QB OF THE ‘90s : Randall Cunningham Looks Like Best of Present and Future

The quarterback of the ‘90s should be about 6-foot-4, 200 pounds, like Randall Cunningham.

He should be able to throw more than 3,000 yards, like Cunningham.

He should be a scrambler, too, someone who runs out of trouble, like Cunningham.

And if he happens to be black, like Cunningham, it won’t matter.

Football is becoming color blind about its quarterbacks, because of people like Philadelphia’s Randall Cunningham.

It wasn’t always that way.

When Southern Cal came calling for Cunningham, fresh out of high school in Santa Barbara, Calif., it was not to play quarterback.

“I don’t know if it was the black quarterback issue, but they wanted him as a defensive back,” said brother Sam, who starred for USC for three years. “My feeling was, ‘All you’ve ever played was quarterback. Go where they’ll let you do that.’ ”

So Randall settled on Nevada-Las Vegas. He was already in place, a little built-in bonus, when Harvey Hyde arrived to coach the Runnin’ Rebels in 1982.

“He played three JV games his freshman year,” Hyde said. “Imagine if he’d only played two, I’d have had him an extra year. I got there a year too late.”

Cunningham quickly won the varsity job and set a fistful of passing records during the next three seasons. He was taller, quicker and better than anyone else. That was what counted. “He was such a tremendous athlete,” Hyde said, “as great an athlete as I’ve ever been associated with.

“You should have seen him punt. We lost a game to Utah on poor punting and dropped snaps. Randall came to me and said, ‘I keep telling you I can punt but you don’t listen. Give me 10 punts. If I can’t do better, I won’t bother you again.’

“The next week, we played Colorado State. His first punt took off. The thing was launched like a satellite. The coaches in the press box were screaming in my headset, ‘Holy Cow! It’s above us!’ It drove the receiver to his knees. That’s the kind of velocity it had.”

Cunningham holds all of UNLV’s punting records and last season for Philadelphia he averaged 55.7 yards for three kicks, including a 58-yarder. In training camp, he kicked a 48-yard field goal.

“He was just foolin’ around,” coach Buddy Ryan said. “He can outpunt and outkick anybody. He can do anything he wants. Except play basketball.”

In 1984, Cunningham directed UNLV to a 10-2 season and the coach and quarterback went to the Japan Bowl. This would be Cunningham’s last showcase before the draft, an important moment for a player with NFL ambitions.

“He threw an interception on an out-route to the wide side of the field,” Hyde said. “Now, that’s almost always an automatic TD, but Randall ran the guy down on the 3-yard line. When he came off the field he was mad. He said, ‘That was a bad mistake. I should never have thrown that pass to the wide side.’

“I said to him, ‘What you shouldn’t have done was run the guy down. Now they’re gonna draft you as a defensive back.’ ”

Cunningham recalls the conversation a little differently:

“That’s just a joke he tells. What he really said was, ‘Now that guy’s not gonna get drafted after he let a quarterback run him down.’ ”

The week before the Japan Bowl, Cunningham played in the East-West Shrine Game and demonstrated another side of his game. Everyone knew he could throw TD passes after he set a school record with 61 in three varsity seasons, but this time he caught one.

“Vance Johnson, who’s with Denver, threw it,” Cunningham said. “We were on the 10-yard line and it was a throw back. I hated it. I got to the end zone and then I had to sit there, waiting for the ball, thinking, ‘Are you gonna drop it?’ ”

He didn’t.

So, he could throw and he could catch. What people still didn’t know was that he could run, too.

“I didn’t run as much in college because we had a short passing scheme,” he said. “I always knew I could, though.”

Cunningham came back from Japan and waited for the 1985 draft. There was one drawback: He was black.

“We talked about the racial factor,” Hyde said. “I told him, ‘I’ll tell everyone what I think and how good I believe you are. But that won’t guarantee where you’ll be taken.’ ”

The first round came and went and teams turned mostly to players who ended up as marginal pros: defensive lineman Kevin Brooks (Dallas), running back Ethan Horton (Kansas City), linebacker Alvin Toles (New Orleans). Cunningham wasn’t among them.

“When they called me, I told them, ‘Draft him or he’ll beat you,’ ” Hyde recalled.

The Eagles finally did, in the second round, after saving their first-round pick for tackle Kevin Allen, a washout who wound up in jail. Cunningham was the 37th player taken, but the first quarterback, and he was placed on the Eagle depth chart behind incumbent Ron Jaworski. Just as important, Allen would start on the line charged with protecting Jaworski.

The Eagle offensive pattern that season was Jaworski running for his life on first and second downs and Cunningham coming in on third down as a reliever.

“That was how he got his chance,” Hyde said. “Jaworski was going to get killed. They couldn’t block. Randall could avoid the sack. Putting a rookie in on third down meant somebody believed in him. What a way to learn.”

In 1986, Buddy Ryan arrived and brought with him Doug Scovil, a highly respected quarterback coach credited with developing, among others, Jim McMahon, Roger Staubach and John Brodie. It was Scovil who adjusted Cunningham’s delivery and orchestrated his rise from a third-down specialist in the first half of the season to starter in five of the last six games that year.

The Eagles had taken the bold step. They were starting a black at quarterback.

Cunningham says it was Doug Williams’ 1988 Super Bowl show for the Redskins that buried all the position’s stereotypes.

“He was the trailblazer for black quarterbacks,” Cunningham said. “If he hadn’t come before me, I probably wouldn’t be playing this position.

“Now things are changing and they’re allowing you the opportunity to go out and play regardless of what color you are. It says you can do what you want to do in life.”

Right now, Cunningham is the centerpiece of the Philadelphia attack; he calls the plays and he executes them.

Ryan, who is not easily impressed, turned play-calling over to his talented pupil during the preseason, deciding that after four years in the NFL, Cunningham was ready for the added responsibility.

“I believe in Randall,” Ryan said, “just like I did when I first came here and everybody said I ought to make a wideout out of him, or a halfback.”

Said Cunningham: “Now I’ll have a better opportunity to do more things. It gives me more control of the whole offense, the running game as well as the passing game.”

Some folks will say that Cunningham has been the whole Eagle offense for some time now. Philadelphia scored 42 touchdowns on offense last season and Cunningham had a role -- either running or passing -- in 30 of them. He rushed for 624 yards and threw for 3,808, accounting for 81.6 percent of the Eagles’ net yards.

He was MVP in the Pro Bowl last January after leading NFL quarterbacks in rushing for the third straight season. He was also the Eagles’ leading rusher for the second year in a row, the first quarterback to do that since Tobin Rote in 1951-52.

That was after Cunningham staged a one-practice holdout and won a three-year, $4 million deal. With endorsements, he’s good for better than $2 million alone this season.

Success has its perks. Cunningham is becoming a marketing star, perhaps not on a level with Michael Jordan and Bo “Diddly” Jackson, but a hot property nonetheless. He does radio and television shows; his face is printed on posters and T-shirts. For travel, he can choose among a Mercedes, Porsche and Lincoln.

Not bad for a second-round draft pick, but not really surprising either.

Growing up in Santa Barbara, Calif., Samuel and Mabel Cunningham’s four sons -- Sam, Anthony, Bruce and Randall -- worried about one thing: having enough daylight to play football.

Most of the time they’d head for La Playa field, home to Santa Barbara City College’s teams and across the street from the beach. “You think it got foggy in that playoff game at Chicago last season?” Sam Cunningham asked. “You should have seen what it was like when the fog rolled in at La Playa.”

Sam, 40, is the eldest. Anthony, five years younger, was a linebacker at Boise State. No. 3 son, Bruce, played defensive back at UNLV.

And then there was Randall.

“He was uncoordinated and gangly as a teen-ager,” Sam said.

And he had all these high falutin’ ideas about being a quarterback.

“It was all he ever played,” Sam said. “We worked out together when he was real young. He wasn’t into doing what I had to do, but I could see he had a good arm.”

In those days, Sam Cunningham was a bulldozing power runner for the Patriots -- they called him “Bam” -- and later became the team’s all-time rushing leader. That made a substantial impact on his youngest brother.

“Having an older brother who was playing in the NFL made you feel emotionally that you can accomplish anything in life, regardless of what it is,” Randall said.

For him, it was being a quarterback, and not a traditional one.

Sam remains a little bemused by Randall.

“When I played in the early ‘70s, most quarterbacks were strictly passers and the offenses were not as open,” he said. “Randall is versatile. In him, I see some things I’d like to do. I watch him with those power runs and going out there making tackles and I tell him, ‘Lay off that power stuff. That’s not what you’re paid to do.’ ”

Then he thought for a moment and said:

“Maybe in the 90s that’s what they’ll be paid to do.”