Sports Talk : Quarterback’s Passing Fancy Gives Franklin Another Title

Another football championship was in the bag for Franklin High School, and Coach Armando Gonzalez, the architect of what is shaping into a dynasty, was in a jubilant mood.

“I don’t mean to take anything away from my other teams,” said Gonzalez, who has won four city 3-A titles during his eight years at the school, “but this one is the best I’ve ever had. . . . This guy (quarterback Santiago Alvarez) has been phenomenal.”

He won’t get much of an argument there.

All Santiago (Chago) Alvarez did last season was become the most prolific single-season passer in California high school history by throwing for a state record 4,019 yards and 52 touchdowns, which were two short of the national mark. He had 11 in 1988, when his 1,643 yards were second in the city’s 3-A division.

The senior quarterback also equaled the state single-game record with eight touchdown tosses for the Highland Park school against Verdugo Hills.

And he capped the year by leading the then 12-1 Panthers--with a hefty assist from the team’s stingy defensive unit, which allowed an average of only four points per game--to the city 3-A title with a 24-6 victory over Garfield at East Los Angeles College last month.

In that one, which could have been billed in anatomical terms--The Arm vs. The Legs--he faced a squad whose offensive scheme centered around Hilario Espinosa, a senior running back who rushed for 2,142 yards on the year and who scored 25 touchdowns, including the lone one against Franklin.

The upper limb prevailed.

“This is the ultimate,” commented an exuberant Alvarez during the post-mortem. “Right after we scored the first TD, I knew we were going to win.”

Alvarez knows something about winning. He lost only two games as the starting quarterback for the Panthers, which is part of the reason why Gonzalez, who has had a string of standouts at the position, calls him the school’s all-time top gun.

“By far he is the best quarterback I’ve ever coached,” noted Gonzalez, whose teams have gone 44-5 the last four seasons. “He gets the ball to where it is supposed to be, and he picks up secondary receivers real well. One statistic that I really look at is completion percentage. He is 62%. In high school, to have a kid over 60%, that’s amazing. . . . The kid is a winner.”

Said wide receiver-defensive back Lamar Lovett, who snatched 19 of Alvarez’s scoring aerials: “Our receivers (were) good, but he just made us that much better. He has tenacity. He comes to play.”

Gonzalez and Lovett are not the only ones singing high praises. College recruiters, including those from UCLA and USC, have sent letters to Alvarez, but a couple of obstacles might prevent him from playing next fall at a major (Division I) school.

For one, there’s the question of whether, at 5-foot-10 and 160 pounds, he would be big enough to play quarterback at a major university. The other is academics. He carries a C+ grade average but apparently did not take some required college preparatory courses mandated by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.

That would make him a “Proposition 48 athlete,” named after an NCAA rule that could be toughened for the 1990-91 school year to force such players to sit out their freshman year and make them ineligible for a scholarship that season.

If he doesn’t want to lose a year, Alvarez could go the junior college route for a couple of seasons, then transfer to a Division I school. One such school, Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, wouldn’t mind that alternative.

“He’s poised and has the athletic ability to scramble,” said Valley assistant coach Ron Ponciano. “You go to a game to see if anyone jumps at you, and he does right away. First time I saw him I thought, ‘Good grief!’ ”

But what about the size?

“Regardless, if you are good, you get the job done. He’s got the arm. There’s no question he can play. He’s typical of the athletes at Franklin,” Ponciano said.

The quarterback agreed: “People say I’m not tall enough, I’m not heavy enough. I think that as long as I get the job done that’s what basically it’s all about.”

Alvarez is not opposed to the junior college option, although he would love to wear the gold and blue of UCLA and eventually study physical therapy or sports medicine. Besides, he’s partial to that institution. He was born at its medical center, the youngest of three children of Salvador Alvarez, a junior high school English teacher, and Francisca, an accounting manager at a department store.

(His father, a former halfback at Army, gave Santiago the nickname chango --Mexican slang for monkey--because he was such an active child. The nickname lost the “n” somewhere along the line.)

Referring to his college plans, Alvarez said, “I would like to stay close to home.”

That kind of talk, from that kind of talent, is what Southland college football recruiters call answered prayers.