Henning Hedges on Who’ll Start at Quarterback

Everybody gets a kick out of a quarterback controversy except, of course, quarterbacks and coaches.

Charger Coach Dan Henning barely finished explaining his decision to call the ill-fated fake punt in Sunday’s 17-14 loss to the Cowboys when somebody wanted to know about the quarterbacks.

Is there a controversy?

Henning answered: “The last thing on my mind is a quarterback controversy.”

Still, it was on everybody’s mind again on Monday. So the question was again asked. Who is the guy? Billy Joe Tolliver or Mark Vlasic?

Again, Henning hedged.

“I don’t know that yet,” Henning said. “In my mind, it’s not a major item. I still think both of them are good players. We have to get all the pieces working around them better for either one of them to have a successful performance.”

Last Monday, Henning announced that Vlasic won the job from Tolliver, the projected starter throughout exhibition season. Vlasic started Sunday, completing 17 of 31 passes for 137 yards and touchdown. Since he didn’t throw with much zip, Henning zapped him on the last series and called on Tolliver. In front of his friends and family who had traveled from Boyd, Texas, to see the game, Tolliver came in for 45 seconds and completed one of three passes for three yards, which didn’t exactly make the situation any clearer.

Henning wasn’t satisfied with Vlasic’s performance. Tolliver, he said, probably would have come into the game earlier if the Chargers hadn’t stayed a step ahead of the Cowboys until the final few minutes.

“If we had been behind in the game earlier, I would have changed to Billy because Mark did not throw the ball with the type of accuracy or the velocity or the decisiveness that he has in the time we’ve had to evaluate him,” Henning said.

Henning plans to evaluate the situation on a week-to-week basis and won’t hesitate to start the quarterback he thinks is best suited for the opposing defense. The starting job could go back and fourth all season.

All the while, Tolliver and Vlasic will have to wait.

Neither had been told anything on Monday.

“I don’t know what’s up,” Tolliver said. “I have no idea. That’s all Dan’s doing. We’re both young guys trying to figure it out. We just do what they tell us to do.”

Tolliver, though, has his mind set on changing things.

“Personally I hope I come out and show that I’m a guy he can stick with the whole year,” Tolliver said. “I’m sure Mark feels the same way.”

Vlasic, starter of three career regular-season NFL games, couldn’t explain why his performance suffered a plunge between last week’s exhibition finale against the Raiders and kickoff on Sunday.

“I couldn’t pinpoint it,” he said. “I wasn’t as sharp as I was in the preseason.”

So now he’ll wait along with Tolliver until Wednesday morning to get the word from Henning whether he will get two starts in a row for the first time since November of 1988, the month he suffered a season-ending knee injury.

“The guy on the field has to get the job done, whether he’s in there for one week, 16 weeks or one play,” Vlasic said. “I’m going to approach each week the same no matter what the case is. That’s a decision that’s made elswhere and I just go out and play the game.”

The problem is one of experience. And neither Vlasic nor Tolliver has much.

“When you have two guys that nobody has any great period of time to determine their consistency this is always going to come up,” Henning said. “And as it stands now, it will continue to come up, I’m sure.”