WAS THEISMANN’S BROKEN LEG A LUCKY BREAK? : Some Say Redskins Are Better Team With Schroeder, but the Previous QB Begs to Differ

The New York Giants won’t say it and the Washington Redskins tread softly around the issue. Joe Theismann himself thinks the Redskins would be just as successful if he were healthy and still their quarterback.

But the unpleasant question remains: When Theismann’s leg was broken under the weight of Lawrence Taylor and Gary Reasons one year and 20 days ago, was it the break the Redskins needed to become Super Bowl contenders again?

The Giants and Redskins, two of the NFL’s three 11-2 teams, meet at RFK Stadium today in a game that should decide the NFC East title and will probably set up the winner as the favorite to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl.

It’s New York’s first visit here since Monday night, Nov. 18, 1985, when Theismann suffered what turned out to be a career-ending injury early in the second quarter. He was replaced by Jay Schroeder, who rallied the Redskins, 5-5 entering the game, to a 23-21 victory and has quarterbacked them to a 15-3 record in the 18 games since.

Could a healthy 37-year-old Theismann have done that?

“I think so,” he said. “I wasn’t having a particularly good season when I was hurt but there were reasons for it. We had a number of people injured, we didn’t have the same offensive line for two games in a row all year and we didn’t have the receivers they have now.”

“The Theismann we played in 1982 and 1983 and 1984 could have done the same thing,” said Bill Belichick, the Giants’ defensive coordinator. “The way the Redskins are playing now, it’s not just the quarterback. The whole team is playing much better than it did a year ago.”

And yet ...

The 6-foot-4, 215-pound Schroeder, a former minor-league baseball player who took over for Theismann with just one game of college experience and a little NFL mop-up duty, is a big-play, long-ball quarterback. The 1982 and 1983 Super Bowl teams, in contrast, played a nickel-and-dime control game that depended on the slogging of John Riggins and Theismann’s short- and medium-range passing.

On the play after he replaced Theismann, Schroeder completed a 51-yard pass to Art Monk to set up the Redskins’ first touchdown -- a bomb the Giants would never have seen from Theismann. One NFL observer, asked after the game if Washington would have won with Theismann, smiled and replied:

“No way.”

This season, Redskin followers suggest that Theismann would have been hard pressed to pull out three of the team’s victories -- come-from-behind wins over Minnesota, San Diego and the Raiders, the latter set up by a 59-yard pass from Schroeder to Clint Didier.

The first time the Redskins and Giants met, Schroeder was 22-for-40 for 420 yards as he rallied his team from a 20-3 deficit to a 20-20 tie. The Giants went on to win 27-20.

“If he played against everyone the way he plays against us, he’d go direct to the Hall of Fame,” Belichick said.

Still, there’s also a lot to be said for the other theory -- that Schroeder is only one member of a rearranged team that has added 14 new players this season.

Theismann and Giants Coach Bill Parcells think the most important new elements are players who didn’t emerge until after Theismann left -- wide receiver Gary Clark and tight end Clint Didier, who add deep-play potential to a receiving corps that depended almost entirely on Monk.

When Theismann went down, Clark had just joined the Redskins from the USFL and had missed three weeks with an injury. Didier was also injured for much of the season and is now part of a system that often uses him like a third wide receiver, much as Kellen Winslow was used during his prime with San Diego.

“The team has been so reshuffled that you can’t really make a comparison,” said Reasons, the linebacker who folded Theismann over Taylor on the play, which has been replayed over and over on TV in excruciatingly detailed slow motion.

“Right now, I’d say it’s tougher this week to get ready for Schroeder than Theismann,” said Carl Banks, another New York linebacker, who smiles and adds, “That’s because Theismann doesn’t play for them anymore.”

Theismann himself hasn’t seen the Redskins much this year -- he’s been watching other teams as an analyst for CBS. But he has seen them on tape enough to know the differences between his team and this one.

“We used to go deep perhaps four or five times a game and under Jay they can strike at any time,” he said.

“I’d say the biggest difference is the evolution of Gary Clark. He has a great knack of adjusting to the open lanes. Even in the short time I was playing with him, whenever I got in trouble, Gary Clark would seem to pop up open in front of me.”

From the New York point of view, if it had been Clark that Taylor and Reasons smothered ...