He’s Passing a ‘Skin Test : Jay Schroeder Is Doing Remarkably Well in Replacing Joe Theismann at Quarterback

The scene made an enduring impression on Monday night football fans. A wrenching encounter with some of his opponents had put quarterback Joe Theismann on the ground with a broken leg.

And now the stretcher bearers were coming out--along with another quarterback, Jay Schroeder, who headed not for the huddle but for Theismann.

Leaning over his stricken teammate, Schroeder said: “We’re gonna get this one for you, Joe.”

And they did. Coming from behind on Schroeder’s passes, the Washington Redskins beat the New York Giants that night last November, 23-21.

Somewhere, sometime, there might have been a more poignant and dramatic changing of the guard in American sports. But surely not on national television.

Theismann, then 36, a Super Bowl winner, never played football again. Schroeder, then 24, emerged instantly as a quarterback who could play in the National Football League.

“I think my baseball background helped me in (that) game,” Schroeder said this week, mentioning his three years in the Toronto Blue Jays’ chain. “In a baseball game, you spend a lot of time sitting around, like a backup quarterback. But then, you’ve got to get up and do something. I was ready.”

Tell Joe Gibbs about that. The Washington coach remembers that during the week before Schroeder’s big Monday night, the young quarterback had spent his free hours memorizing the game plan.

“Whenever we were practicing defense, Jay dragged (offensive coach) Jerry Rhome over to a corner of the field,” Gibbs said.

“He made Jerry run ups and outs and hooks, and kept throwing the ball out there until he’d mastered every pass in the game plan. He didn’t just do it once. He did it all the time, week after week. Here’s a backup who doesn’t figure to play all year, and he’s working like he’s the only quarterback on the team. That’s Jay.”

Apparently it is. Anywhere you want to start the story--at UCLA, at Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, at Redskin Park in Virginia--Jay Schroeder’s story is a remarkable one.

He’s the guy who tried to play baseball but gave it up gracefully when he couldn’t, who has settled for $350,000 a year when he was shooting for a million, who, even now, would rather be catching for Toronto Sunday, or even Medicine Hat, than pitching against the Raiders at RFK Stadium.

He’s the guy who in the same year played professional baseball in the minors and big-time football at UCLA, who threw away a career as a college football hero, who replaced a big name here.

In Theismann’s first 10 games a year ago, the Redskins had a disappointing 5-5 record. Six weeks later, they finished a respectable 10-6 with a passer who might have been the most inexperienced pro in the land.

As a starting quarterback, Schroeder had played scarcely a year at Palisades High School and less than a year at UCLA. After three seasons of minor league baseball, he had played six downs of regular-season football for the Redskins in September. And that was it.

Yet, he has played like a Heisman Trophy winner ever since for a team that has won six times in Schroeder’s first seven starts.

“He always makes you think you’ll win,” Pro Bowl guard Russ Grimm said.

Off the field, Schroeder’s personality belies this. He is so unassuming that when he arrived in Washington two years ago as the club’s third-round draft choice, nobody thought to pick him up at the airport. There was supposed to be a press conference, somewhere, but apparently everyone forgot it.

On the field, however, Schroeder is a Hyde, as in Jekyll and.

“He even yells at me ,” Gibbs said.

There was the time in an exhibition game this year when the Redskin coaches couldn’t decide whether to run or pass. Out on the field, standing near the huddle, Schroeder glared at them for five or six seconds, then shouted: “Hey, you guys, hurry up! Do you want another penalty?”

Gibbs called back, soothingly: “Now, hold it, Jay.”

But he did send the play right in.

Later, Schroeder said: “The coaches who call the plays always want to come up with a perfect signal. But nothing’s perfect--except winning.”

He had the same attitude at UCLA, according to offensive coordinator Homer Smith.

“Jay was so nice off the field you couldn’t believe it,” he said. “And so ornery in a football uniform that you couldn’t believe that, either.”

On the practice field one day at UCLA, when Schroeder and Bruin starter Tom Ramsey were working on their long-distance accuracy, Schroeder apparently decided to show up Ramsey.

As Smith tells it, Schroeder, after letting the pass go each time, retreated a few paces for his next attempt, forcing Ramsey to fall back with him.

Soon Ramsey, a 180-pounder, was breathlessly winding up like a hammer thrower and still not getting the ball out there. He underthrew everybody.

Disconcerted, red-faced, Ramsey watched the 200-pound Schroeder calmly throwing into the hands of every receiver.

“It was a disgusting thing for Jay to do,” Smith said. “But, golly, you had to admire him, too. A quarterback with that kind of personality isn’t going to lose very many.”

Schroeder, though, sheds his football personality the instant he sheds his uniform.

“I wish people would think of me as just another guy who works hard all day, then drives home and does nothing exciting at all--like everybody else,” he said. “That’s the way I think of myself. My father happens to be a salesman (in the Thousand Oaks area). I happen to be a quarterback. It’s no big deal. All I want (after work) is to be with my wife.”

Except for his size--he weighs 215 now and stands a commanding 6 feet 4 inches--Schroeder doesn’t even seem like a football player. With his blond hair, he looks more like a California surfer, although he has never been on a board. A mutual acquaintance calls him a taller, younger, blonder Peter Ueberroth.

Schroeder’s best friend is the woman he married, the former Deborah Anding of San Diego.

When he was in baseball, they traveled together through the minor leagues, Jay in the team bus, Debbie trailing behind in the family van.

Schroeder said that Debbie, a former gymnast and aerobics teacher, listened patiently when he decided to return to football in 1984.

“You’ll have to learn to run,” she said.

“Run!” he said. “What’s wrong with the way I run?”

“You aren’t fast enough,” she said. “You’ve got to learn to stride.”

And she taught him.

“Debbie had learned how to stride as a gymnast,” said John Konoza, one of their friends.

And, eventually, it was Jay’s speed that sold him to Redskin General Manager Bobby Beathard, who drafted Schroeder that spring.

“Few quarterbacks can beat five seconds (for 40 yards),” said UCLA’s Smith, who had alerted the National Football League that Schroeder was available by sending memos to all 28 clubs. “When Jay came in at 4.7, that got their attention.”

His accuracy as a passer also helped--and Debbie also helped with that.

“When I left baseball, she was the receiver I practiced with,” he said. “For a good six months, she had the bruises to prove it.”

Today, the Schroeders live near Redskin Park in Reston, Va., at the end of a row of 10 two-story condominiums, where they watch football films together in their second-story study. He may be the only NFL quarterback who has a football coach at home.

“When we put the tapes on the VCR, Debbie helps me nearly every night,” Schroeder said. “She has a knack for asking the right question. She won’t let me skim past a play or a series when they seem a little dull. She keeps me concentrating.”

When he isn’t studying, Schroeder said, he might be outside working in the garden, or presiding over the barbecue. “Jay’s idea of a big time is having his friends over for hamburgers and beer,” Konoza said. “At a barbecue, he’ll have a light beer or two. I’ve never known him to drink anything more, or anything stronger.”

On a day off last week, Jay conferred with Debbie as usual, he said, and then invited the Konozas to dinner.

“Afterward, he suggested that Debbie and Cathy (Konoza) take Brian (the Schroeders’ son) to the playground down the street,” Konoza said.

Debbie asked him: “Who’ll clean up?”

“You’re looking at him,” Jay said.

And he followed through, Konoza reported, washing the dishes, putting them away, mopping up. “That is, Jay and I did,” he said.

Gibbs, when told of this, said that Theismann wouldn’t have been caught dead washing dishes in the days when he was the Redskins’ No. 1 quarterback. Theismann reveled in the life of a celebrity.

“Joe and Jay couldn’t be more different,” said Gibbs, who likes to tell about the time he needed an emergency punter last year.

Theismann and Schroeder were then the backup punters, and when the Redskins’ kicking specialist went down, Gibbs called for volunteers.

“It’s up to one of you,” he said. “Which one?”

Slowly shaking his head, Schroeder said: “Well, I don’t know . . . “

Theismann jumped up and said: “Yeah, I’ll take a shot at it.”

Recalled Gibbs: “He took a shot, all right, and punted the ball three feet. One yard. The next time I needed a punter, I sent Schroeder in--and he punted it 45 (yards).”

To Gibbs, there’s a moral in all this. “You’ve got to know the whole personalities of your players,” he said.

In Schroeder’s case, that isn’t easy. His takes a 180-degree turn when it’s time to play.

About the only thing he has in common with Theismann is an overwhelming sense of self-worth when throwing the ball or leading the troops.

Gibbs and Beathard found out about that for sure in the off-season when they got a chance to bring in Doug Williams as their backup quarterback.

Some years before, as a Tampa Bay assistant, Gibbs had brought Williams to John McKay, and Gibbs still regards Williams as one of the game’s best passers.

“I’m worried about how Jay will take it,” the Redskin coach said.

Beathard said: “I’m worried, too. We don’t want Jay feeling insecure. Let’s ask him for his opinion before we make the trade.”

That night, Gibbs talked to Schroeder, who answered:

“I don’t care who you bring in--if it will help the team. You know I’ll beat him out, anyway.”

Both Schroeder and Williams are powerful passers. At Medicine Hat, or maybe it was Kinston, N.C., when he was playing baseball there, Schroeder couldn’t get out of a bet one day when a teammate doubted his ability to throw a baseball out of the park.

Standing at home plate, Schroeder wound up easily and lobbed the ball over the fence, 320 feet away.

Some said it tipped the fence.

“It went far enough to get me a free light beer,” said Schroeder, who, just for fun, had once beaten USC with a another tipped pass, fielded by Freeman McNeil.

Schroeder throws so hard and with such an accurate touch that UCLA’s Smith called him the best athlete he has ever coached and said Schroeder could have been a major league pitcher.

No way, said Debbie Schroeder.

“As a pitcher, Jay realizes he might hurt somebody badly, and I know he’d never take the chance,” she said. “He knows what it’s like--he’s been hit by a 70-m.p.h. fastball. He can throw it in the 90s.”

Schroeder himself has another explanation.

“The reason I’ve never pitched, even in high school, is that I don’t want to throw out my arm,” he said. “Pitching is an unnatural movement. Show me a major league pitcher and I’ll show you a guy who’s had arm trouble and worked through it, or will have arm trouble someday, or maybe he’s one of the lucky ones. My arm is too important to me.”

So when the Blue Jays tried to convert him in 1984, after three years of his batting .234 or less as a catcher, outfielder, third baseman and first baseman, he asked Debbie if she wanted to practice her pass receiving, and she said yes.

About the same time, UCLA senior defensive back Don Rogers was working out for the scouts on the Bruin campus. Later, Rogers would be Cleveland’s No. 1 pick, and still later he would die tragically. But that spring, the scouts came in droves to see him.

“We went out there to scout Rogers and stayed to get Schroeder,” said Beathard, who added that anyone can build a football team with the right coach and the right quarterback. Which is easier said than done. Check the standings next Christmas.

It was Beathard who found Gibbs and who now has Schroeder, all of which is a good 10 years’ work if he never does another thing for Jack Kent Cooke, the Redskin owner.

“We are a great deal alike,” Schroeder said of himself and the people he works for.

“Before Joe Theismann was hurt, they took a chance on me--an inexperienced quarterback. And that’s the way I like to play football, too, taking chances--like Terry Bradshaw used to. If there’s a chance that the long pass might be open, shoot for it.”

On the second Sunday of the season, the Raiders ought to love this guy.