The Second Coming: BILL WALSH

NESTLED IN A STAND OF FRAGRANT EUCAlyptus trees at the Embarcadero Road entrance to the campus of Stanford University is a billboard advertising the home schedule of the varsity football team. But the larger-than-life image on the billboard that causes motorists to pause is that of a man with a mane of white hair beckoning them to turn in on a Saturday afternoon, park their cars, fill the 85,500 seats at Stanford Stadium and watch him lead the local student athletes to the promised land. Which, in the vernacular of Stanford football, means the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena on January 1st.

In the rich but checkered history of Stanford football, sporting supplicants who have placed their fannies on Stanford Stadium's wooden-bench seats in prayerful anticipation of just such an event have spent more than their share of New Year's days sorely disappointed. There have been moments of brilliance, of course. On occasion, there have even been seasons of considerable distinction. But the chroniclers of sport have always preferred to measure excellence in terms of eras. Eras have been in short supply recently at Stanford. So too have been coaching dynasties. There's certainly been nothing like the dynasty Bill Walsh ruled when he was the coach of San Francisco's professional team, the 49ers.

Sportswise, that was a dynasty with substantial heft. It lasted the better part of a decade and led to three triumphs in the Super Bowl. As a result, Walsh first had the cloak of greatness draped around his shoulders. Then, as the championships accumulated, the purveyors of hyperbole whisked it away and replaced it with the heavier mantle that bore the title "genius." The fact that Walsh on occasion used words such as "sublime" to describe the play of his team certainly set him apart from those in the pro-football fraternity, whose grammatical constructions often drift toward the martial, monosyllabic and scatological. No less a personage than former Secretary of State George Shultz, now penning his memoirs at the Hoover Institution on Stanford's campus, says, "I have come to admire him as a great intellect."

In January, at age 60, years after he stepped down as head coach of the 49ers, Walsh decided to seek the sublime again, leaving the television booth and a lucrative contract as an analyst of N.F.L. games for NBC. To the surprise of many, perhaps even himself, he took a pay cut to $150,000 a year (plus fringes) to become head coach at a school where athletes can conjugate a verb, carry on a conversation and occasionally play a little football. Walsh described the feeling upon his return home to a campus where he last coached 14 years ago as one of unmitigated "bliss."

Midway through his first season that feeling is undiminished, and it has spread into academic nooks where enthusiasm for football has rarely flourished. Unexpected back-to-back victories over Notre Dame and UCLA propelled Walsh's charges into a national ranking in the top 10 for the first time in 22 years; despite a subsequent loss to Arizona, Walsh's return to Stanford and his application of complex pro strategies to college ball have revived discussion of whether a mere football coach could actually qualify for the untenured title of genius.