Oilers Give Tolliver a Few More Lessons

Billy Joe Tolliver hung out with John Elway enough in the off-season to see the difference.

Elway is a celebrity. Tolliver isn’t. Elway gets mobbed everywhere he goes. Tolliver doesn’t.

Simple.

But Elway, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, had his share of rocky performances on his way to Rocky Mountain fame. Tolliver is going through them now, and the hard part is he has no idea whether his career will eventually follow the same course as Elway’s.

“I don’t know what to expect,” he said. “I haven’t talked to a lot of people who have gone through this. Maybe I’ve got to call my boy Elway up and see what’s up.”

Certainly, few know better than Elway what it’s like to have an industrial-strength arm and lot of people wondering if you really know what to do with it. After Sunday, more people are wondering about Tolliver, the second-year Charger quarterback. This was another day at school. This time, Tolliver’s lesson came from an aggressive Houston defense, which plucked his passes and swarmed through his backfield en route to a 17-7 victory at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

Twice, drives were killed when Tolliver passes were intercepted, once in the third quarter and again early in the fourth. He finished with 14 completions in 25 attempts for 174 yards, including a nice 27-yard touchdown pass to--think you can guess?--Anthony Miller.

Late in the fourth quarter, with the Chargers on Houston’s three-yard line, Tolliver held the ball too long and was clobbered by the Oiler pass rush, which left him on his back at the 10.

“You take a snap, and you learn something,” Tolliver said. “Next time, I won’t wait so long for a guy to get in there. I thought he could get in there and we could get it to him. You just can’t take a sack down there.”

Everybody notices if you do.

“As a quarterback, you’re the eye of the hurricane,” he said. “I’m the one that sets it in motion.”

Sunday’s motion was something less than a hurricane, maybe not even enough to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. The Tolliver-directed offense converted only three of nine third downs and managed 14 first downs to Houston’s 29.

Unlike kicker Fuad Reveiz, though, Tolliver isn’t in danger of losing his job.

“I don’t think anybody here loses faith in Billy Joe,” Charger General Manager Bobby Beathard said. “I think Billy Joe does something to show he’s making progress every game. As a team we did a lot of things to hurt ourselves. I think everybody’s confident that Billy Joe is going to continue to make progress.”

This is new territory for Tolliver. At Texas Tech, his alma mater, things weren’t always a skip to the candy store, but the problems didn’t have anything to do with him.

“In college we had an offense, there was just no defense,” he said. “Now we’ve got a defense, and we need to make some plays offensively. They’re there. We’ve just go to make them.”