Pro Football / Bob Oates : Mandarich Is Key to Signing Top Rookies

The six or seven most famous players in college football last season might also have been the most gifted, as a group, to qualify for pro football in any one year since 1983, when Eric Dickerson, Dan Marino, John Elway and other star performers came up.

But with only a couple of weeks remaining before another regular season begins, only two of them have yet signed into the National Football League--the two quarterbacks, Troy Aikman of UCLA with the Dallas Cowboys and Rodney Peete of USC with the Detroit Lions.

The others are still on the roster of holdouts--tackle Tony Mandarich, cornerback Deion Sanders, the Heisman Trophy-winning ballcarrier, Barry Sanders, and prize linebackers Derrick and Broderick Thomas.

There seems to be a three-fold problem:

--The new Cowboy owner, Jerry Jones, started it last spring when he shook up the other owners, as well as the agents who represent other NFL players, by handing Aikman $11 million for six years. That’s several million more than he’s worth, many said.

--Mandarich promptly asked the Green Bay Packers for the same package, noting that most scouts had ranked him at least even with Aikman as an NFL prospect. He has since come down to $1.5 million a year, which the Packers, to nobody’s surprise, say is out of the question for an offensive lineman.

--Meanwhile, the unrelated Sanderses and the unrelated Thomases are stacked up behind Mandarich. Before making a move, they want to know what he gets. In all, there are still nine unsigned first rounders--each drafted in the first half of the round--and they’re all saying, in effect, that for the year’s top prospects, nobody knows what the salary scale is.

Deion Sanders, for example, isn’t reciting his qualifications to the Atlanta Falcons, who made him the fifth choice in the draft. He is simply waiting to see what the Kansas City Chiefs pay fourth choice Derrick Thomas, who is waiting to see what the Lions pay third choice Barry Sanders, who is waiting to see what the Packers pay second choice Mandarich.

Everything depends on Mandarich. And Mandarich is still leaning heavily on first choice Aikman.

On the college level, quarterbacks aren’t being produced these days in anything close to the numbers required in pro football.

Leigh Steinberg, Aikman’s agent, handed that line to the Cowboys after the draft several months ago, when he also convinced them that the tall Bruin passer is the only new franchise-type quarterback in sight.

So the Cowboys committed $11 million to install Aikman as the fourth-highest paid player in the NFL before he ever played a down. And this bent the league’s informal salary scale far out of joint.

“I still think it was an excellent deal for both sides,” Steinberg said this week. “On top of everything else, Troy is a box-office quarterback. He fills empty seats.”

What Steinberg means is that offensive linemen like Mandarich and defensive backs like Deion Sanders, as good as they may be, don’t fill empty seats.

Disclaiming responsibility for the logjam of holdouts this year, Steinberg said: “It isn’t clear to me that signing a top-drafted franchise quarterback is relevant to (Mandarich) or the others.”

To them, however, it’s both clear and relevant.

Some college players these days are apparently reasoning that there is more than one way to get a hefty entry-level NFL salary.

They think the pros are interested in two types:

--One is cool, controlled and capable. That’s Aikman.

--A second type is crazy and corrosive. That’s Mandarich, or Deion Sanders, or Brian Bosworth.

Some of the things that Deion says and does are outlandish, and Mandarich is even wilder. It’s been called the Boz syndrome.

Bosworth is the linebacker who in 1988 talked his way into a multimillion-dollar contract with the Seattle Seahawks, and who still has a lot to say--about himself, and everything else.

The game Boz plays, however, isn’t quite as good as the game he talks.

Among some NFL coaches and scouts, there are the same doubts about Mandarich and Deion.

The 30,000 crowds for the Raiders this month have convinced some people that for exhibition games, the bloom is finally off pro football. And it may be.

But you couldn’t prove it by the crowds at other NFL exhibitions Saturday night, when the Raiders played to 40,000 vacant seats.

There were 60,167 spectators for San Diego-Chicago, 56,712 for Houston-Miami, 48,512 for New Orleans-Buffalo, 71,939 for Pittsburgh-Cleveland, 43,416 for Cincinnati-Detroit, 48,745 for Seattle-New England and 54,807 for Denver-San Francisco.

At two other exhibitions that night, the real question was why 28,230 and 30,218 would even bother to turn out for, respectively, Atlanta-Tampa Bay and Indianpolis-Green Bay.

The Bays and the Raiders haven’t won much lately. In fact, it’s been four years since the Raiders last had a winning season. They were 7-9 last year, 5-10 the year before, and 8-8 the year before that.

In the seasons when the Raiders were repeatedly selling out a much smaller stadium in Oakland, they were a winner.

And against Houston Saturday night, they’ll sell it out again, but this time for three other reasons: They’re a sentimental attraction up there now, they’ll be a novelty attraction to some, and they’ll attract others who, remembering the Raiders as a winner, want to prove that Al Davis still belongs there.

Los Angeles is a different kind of place. For a loser in Los Angeles, as the Raiders have discovered, an exhibition game is a tough sell.

Steve Walsh, the rookie from Miami who is fighting Aikman for the Dallas Cowboys’ starting job, showed somewhat more style as a passer in his second appearance of the season Saturday night, when he faced the Raiders in the first half.

Although Walsh isn’t a picture passer, he’s trying.

Aikman, however, as the Cowboys’ second-half quarterback Saturday, still didn’t throw the ball downfield.

In both Dallas games this month, Walsh has attempted middle-distance and longer-range passes. But Aikman hasn’t.

The game plans were apparently the same for both passers. Pro coaches don’t bother with different game plans for different quarterbacks--not in the exhibition season, not when they’re dealing with rookies.

Thus, a strange case continues.

Are long passes necessary? Not in college. But in pro ball, good defensive teams are happiest when their opponents can’t or won’t go long.