general manager.

It took three seasons for him to transform the 49ers from one of the league’s worst teams to one of its best. Although San Francisco went 2–14 in 1979, matching its record from a season earlier, the seeds of victory were sown. Walsh used a third-round pick in 1979 to select Notre Dame’s Joe Montana, who would go on to win four Super Bowls, three league MVP awards and would establish himself as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history.