Exactly. I still see articles or hear people on TV/radio who describe the Packers as running the WCO. To my memory, McCarthy never ran that while here. Seems to me he was asked as a rookie HC if he would run the WCO and his response was something like "No, it's all about individual matchups."
So what is it? To me a WCO is
- spread formations
- quick slants
- FB screens
- setting up for YAC
Spread formations? Not really. Whether the genesis of West Coast in Cincinnati in 1970, which Walsh implented under Paul Brown when Greg Cook was injured and replaced by the less skilled Virgil Carter, or the subsequent implementation in San Francisco, it was run primarily out of the standard formation of the day: 2 back, in-line TE, 2 wide.
Nothing today looks like that except the occasional short yardage where the FB/H-back lead blocks. Even then it is typically a run sell-out with a 7 man line (or even 8 man with no wideouts).
McCarthy hit the nail on the head. Those quick slants, FB screens and setting up for YAC was a match-up game, not in the player-vs-player meaning but in the way the offense attacks a defense. It was a departure from what was primarily a "we play our game, you play yours, and we'll see who wins".
Walsh was exploiting a defensive ineffciency in that defenses were largely static without the variety of substitutions or the disguises as we see today.
Today, the term West Coast is meaningless. Everybody runs a wide variety of everything on both sides of the ball in the match-up game. The differences boil down to (1) insight, what works best against what, (2) talent, where what you have leads to what you can emphasize and what you have to minimize, (3) clarity, in what's to be executed, euphemistically referred to as "communication", developed in practice and (4) execution, "do your job" invidivually within the collective concept which is most acutely a factor in line play.
