Pro Football / Bob Oates : Raider Rally in Denver Was a Smash Beginning

The Raiders in recent years have been gathering together some of the most dynamic offensive players in football.

From Notre Dame they brought in Tim Brown, whose touchdown on a 76-yard punt return Monday night would have won the game early in overtime, had it not been nullified by a penalty.

From Green Bay came James Lofton. From Canada, Mervyn Fernandez. From the Chicago Bears, Willie Gault. From baseball, Bo Jackson, who will rejoin the team next month. And among others, from USC, Marcus Allen.

But astonishingly, with what some season-ticket holders have called criminal negligence, the Raiders have played for years without a competent quarterback.

If they’ve found one this month in Jay Schroeder, whose second-half rally was too much for the Denver Broncos, 30-27, are they about to return to the top of the National Football League?

Not likely. Not immediately.

“We may have more (offensive) weapons now than we’ve ever had,” Raider owner Al Davis said. “But first we’ve got to team them up with (Schroeder). And that will take time. The timing (process) on a football team is tricky (and) time-consuming.”

It appeared Monday night, moreover, that Schroeder has only fixed one of several Raider disorders. Their secondary, which had been the strength of the defensive team, has been wiped out by injuries. Their front seven has deteriorated alarmingly since 1985 as a force against running plays. And on the other side of the ball, their offensive line is at least as erratic as last year’s.

Their comeback win in the Rockies this week was the smash beginning of a new era, no doubt, but no more than a beginning.

What does a big, active quarterback do for the Raiders that their talented but less mobile rookie, Steve Beuerlein, couldn’t?

This was most clearly shown in the third quarter Monday night after Schroeder had taken the first half off, as he often had in Washington. To preserve their sanity, Raider fans will have to get used to that. Schroeder, as was Jim Plunkett, is a streak player.

But suddenly in the third quarter, Schroeder was swiftly rolling out, far away from the Bronco rush, and throwing touchdown passes on the run. Nicely timed touch passes. The kind that his Eastern critics last year said he couldn’t throw.

He rolled both right and left with equal success to reach fullback Steve Smith swinging out of the backfield on 40- and 42-yard touchdown patterns.

These plays, which shortened the Denver lead from 24-0 to 24-14, illustrated the style of the Raiders’ new coach, Mike Shanahan. Both times, on first or second and long, the Broncos were in a double-double defense--using both safeties and both cornerbacks to double on Raider wide receivers.

The conventional NFL reply to this defense is a pass down the middle to the tight end, but Denver’s defensive coach, Joe Collier, had taken that away, too, as Shanahan, a former Bronco assistant, was sure he would.

So Shanahan jammed the middle with decoys--wide receivers, tight end Todd Christensen and halfback Allen--and swung around them with Smith carrying Schroeder’s passes.

One of the league’s faster fullbacks, Smith, a second-year Raider from Penn State, was in the end zone before the Broncos could react to him.

The Southland is suddenly full of colorful football teams with exceptional quarterbacks.

Undefeated USC operates with a different kind of mobile leader, Rodney Peete. UCLA may be unbeatable with classic drop-back passer Troy Aikman. The undefeated Rams got 5 touchdown passes Sunday from their drop-back marksman, Jim Everett. And in his first Raider start, Schroeder averaged 6 yards running and 7 passing.

All four teams have already won big games with striking performances this year, UCLA over Nebraska, USC over Oklahoma, the Rams in the East over the New York Giants, and the Raiders in the noise of Mile High Stadium.

Conceivably, the most impressive of these achievements was the Rams’ conquest of the Giants, the favorite this year to win the NFC East title, in a 45-31 shootout at the Meadowlands.

It’s hard to think of a more impressive Ram performance on the road, going all the way back to the 1960s.

When Coach John Robinson rebuilt this team into a playoff contender in 1983-86, the thing that distinguished it was excellence in almost every respect--special-teams play, defense, blocking, rushing, receiving. And that is still true.

Since 1983, no NFL team has been more solid than Robinson’s teams in the full range of critical football areas--save one, passing. With the emergence of Everett as an NFL passer Sunday, the Rams now seem to be the better rounded of the Los Angeles pro clubs.

The undefeated Cincinnati Bengals (4-0) will be at the Coliseum for Sunday’s Raider game with the league’s most uninhibited quarterback, Boomer Esiason, who, fended off a reporter’s question the other day by asking him: “Why don’t you go get a real job?”

Esiason said it with a smile.

Still smiling, he added, in a visit with Ohio reporters, that he and Cincinnati Coach Sam Wyche are both head cases.

“You could say Sam used to, and sometimes still does, go off the (reservation) a bit,” the Bengal quarterback said. “(But) I’m more nuts myself (than Wyche).”

As led by Wyche and Esiason, the 4-0 Bengals have already won as many games as they won all of last season, when, with one of the NFL’s most talented clubs, they got none of the breaks that have been coming their way each week this year.

“I like gambling, taking chances,” Wyche said of his unusual aggressive style, which for a while last season backfired almost every Sunday. “Fans are having fun, and players have fun. Why can’t coaches, too?”

In another display of nonsensical scheduling, the NFL has the Rams and the Raiders both playing at home Sunday. The Phoenix Cardinals (2-2) will be at Anaheim.

After 4 weeks, the Rams and the San Francisco 49ers are the NFL’s two highest-scoring teams. Their showdown at Anaheim Oct. 16 will match two of the NFL’s top three powers. The leader right now is probably Minnesota, which plays at San Francisco Oct. 30. The Rams, in the 1988 scheduling, have somehow escaped the Vikings.

Commissioner Pete Rozelle, in Denver for the Monday night game, said that the league’s instant-replay machinery has been in tune, on balance, during the first month.

“If they only act when they have conclusive evidence that a call should be overturned, they’re doing it right,” Rozelle said.

Buffalo Coach Marv Levy isn’t so sure about that. “The ‘instant delay’ is a detriment to the game,” Levy said after Jim Kelly’s first touchdown pass of the season, fielded Sunday by Bill receiver Chris Burkett, had been ruled incomplete by the press box official.

Still, the replays were conclusive. Levy was wrong. Burkett was out of bounds.

“I think they’ll keep instant replay next year,” Rozelle said.

Quote Dept.:

--LeRoy Irvin, Ram cornerback, making a distinction between NFL cities: “Last week we took L.A. This week we took the Big Apple. Now it’s time to defend (Anaheim).”

--Jerry Burns, Minnesota coach, after the Vikings had beaten hard-luck Philadelphia in the last minute with a 10-yard pass on fourth and 5: “There’s a lot of ways to win and lose. Yeah, maybe I do feel a little blessed to have won this one.”

--Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham, after he was sacked 8 times, 4 times by Minnesota lineman Keith Millard: “I saw (Millard) a lot. We are good friends now. I shook hands with him about nine times.”