Virgil Carter of Folsom played for legends. How he helped create the West Coast Offense
He played for George Halas and Paul Brown and was mentored by Bill Walsh, each worthy of football’s Mount Rushmore of eternal greats.
College football just concluded its 150th season and the NFL is about to cap its 100th campaign in Sunday’s Super Bowl in Miami, pitting the 49ers against the Chiefs, and a small footnote of history should be earmarked for Virgil Carter.
Without Carter, the dominoes of football fate would have surely turned out differently. Walsh might never have landed in San Francisco. Without Walsh, the 49ers likely don’t draft Joe Montana, and who knows who wins those Super Bowls throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Carter is the X-factor for some of the greatest “what-ifs” in NFL history. He downplays it, of course, as a proud 74-year old living in retirement in Southern California. He enjoyed his quarterback days and small part in history as much as his world travels with wife Donna and his successful postfootball career in insurance.
He said this week by phone, “Oh, I don’t know how good I was, but I had fun. If I work a little bit on my arm, I might still throw now. I don’t have much overwhelming muscle mass left (laughs).”
Carter’s story began at Folsom High School, where in 1962 he quarterbacked the Bulldogs to a 10-0 showing and No. 1 Northern California ranking. Carter wondered if he’d ever take a snap at BYU, planning to graduate with honors. He emerged as the first All-America quarterback for the Cougars, shattering NCAA records at a time when the block Y on the helmets had people wondering if it stood for Yale.
“LaVell Edwards was the assistant at BYU who recruited me out of Folsom,” Carter said. “He convinced me to be patient with football when BYU ran the single-wing, a running offense. I figured I’d just go to the library to study as a student, but he told me to stick with it. Then we started to throw it 30 to 50 times, unheard of then. Then Edwards did it all the time when he became head coach.”
‘I ran George Halas out of football’
Carter was drafted in 1968 by Halas, the snarling Chicago Bears owner and coach who was a founding father of the NFL. Carter in practice rubbed elbows with Hall of Famers in the making, handing off to Gale Sayers when he wasn’t running like his helmet was on fire to get the hell away from a charging Dick Butkus.
Then fate took shape.
In the summer of 1970, Carter was with the Buffalo Bills and was urgently acquired by the Cincinnati Bengals, a second-year franchise created by Brown.
Brown’s innovations during the 1950s and ‘60 while with the Cleveland Browns reshaped the game. Brown was not short on ego. He named the team mascot after himself. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick not long ago deemed Brown, “as the father of professional football.”
Walsh’s first quarterback star was a cannon-armed golden boy named Greg Cook. Walsh would years later say, “Greg Cook was, I believe, the greatest talent to play the position.” But Cook became a “what-if” casualty. In 1969, he suffered a crushing shoulder injury against the Kansas City Chiefs, who went on to win Super Bowl IV. Cook did not play after the ‘69, his shoulder shot.
Carter became Walsh’s first quarterback project in what would later be known as the “West Coast Offense.” Perhaps it should have been called the “Ohio River Offense.”
Carter was a cerebral and crafty leader who overcame a relatively weak arm by using short passes in a ball-control attack, piling up first downs to keep defenses guessing and gassed. Walsh use the model to revolutionize the NFL’s modern game the next three decades.
Carter stepped in as a starter in 1970 when two other Bengals quarterbacks were hauled away by ambulance after brutal hits. Carter was the first Bengals quarterback to rush for 100 yards in a game. He gutted out a win over Houston after taking a forearm to the face. Without the luxury of anesthetic or pain killers, Carter had 14 stitches in his tongue at the half, and led the Bengals to victory. (Brown years earlier introduced the age of the facemask with Cleveland after Otto Graham needed 15 stitches to close a gash on his face.)
The Bengals overcame a 1-6 start to the season to win their final seven games, resulting in the franchise’s first division championship. In 1971, Carter led the NFL in passing completion percentage at 62.2 percent. Carter passed for 5,063 yards and 29 touchdowns over 52 career NFL games, including 30 starts. By comparison, Dallas’ Dak Prescott had 4,902 yards passing and 30 touchdowns in 16 games in 2019.
Brown wrote in his autobiography that, “Carter was a godsend to us.” Walsh was the first coach to script 15 plays before kickoff, starting with Carter, then stretched it to 25 when he was the 49ers coach. This is NFL norm now.
“We had no idea that we were creating a template for the future of offense in the NFL,” Walsh wrote in the book, “More Than a Game.”
Walsh said in the summer of 1985, “The only choice we had in Cincinnati was to build our offense around what Virgil could do. And believe me, the short pass was all he could. He was a great competitor and a great team leader, so we just played into his strength.”
Carter joked that he helped make Walsh look like a “genius.”
“First, I ran George Halas out of coaching because my first year with the Bears was his last in coaching,” Carter said with a laugh. “I was Walsh’s prototype for the West Coast Offense. I had so little ability that he helped me look good. Offenses are different now, and the West Coast Offense is in the trash pile of memories, but it reshaped the game.”
True student of the game
By 1972, Ken Anderson had taken over as the Bengals quarterback. Carter played the 1974 season in the soon-to-be defunct World Football League, leading the league in passing with the Chicago Fire. He was done with football by 1976 and bowed out with few regrets, his brain and body mostly intact.
Carter and Walsh added an intellectual aspect to what had been a game defined by savagery, and Carter’s ability to absorb information endured him to coaches. He earned an MBA in mathematics at Northwestern while with the Bears, a rarity for any era of football, and ushered in a dose of analytics before anyone had even heard of such a word.
“Halas financed that,” Carter said. “I’d come into the Bears offices to study film and the playbook. He was beyond measure, and I took classes in quantitative analysis, looking into the expected value of having the football on different spots on the field. I got play-by-play information from all the NFL teams, data-coded them on punch cards.”
Carter also taught mathematics and statistics courses at Xavier while in the NFL, always eager to learn. While with the Bears, Carter would mark down plays on his game pants.
“They were upside down when the defense looked at it,” Carter said with a laugh. “When I went to the Bears, I was handed a playbook that was 8 to 10 inches thick. It was like learning a different language. Later, working with Bill Walsh, I learned a so much more. He was a humorous intellect. Paul Brown didn’t smile unless he was squinting in the sun. Bill was so gifted. His thinking was, ‘what’s the defense doing?’ and then designed ways to beat that defense.”
Walsh’s football fate
Walsh expected to be named Brown’s successor in Cincinnati following the 1975 season, when he stepped down to run the club in the front office. Brown instead hired another assistant coach in Bill “Tiger” Johnson.
Walsh, at 44, was crushed and nearly quit football. He became an assistant with the San Diego Chargers, where he helped mold and mentor eventual Hall of Famer Dan Fouts. Walsh coached Stanford through the 1977 and ‘78 seasons, where the West Coast Offense resulted in the Cardinal leading the NCAA in passing.
“I can tell you why it didn’t happen for Bill in Cincinnati,” Carter said. “Paul was a man of integrity. Tiger Johnson was an old friend of his. Paul promised him the job and he was going to give it to him.”
In 1978, Chicago Bears general manager Jim Finks offered, or contemplated offering, Walsh the job as head coach. There are conflicting reports on this over the decades. Walsh had said years before he died that he didn’t want to leave California after a season coaching Stanford, in 1977.
Carter isn’t so sure.
“I went to Jim Finks to sell him on getting Bill Walsh,” Carter said. “After Jack Pardee left the Bears to coach the Redskins, Bill was in the airport talking to Finks. He thought he had the job. He wanted it.”
49ers fate and irony
The DeBortolo family purchased the 49ers in 1977. By 1978, 35-year old Eddie DeBortolo Jr. badly wanted a new coach. Having gown up in Northern Ohio, DeBortolo idolized Brown. He wanted someone similar to Brown and landed Walsh.
In Walsh’s first draft in 1979, the 49ers nabbed Joe Montana, whom Finks and the Bears nearly grabbed. Walsh had Sam Wyche, the quarterback Carter replaced in 1970, mentor Montana as an assistant coach. Following the 1981 season, the 49ers won Super Bowl XVI, beating the Bengals.
In 1984, Brown hired Wyche to coach the Bengals. In 1988, Montana led a late-game drive to beat Wyche and the Bengals in the Super Bowl. Walsh retired as coach a month later.
“Great teams,” Carter said of those 49ers clubs. “I used to take my son Chad to the 49ers training camps in Rocklin in the 1980s. We’d chat with Joe Montana, Dwight Clark and Bill.”
Carter will watch the Super Bowl on TV and perhaps plot more world travel. He and wife Donna have visited Israel five times and been through Rome. Carter is mixed on whom to root for in the Super Bowl. He is forever fond of Walsh, who is forever linked to the 49ers, but Carter is also a fan of Kansas City coach Andy Reid, due to their mutual BYU ties.
And the quarterbacks in the game, Patrick Mahomes and Jimmy Garoppolo?
“I think Mahomes is phenomenal,” Carter said. “His comebacks are unheard of. The rest of us would have buried our heads in the sand. I like Garoppolo, too. I fear the 49ers defensive line can control the game if they can control Mahomes. I’m a Walsh fan. It’ll be like pulling out the alumni lettermen’s sweater and reaching for the pom-poms.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Virgil Carter of Folsom played for legends. How he helped create the West Coast Offense."