In Memoriam: The Gunslinger (1939-2024)
Remembering Archie Cooley, one of the greatest coaches you've never heard of.
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I.
In the 1980s, in a Mississippi town so small that it didn’t even appear on some maps, a man kept his secrets in a black loose-leaf notebook. Every day, he would lock it up in his house on the campus of a school called Mississippi Valley State University, and every evening, he would open it up and page through it, absorbing the ideas he’d appropriated from others and thinking about how to incorporate them into his own strange and unique vision for the future of football.
The man’s name was Archie Cooley, and by the mid-1980s, he had rifled through the notebook so many times that the leaves had begun to detach and the pages were bound together with scotch tape. He had begun compiling the notebook while he was a defensive coach at Tennessee State University; his job was to prepare the scout team, and each week, he’d single out the opponents’ two or three best plays and transcribe them. When Cooley eventually became the head coach at Mississippi Valley State, the notebook served as a totem.
“It’s a combination of a lot of minds,” he told reporter Tim Rosaforte, “and what they did to me.”
Archie Cooley did not lack for confidence. He referred to himself often in the third-person; he nicknamed himself “The Gunslinger.” He did not care that his team practiced on a dirt field, the air thick with mosquitoes; he did not care that his entire football budget was essentially the equivalent of coffee money at the big state schools like Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Archie Cooley saw past all that, because he had a vision for an offense that would push the boundaries. And at the same time, he had the foresight to recruit a skinny wide receiver that none of the bigger schools wanted, who would go on to become perhaps the best player in the history of the sport.
II.
As The Athletic’s Jayson Jenks wrote, Archie Cooley did not invent modern football. But he helped reinvent it. He brought in a quarterback named Willie Totten, who could make all the throws, and he centered his offense around that young receiver, Jerry Rice, the soft-spoken son of a bricklayer, who was nicknamed “World” because he could catch pretty much anything on earth. When an assistant coach asked Cooley why his team paused to huddle up after every play, he realized he only had one answer: Because everyone else does it.
So he stopped doing what everyone else did. He decided his team would move fast and throw the ball prolifically. They lined up in crazy formations, with four or five receivers stacked on one side of the field. They didn’t allow the defense the time to set up, which meant Rice was often matched up one-on-one against a defensive back—and as we would learn over the course of the 1980s, there really was no one on earth who could cover Jerry Rice one-on-one. In 1984, Cooley’s team won its opener 86-0; they put up 77 points and 66 points and 83 points and defeated archrival Jackson State, 49-32.
Despite a blowout loss to Louisiana Tech in the first round of the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs, Cooley set into motion a more modern brand of football, one that used relentless speed and prolific passing as a cudgel. Eventually, his style was co-opted and re-re-invented by NFL coaches like Marv Levy and Sam Wyche; in San Francisco, the 49ers’ idiosyncratic coach, Bill Walsh, was so impressed by Rice’s ability to completely restructure an offense that he traded up in the first round to choose him. And all of it began in the pages of the notebook of Archie Cooley.
“I dare to do what other people only think about,” he said.
III.
If there are any recurring themes to this newsletter, I suppose this is one of the most prominent: Sports, perhaps more than any American enterprise outside of politics, has long been driven by groupthink, and the people who manage to buck that trend and attempt something entirely different are the ones who fascinate me, both in success and in failure. (Perhaps because I often feel like I’m trying to walk that tightrope myself with my own writing, both in success and in failure).
That tendency toward groupthink may have shifted since the Moneyball revolution, but even now, sports tend to reward conformity—there is an aggrieved tide of online and talk-radio fury when a coach does something that is not easily understood in the moment. During last month’s NFL draft, the 49ers’ newest idiosyncratic head coach, Kyle Shanahan, bucked all expectation by drafting a wide receiver in the first round. One local writer deemed it “indefensible,” condemning the choice before that receiver had ever played a single game.
But sometimes the only way forward is to ignore the skepticism. The only way forward is to dare.
Archie Cooley died last month, at the age of 85. His passing earned him an obituary in The New York Times, not merely because he coached (arguably) the best football player in history, but because of his belief in the enduring power of his own ideas, and because of his refusal to let them go.
“What I’m doing is against the rules of football,” he once said. “I have the guts to stick with it.”
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I always love stories like this, ones that look at the history of a sport and focuses on a defining moment or person who completely changed the game. Good job! Sorry to hear about Archie's passing. I hope he was properly rewarded for his innovations.