Pro Football / Bob Oates : Poll, No Poll, Raider Game Must Be Live

The Channel 7 people were fooling either themselves or their clientele this week with their so-called viewer poll.

There was never any chance that Thursday night’s Raider-Charger game in San Diego would be tape-delayed from 5 p.m., the kickoff hour, until 7:30 p.m.

National Football League games aren’t tape-delayed.

National Basketball Assn. games often are, some baseball games have been, as have some college football games, but “NFL games are always live,” an NFL club spokesman said.

Asked about this, the league’s director of broadcasting, Val Pinchbeck Jr., said that to avoid confusion, live TV is mandated “in the contract (with) home city stations.”

At Channel 7, they may have forgotten to look. John Severino, the station’s general manager, was not available for comment.

The two ends of the country can’t be appeased on kickoff times.

After a 9 p.m. start in Washington, much of Monday night’s 49er-Redskin game was shown early Tuesday morning in Eastern cities.

With the 5 p.m. kickoff in San Diego Thursday, much of the Raider-Charger game will be shown while many West Coast football fans are still on the freeways.

“This is an experiment,” Pinchbeck said of Thursday’s 5 p.m. kickoff. “We’re trying to find out what happens (to viewers) at different times.”

What happens here at 5 p.m. is fairly predictable.

Is Jim Everett the quarterback he seemed to be in his NFL debut with the Rams Sunday?

Pat Haden, TV commentator and former Ram quarterback, said: “He’s a good one. I’ve been impressed with Everett ever since I started following him at Purdue. In his pure throwing motion and physical dimensions, he reminds me of (the Raiders’) Marc Wilson.”

At not quite 6 feet 6 inches, they are the same size, and whatever his other problems, Wilson ranks with any quarterback as a long-ball thrower.

“Everything (in Everett’s future) depends on the intangibles,” Haden said. “All quarterbacks are eventually booed and criticized. We’ll have to see how he responds to that.”

Another of those intangibles is how a quarterback responds to the kind of beating Joe Montana took Monday night. The young Ram hasn’t yet had that opportunity.

Dick Steinberg, the New England Patriots’ director of player personnel, said most NFL scouts have been impressed with three of Everett’s assets: his arm, poise and athletic ability.

But Steinberg added: “Everett’s big game against (the Patriots) Sunday wasn’t a real test. It was his first NFL game, and our defensive people weren’t preparing for Everett. They were preparing for Eric Dickerson.

“When Steve Dils is at quarterback, Dickerson is the Ram to beat,” Steinberg said. “So we were blitzing a lot on running downs. If we’d seen Everett even once, we’d have had a different game plan.”

Race within a race: When the Miami Dolphins and Dallas Cowboys both won last Sunday’s games, their coaches, Don Shula and Tom Landry, remained tied for second place in NFL victories at 260.

They trail the late George Halas, owner-coach of the Chicago Bears who may be out of reach with 325 wins.

Shula started the season two wins ahead of Landry. With the kinds of teams they have in Dallas (7-4) and Miami (5-6), Landry will probably end the year No. 2.

But at 62, he can’t soon retire and expect to hold No. 2 against the challenge of Shula, who is 56.

Quarterback David Archer of the Atlanta Falcons was running the ball on a bootleg rollout Sunday when defensive end Richard Dent of the Bears rammed him and put him out for the season with a separated shoulder.

“When a quarterback goes wide by himself, something good or bad can happen, and it was bad for him,” Dent told reporters afterward. “He’d embarrassed me on that bootleg (a few minutes earlier), and I didn’t want to be fooled again.”

That sounds as if Dent had run down Archer in an open field to avoid being fooled and embarrassed.

The reality is that Archer had been tackled and, unable to defend himself, was being firmly held by another Bear when Dent came up late and used his upper body as a battering ram to smash Archer deliberately.

It would have been a late hit had Archer been throwing. Hiding behind the NFL rule that the Atlanta quarterback was technically a ballcarrier on that play--and goaded, as he said, by a previous embarrassment--Dent hit him with all the force he could muster and knocked him out until 1987.

And the NFL keeps wondering what’s happening to its quarterbacks.

Quote Dept.: Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs, on quarterback Jay Schroeder: “He gets better in every game. I can’t wait to see how he plays when he’s got some real experience under his belt.”

Bear Coach Mike Ditka, on whether he considered replacing quarterback Mike Tomczak, who completed 1 of 8 passes for 6 yards in the first half Sunday: “You teeter on whether to take him out, but that would have been the worst thing to do.”

Ditka, again, on Chicago’s next three games, against Green Bay, (2-9), Pittsburgh (4-7) and Tampa Bay (2-9): “This is the key. We can win the Central Division in (these) games.”

The Philadelphia Eagles (3-8) have declared war on beer, moving on three fronts:

--They have cut off beer sales at Veterans Stadium after halftime, instead of after the third period.

--They have reduced the size of a cup of beer from 32 ounces to 16, and limited each customer to two at a time.

--They have banned tailgating on city-owned parking lots.

And still the Eagles lose.