Lions Pick Chaos Over Convention : Football: Coach’s strategy makes observers wonder if “run-and-shoot” will crash and burn.

In less-enlightened times, the elders in charge would simply have burned men like Mouse Davis at the stake. These days, it’s done at the line of scrimmage.

Make no mistake about it: Darrel (Mouse) Davis is a heretic, though the only doctrine he is trampling on is what passes for orthodoxy in the NFL. The one that reads: “Thou shalt not send four wide receivers down the field ON EVERY PLAY (emphasis his; Davis sends a fifth on some occasions).”

For pro football fans who haven’t had the opportunity to see the aptly named run-and-shoot offense, imagine the Monty Python troupe footloose on Astroturf or the Four Tops trying to cross a Manhattan street at rush hour without benefit of traffic signals.

Chaos, run-and-shoot is thy name.

There is no tight end and only one back behind the line of scrimmage to help fend off blitzers. The quarterback, already under siege because of the aforementioned rush, almost always has to throw while rolling out to one side or the other. Each of the four receivers has to choose a pattern from any of a dozen options determined by how the defense reacts, and the quarterback has to read all of them before picking out his target.

And all of this has to be accomplished in the few seconds it takes one or more defensive linemen to make his way past the undermanned front and into the backfield on the dead run.

It’s not that there isn’t method to the madness; it’s just that Davis often seems to be the only one who can find it.

“The status quo will use what they have known,” said Davis, who at 57 is round-faced, soft-speaking and of average size (5-foot-9)--nothing like the wild-eyed radical he is sometimes branded. “They haven’t known this, so they may not use it.”

Yet.

The first and most important point that should be made in Davis’ defense is that he is the rookie offensive coordinator for the Detroit Lions, the same toothless bunch that ranked 28th and last in the NFL in offense last year and finished 4-12.

That team was so bad that the 27th-ranked unit, the disarmed Dallas Cowboys, could have thrown out the production of any three of their 1988 games and still finished ahead of the Lions.

The next point in Davis’ defense is that the run-and-shoot, which he has installed at every level from high school to the now-defunct USFL, never has been stopped. Never.

Not at Milwaukie High in Oregon, where Davis took the wraps off his zany offense in 1962; not at Portland State, where his teams set 20 NCAA Division I-AA records and led the nation in scoring three times; not in the Canadian Football League, where he took a last-place team in Toronto and made consecutive appearances in the Grey Cup championship, winning the title in 1983.

And especially not in the USFL, where current Buffalo and then-Houston Gamblers quarterback Jim Kelly threw for 83 touchdowns in two years and a 5-6, 185-pound receiver named Richard Johnson (since reunited with Mouse) caught 218 passes over the same span.

So what is it about the run-and-shoot that makes Davis’ current quarterbacks willing to risk their lives for it? How does it lure one former quarterback from a good job with the Oilers to come north and join his mentor and another fly a few hundred miles most weekends to watch?

“Part of the lure is Mouse, part of it is the newness, the possibilities it opens up,” said Jerry Costanzo, who was Davis’ first run-and-shoot guinea pig at Milwaukie High and now, despite being a poet and English professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, flies in from Pittsburgh to see the Lions play at home.

“I’ve said this before, but what the run-and-shoot does is take the ‘smash-mouth’ out of football. You do things other teams can’t anticipate,” he added, “and you do it without having to hit harder or take harder hits.

“With a little speed and brains and the run-and-shoot, you can beat bigger, stronger, more talented guys. And it’s difficult,” Costanzo said, “to express how inspiring that is--especially to kids.”

Inspiring enough, apparently, so that Rodney Peete, the quick, highly regarded USC product whose talents appear matched to the run-and-shoot, was willing to endure having his teeth rattled much of Sunday while still trying to master it.

Peete managed only 54 yards net passing for the game--four sacks sliced 23 yards from the total--but also completed a pair of touchdown passes to the diminutive Johnson, who spent the past two years selling computers until he got a call from Mouse.

Most important, perhaps, the Lions beat the Packers 31-22 for their second victory of the season.

“I’ll accept playing poorly,” Peete said, “as long as we come out on top.

“And I don’t feel like a guinea pig. In fact I feel lucky to be a part of it,” he added, “because, as the weeks go on, it’s going to get better and better.”

Indeed, Davis has the Lions’ offense ranked in the high teens at this juncture of the season.

For all the hoopla surrounding Davis, the run-and-shoot is not entirely new. A number of NFL teams have used a variation of the run-and-shoot in passing situations for several seasons now. It also has fueled the high-octane offenses of the Houston Oilers (brought there by June Jones, a former Portland State quarterback and Oilers assistant who has since rejoined Davis on the Lions staff) and the University of Houston (whose current head coach, Jack Pardee, headed the USFL Gamblers while Davis was offensive coordinator).

But will the full-time run-and-shoot spread any further and will Davis be around long enough to see it?

“I know it’s gained positive acceptance by what some coaches told me,” he said.

But when asked the names, Davis demurs. “I can’t. It would make their own ballclubs look bad.”

And perhaps get a few more guys burned.