Barring Trades, Signs Point Oliver to Chargers
The perfect draft for the Chargers would have been UCLA quarterback Troy Aikman. But they ruined that scenario by winning four of their final six games last season. Their 6-10 record earned them the eighth pick in today’s first round of the 54th annual NFL draft.
Dallas wound up with the worst record in the league and the rights to Aikman. The Cowboys signed him Thursday to a six-year contract for $11.2 million. Green Bay will almost certainly use the second pick to choose Michigan State tackle Tony Mandarich.
After that, the fun will begin.
“The perfect draft for the Chargers would be Tony Mandarich,” said Steve Ortmayer, the Chargers director of football operations, between meetings Saturday afternoon.
Translation: Aikman signed. And as of late Saturday, Mandarich hadn’t.
But the best the Chargers can realistically hope for now is a deal that would move them up to the No. 3 spot in the first round. They would use that selection to grab Florida State cornerback Deion Sanders.
And that sound you would hear in the Chargers’ draft room would be the corks popping off the champagne bottles. Sanders alone is reason enough to christen anybody’s secondary.
But Detroit, which owns the third pick, apparently has backed itself into a public relations corner by selling Oklahoma State running back Barry Sanders to its fans, billing him as the next Billy Sims.
And Kansas City, choosing fourth, will surprise everybody if it doesn’t go for Derrick Thomas, a cruiserweight linebacker from Alabama.
Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Pittsburgh--the three teams that follow Kansas City and precede the Chargers in the first round--finished 25th, 12th and 21st in NFL pass defense last year. Deion Sanders would be as valuable to any of those teams as he would be to the Chargers, who finished 26th in pass defense.
So the likelihood of them collectively passing on Sanders is nil. The likelihood of the Chargers trading up with Atlanta, Tampa Bay or Pittsburgh to get Deion Sanders is only an outside possibility.
After Aikman and Mandarich, Deion Sanders would have been the perfect draft for the Chargers. Detroit really needs Deion Sanders more than anybody. The Lions allowed more passing yards last year than any other team. But Deion Sanders says he doesn’t want to play in Detroit.
Meanwhile, don’t despair for the Chargers. If they sit tight at No. 8, they will get a defensive player who will help immediately. And if they trade down, they may get a quarterback--USC’s Rodney Peete perhaps--who is good enough to start for them immediately. Or they could get Burt Grossman, a highly regarded defensive lineman from Pitt.
“Maybe 50-50,” Ortmayer said when asked about the chances of trading down in the first round. “In order to get us to move down from the eighth pick, it would take something (players already in the league) that we could plug into our team now or selections that we have projected would be players that we could plug into our team. In others words it would take immediate help.”
And if they don’t trade down?
The Chargers, a team that didn’t get a sack from a starting linebacker until the 10th game of 1988, have hoped all along that Nebraska linebacker Broderick Thomas, a fierce pass-rusher, might slip to the eighth spot. They will probably take him if he does. If not, that leaves Florida free safety Louis Oliver and LSU linebacker Eric Hill as the likely choices at No. 8.
And this is where Dwight Adams, a florid-faced ex-Marine with a barrel chest, enters the picture. Adams is the Chargers’ scout in the Southeastern Conference. He served in Korea. He once coached high school football in Smackover, Ark. He has fingers that look like smoked sausages, knuckles that resemble pine knots and a voice that’s a cross between Wilford Brimley and Slim Pickens.
Eric Hill is 6-1, 252 pounds with above average speed and quickness. “He’s a man,” Adams says. “He’s a damn man.”
Adams on Oliver: “Now then, he is measured and weighed as a verified six feet, two and two-eighths inches and 225 pounds. He looks like Tarzan.
“Gentlemen, this guy has got it all, starting right here (tapping his head). He’s got the gray matter.
“He has intelligence, he’s got instincts, he’s got change of direction, he has toughness and he has his degree. He’s an unusual cat. He’s a good, solid, high character, goal-oriented person. Plus he’s got every athletic attribute.
“This guy would come in here, and you wouldn’t believe it. I’m talking about arms and a chest on him--a high-cut guy with good definition up and down--a clean-faced, clean-shaven guy. He’d come in, and you’d love him.”
Adams isn’t the only critic in Oliver’s corner. Baltimore draft expert Mel Kiper Jr. rates Oliver the sixth-best player available. Oliver went to Florida on an academic scholarship. Brown University of the Ivy League recruited him out of high school.
Oliver is unpretentious (his answering machine greets callers with an airy “Yo, this is Lou.”). And his agent says he has gained 10 pounds since the combine workouts in January. Which means the Chargers could plug him in at free safety, strong safety or outside linebacker.
“Speed on the defensive perimeter,” was Charger Coach Dan Henning’s answer at the recent NFL owners’ meetings when asked to identify his team’s primary need. Louis Oliver has run a 4.37-second 40-yard dash. Oliver is speed on the perimeter.
And for the Chargers, Louis Oliver is the realistic perfect draft.
They can improve upon that perfection if they can pinpoint which team wants Peete badly enough to take him on the first round. Here’s how that works:
Let’s say, for example, the Chargers determine that Phoenix will take Peete with the 17th pick of the first round. As soon as they select Oliver, the Chargers get on the phone with New England, the team that picks 16th. They start making offers to the Patriots. Maybe a second-rounder and a player. Maybe a second- and third-rounder and a player. But if they give up their 1990 No. 1 to New England for the Peete pick, that is too much.
Let’s say they lose their second (37th overall) and third (64th overall) and a player to the Patriots for Peete. That would leave them with one pick in each of the remaining rounds except the sixth (which they lost in the 1987 Barry Redden trade) and the seventh (where they have three choices from trades that sent Thomas Benson to New England and Wes Chandler to San Francisco).
Another player the Chargers might trade down for is Clemson cornerback Donnell Woolford. But they had better do it before Chicago Bears, who own the 11th and 12th picks, get a shot at him.
If the Chargers keep their second-round pick, they will jump for joy if North Carolina Central cornerback Robert Massey is still available. Massey looked good in postseason all-star play. But he is raw. So is his agent, a 22-year-old college student named Drew Rosenhaus who wears an earring in his left ear.
Ortmayer has said he wants five or six players from this draft to make the Chargers’ regular season roster. That will be difficult. There are probably only 100 players in the draft good enough to play regularly next year.
The perfect draft, like the perfect wave, is an elusive goal. But if you’re a surfer, you know almost immediately when you’ve discovered the perfect wave. If you’re a general manager or a head coach, you don’t really know how you did in the draft until the next season, at the earliest. So many late-round selections arrive as development projects that it sometimes takes years to fully assess a draft.
Charger Notes
Steve Ortmayer, the Chargers’ director of football operations, said Saturday that talks between Atlanta, Washington and the Chargers are continuing. Ortmayer wouldn’t discusss specifics. But published reports on the proposed deal have Falcon running back Gerald Riggs going to the Chargers in exchange for their first-round pick. The Chargers would then ship Riggs to Washington for one of two backup quarterbacks--Stan Humphries or Mark Rypien--and a reserve offensive lineman and a second-round pick in this draft.