Vlasic Is Getting His Chance With Chargers, but Is It Too Early

When Charger quarterback Mark Vlasic played at Iowa, his coach, Hayden Fry, had this joke he liked to tell about him.

“The players call Mark ‘Pickle,’ ” Fry would say. “But I don’t know if he’s sweet or dill.”

Charger Coach Al Saunders will never win a quote-off against the crusty Fry. Ask him about Vlasic, and he says things such as: “Mark’s got to develop some consistency.” Or: “Mark is a quarterback that hasn’t had much experience.”

But it’s the same thing: The Chargers don’t know whether Mark Vlasic is sweet or whether Mark Vlasic is dill. They don’t know yet whether he’s a player or a promise.

They selected Vlasic in the fourth round of the NFL draft in 1987 as a developmental project. He had played only eight games in college over a five-year period, serving mostly as a clipboard caddy for All-American Chuck Long.

Last year, Vlasic threw six regular-season passes and completed three. His longest completion was 7 yards. His other two averaged .5. He also threw an interception that did nasty things to his quarterback rating--16.7 at season’s end.

Originally, Vlasic said he figured that the two years he would get learning the art of playing quarterback at the feet of Charger fixture Dan Fouts would help him immeasurably. But Fouts retired in the off-season. Newly acquired Mark Malone is the air-apparent. But the Chargers are hoping that Vlasic will challenge for the starting position.

“Looking at it from a selfish point of view, I probably would have been better off had Dan stayed here for another year or two,” Vlasic says. “But I think I can get the job done.”

Get the job done. Vlasic is starting to sound like his head coach. For that matter, maybe there aren’t too many people outside of Frank Layden, Lester Hayes or George Bernard Shaw who could win a quote-off against Hayden Fry.

That is not to say that Vlasic is dumb. He is smart enough to know that his opportunity to play quarterback in the NFL has arrived a year early. He watched what happened to former Charger quarterback Mark Herrmann. And he has decided he is glad that didn’t happen to him.

“I thought Mark Herrmann could play,” Vlasic says. “The whole time I was here I felt Mark Herrmann had all the ability in the world.”

The Chargers didn’t. They shipped Herrmann back to the Colts earlier this spring.

Which is another reason Vlasic’s learning process has gathered speed. Other than Malone, the current competition at quarterback comes from veteran backup Steve Fuller and free-agent types Babe Laufenberg, Ed Rubbert and Mike Kelley.

Saunders says the Chargers will pare that number to five by the time training camp starts in July. The three-day veteran minicamp that ends today will be the last time the Chargers give all six equal amounts of time running the offense.

Malone, Fuller and Vlasic, not necessarily in that order, are the betting favorites to be the three quarterbacks the Chargers take into the regular season.

But Saunders has stopped short of anointing Vlasic as the Chargers’ quarterback of the future in his public pronouncements.

“He throws the ball well because he has such a strong arm,” Saunders says. “But he’s fairly inconsistent. And he’s got to learn the offense the way it’s got to be learned.”

The same goes for Malone, who grew up in El Cajon and suffered in Pittsburgh because he was the guy who had to try to replace Terry Bradshaw. Bradshaw was the guy who won four Super Bowls in four tries and still was booed in Pittsburgh when he didn’t meet the demanding standards of the paying customers there.

Vlasic knows all about that. He grew up in Monaca, Pa., just a hoot and holler down the road from all the other Western Pennsylvania towns that produced quarterbacks such as Joe Namath, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Jim Kelly, Johnny Unitas and George Blanda.

“The fans in Pittsburgh aren’t gonna leave the stadium when you’re not winning,” Vlasic said. “They’re gonna show up, and they’re gonna give you a hard time.”

Vlasic considered staying in Pennsylvania when Penn State showed an interest. But the Nittany Lions were red-shirting Todd Blackledge at the time. So he went to Iowa, only to be disappointed when Long wound up sticking around for five years.

Now he wonders how long he will have to sit in San Diego. He wonders if one or two more years of waiting will be good or bad. He doesn’t want to wait too long and become another Herrmann in the Chargers’ eyes. But he doesn’t want to become a starter too soon on a team with a questionable offensive line, in a rebuilding situation.

“I can tell you today that I’m willing to wait as long as it takes to play,” Vlasic says. “But at the same time I’d probably be hypocritical saying that, because earlier I said I wanted to be on the field playing.

“I thought Mark Herrmann got a bad rap as being a good backup but not a starter. The more playing time, the better you get. Usually the nice guys are the ones who end up getting hurt.”

And Mark Vlasic is a nice guy.

Already he has something to work with that Herrmann or Fouts never did. And that’s world-class speed on the flanks. When the Chargers drafted sprinters Anthony Miller and Quinn Early, Vlasic’s former teammate at Iowa, someone suggested he must have felt the way a car buff feels waking up on Christmas morning and finding a Porsche and a Ferrari in the driveway.

“Exactly,” Vlasic said.

The draft helped make up for the hectic period last winter when the Chargers were so busy looking for a replacement for Fouts on the trade market and preparing for the draft that they didn’t have as much time to teach new offensive coordinator Jerry Rhome’s tenets as certain players would have liked. Vlasic was one of those players.

But since the beginning of May, the quarterbacks have been eating, sleeping and breathing Rhome’s offense. A typical day begins at 8:30 a.m. with a written quiz from Rhome on the previous day’s lesson, followed by film study, followed by a mid-morning workout, followed by weightlifting, lunch and another meeting.

Rhome’s offense will call for the quarterbacks to pass from a variety of positions. The idea is this: If the defense knows that the quarterback throws only from the pocket, then it knows exactly where it must go to sack that quarterback. In Rhome’s scheme, there is less pressure on the offensive linemen.

And, says Vlasic, “we are being encouraged to scramble. We’re being told if things break down downfield, we can make things happen. I think overall it will help our whole game. You will now have defensive linemen worried about the quarterback getting outside of contain.”

Which is one thing defensive linemen didn’t have to worry about during the Fouts era.

In the end, it will boil down to how much confidence Saunders and Rhome have in Vlasic. And how soon. Vlasic doesn’t blame them for seeking a starter through a trade.

“The situation the Chargers were looking at,” Vlasic says, “was this: Mark Vlasic sat four years at Iowa, played one, got hurt, missed a few games and sat on the bench one season in the NFL. Is he ready to play in the NFL? It may turn out that he isn’t ready to play. He may get lost in the shuffle.”

Vlasic’s answer: “I feel like I’m gonna be up in there competing for it, and I’m gonna make the best of it. I’m an opportunistic person.”