A THROWBACK : Tollner Returns to Southern California as Charger Quarterback Coach
The first thing you will notice about Ted Tollner, if you speak with him in person, is that he will be looking right back at you. He will be friendly but focused. Responsive but riveted.
The next thing you will notice about him is a face and an enthusiasm you sense you’ve seen or heard somewhere before.
It does Tollner a disservice, but the names of Dick Vitale, college basketball commentator, and Jim Lange, the former host of TV’s Dating Game, come to mind.
But Tollner does not string non sequiturs or self-promote in the bold-faced manner of Vitale. And though he resembles Lange, he does not see the world through rose-colored glasses the smiling way the game-show host used to.
Tollner is straight-up-and-down serious about his new job as the San Diego Chargers’ assistant head coach/quarterbacks.
The incumbent starter he inherits is Mark Malone, whose passing statistics have been the worst in the American Football Conference each of the past two years. The hope for the future is a promising but untested quarterback, Mark Vlasic, who injured a knee in Atlanta late last season. The Chargers’ fallback quarterback is much-traveled Babe Laufenberg, whom Tollner once recruited when Laufenberg was a senior at Encino’s Crespi High. Tollner was then an assistant at San Diego State.
Can the Chargers, 6-10 in 1988, win with the quarterbacks presently on their roster?
“My answer has to be ‘Yes,’ ” Tollner said. “And I’m going to base it on this: The Chargers won six last year, and Seattle (winners of the dreadful AFC West) won nine. If you take three games and say: ‘Can we take what’s here and get more consistent with the improvement that’s going to come from the natural maturity of some people and the continuation of this offensive scheme?’ . . . If I look at the overall thing and say ‘Can we be some percentage points better at the consistency of the quarterback position?’ My answer is, ‘Yes,’ because we’re talking about a line of six to nine games.”
Tollner, a former college quarterback at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, knows the disproportionate importance of the position he now coaches. He also knows the Chargers’ quarterback outlook could (and should) change, either through draft or trade, before the 1989 season begins. But more important, he knows that’s the business of Coach Dan Henning and Steve Ortmayer, the team’s director of football operations.
So he will look you in the eye and say: “For us to do what we want to do offensively, the quarterback position is the obvious key. We have talked about it. But I don’t think it would be proper for me as an assistant to get into that. It should come from Steve or Dan.”
This is the same Ted Tollner who ran the football program at USC for four stormy years. Despite taking over a team already on probation for ticket scandal violations dating back to Marv Goux, a John Robinson assistant, his record at USC was 26-20-1. It wasn’t good enough. In eight games against arch-rivals UCLA and Notre Dame, Tollner’s Trojans were 1-7. On Dec. 8, 1986, Tollner became only the third USC head coach to be fired since the school began football in 1888.
Tollner spent the past two years in Buffalo supervising the wide receivers and waiting patiently for more responsibility. When the Bills replaced offensive coordinator Jim Ringo with Ted Marchibroda last month, nobody blamed Tollner for interpreting this as the right reason to listen to Dan Henning’s sales pitch when the Chargers named Henning their head coach.
Henning and Tollner had never worked together, so Henning’s interest was a rarity in the relatively closed circles of National Football League coaching. But mutual acquaintances--mainly Washington Redskins General Manager Bobby Beathard and former Charger assistant Ernie Zampese--promoted a meeting between the two. It lasted five hours.
“The more we talked, the more I got excited about the situation,” Tollner said. “Hopefully that’s a two-way street.”
Said Laufenberg: “Dan Henning knows the passing game, and Ted Tollner knows the passing game. Plus, both have been head coaches. Effectively, we now have two quarterback coaches. On a lot of staffs, you’re lucky if you have one that really knows the position.”
At USC, Tollner was largely responsible for developing Trojan quarterback Rodney Peete before the arrival of Tollner’s successor, Larry Smith. Peete was a Heisman Trophy candidate much of last season. And it’s not inconceivable Peete could wind up with the Chargers, although at the moment it’s a stretch to imagine the Chargers reaching for Peete with the eighth pick of the first round.
“Rodney offers many, many things, and I think he can play in this league,” Tollner said. “First of all, he has the intellect that it takes to play in a sophisticated scheme. He has an excellent release, touch and accuracy on the ball.
“His bonus qualities of quick feet and scrambling are in the top echelon, and he has enough arm. He wouldn’t be in that great arm category by any means. But there are people who have less velocity playing winning football in this league.”
The natural assumption in any discussion about Peete and the Chargers is that Peete, because of his history with Tollner, would have less to learn about the complexities that normally hold back rookie quarterbacks. Tollner warns against that thinking.
“The design and the terminology here are going to be different than what we had at USC,” he said. “So he is going to have to learn, I would think, a totally new system.”
If he becomes a Charger, that is.
Peete was quick to stick up for Tollner when USC fired him. “I would have bet anything he would have been back next year,” Peete, the son of a football coach, said at the time. “He has done a lot for me, not just on the field but off the field, too. And I’ve learned a whole lot from him. I want to thank him for giving me all those opportunities.”
It was clear from the beginning of the 1986 season that Tollner’s Trojans would have to show the kind of progress in the win-loss category that would make it impossible for Athletic Director Mike McGee to dismiss him. McGee and university president James Zumberge decided 7-4 wasn’t the kind of progress they were looking for.
But probation that kept the Trojans from bowl games in 1982 and 1983 and off television in 1983 and 1985 were too much to overcome.
Still, Tollner retained his dignity throughout his last season and refused to burn bridges when it was too late to get back to the right side. “This year, he’s written the book on handling pressure,” Peete said of 1986.
But 10 times in Tollner’s four years, the Trojans lost by 20 or more points. Only one of his teams finished in the top 20 in the final wire-service polls.
John Robinson, Tollner’s predecessor, was a combined 11-3 against UCLA and Notre Dame and lost only two games by 20 points or more in seven years at USC.
Smith is 18-6 in two years at USC, including a combined 2-2 vs UCLA and Notre Dame. He is 0-2 in Rose Bowls.
Tollner’s only public complaint upon his departure from USC was his insistence that USC broke his contract, which had two years remaining. It took about a year, but Tollner’s attorney and USC officials finally reached a settlement. “Part of the settlement was for me not to disclose what the settlement was,” Tollner said. “But it got squared away in a very, very positive light. It was very favorable.”
By way of comparison, when Trojan basketball Coach Stan Morrison left in 1986, it took 2 1/2 years to reach agreement on the remainder of his contract.
Still, it took Tollner awhile to put the USC experience behind him. “I try to remember the best parts,” he said. “All coaching jobs have their highs and lows, and my reflections on it, especially now that two years have gone by, are much more positive about the situation and the way it was--coming in with the probation and leaving and having a moderate amount of success while we were there . . . winning a Rose Bowl . . . and having a winning record and going to two other bowl games--we were moderately successful. Under the conditions, maybe we were more than that. But that’s speculation.
“I think we left it (the program) healthy. The first year (after the firing) I think there was hurt. The firing process stings a little more. But as soon as you get on with your life and get coaching again, the sting disappears and you reflect back on the whole thing. At this point, I reflect upon it much more positively.”
Was the firing fair?
“I guess you have to say yes,” Tollner said. “There was a difference of opinion on how the program should be run, I guess, between Mike (McGee) and I. And that’s fair. He’s the athletic director.
“In my mind we were headed in the right direction. In his mind we weren’t. He’s in that chair. I think if there’s a difference of opinion on where you’re going, there should be a change made. You’ve got to be on the same page. From my perspective as a football coach, I believed in what we were doing, and that will never change.”
Tollner has been through lots worse than getting fired. He was one of 26 survivors of the Cal Poly plane crash on Oct. 29, 1960, in Toledo, Ohio, that killed 22 people, including 16 of his teammates. Tollner suffered a fractured and dislocated left ankle but returned to play quarterback for the team in 1961.
And now he has jumped from a team that advanced to the AFC championship game last January to a team with an impatient owner, an untested general manager and a new coach who lost almost twice as many games as he won in his only previous experience running an NFL team.
But those are not the only considerations. All three of his children live in Southern California as do his three grandchildren. Plus, he is already familiar with San Diego.
“I know from when I was coaching at San Diego State the kind of excitement that can be generated in this community if you can win,” Tollner said. “Whether we can get it back to that point or not, that’s the challenge. I just keep blinking my eyes to make sure it’s true that I’m back here.”
For better or worse, it’s true.