Charger Rookie Friesz Is Thrown to Raider Wolves : Pro football: First-year quarterback has not played since briefly in exhibition season.
Their precious playoff spot secured, the Raiders look beyond the regular season today as they meet the San Diego Chargers at the Coliseum.
Momentum is operative word here. The Raiders have won four consecutive games since Coach Art Shell reduced the team’s final games to a five-game, must-win miniseries in late November. A loss to break up that winning streak before heading into the playoffs is unacceptable, especially against a Charger (6-9) team that has all but conceded the game in favor of starting training camp a few months early by throwing rookie quarterback John Friesz to the wolves.
A loss under these circumstances wouldn’t look good on a Raider playoff resume.
“We need to play as if we are in the playoff chase,” defensive end Greg Townsend said. “Because that’s what we’re getting ready for: going into the playoffs. We need a win so that we have that attitude for winning. We need to get ready for other things.”
The Raiders also have some fine-tuning to do, namely figuring out how to put away opponents once they get a big lead. Last week in Minnesota, an 18-point lead shrank was squandered to four in the final minutes of an otherwise lopsided victory over the Vikings.
“You want your team to put people away when they have the opportunity to do it,” Shell said.
Despite a rash of injuries that have further weakened the Chargers, Shell is expecting a tough game, if only for old times sake.
“They’re a dangerous team, whether they’re vying for the division championship or in the position they’re in now,” Shell said. “They’d love nothing else but to beat the Raiders. This goes back a lot of years. Chargers don’t like the Raiders. The Raiders, I think, they love to beat more than anyone else in the league.”
The Raiders don’t mind that the Chargers have chosen to start Friesz, except that he hasn’t left much of a celluloid trail. Football coaches are movie hounds, notorious for filming anything that moves on a football field for the purposes of later scrutiny.
Friesz has few football fingerprints, unless you’re satisfied with breaking down four passes he threw in the exhibition season. Oh, don’t forget that summer scrimmage he played in Flagstaff, Ariz.
“There’s not a whole lot,” Shell admitted.
What the Raiders know: Friesz is right-handed, 6-foot-4 and 209 pounds. He looks like a quarterback. He passed for more than 10,000 yards at the University of Idaho, a division 1-AA school, so apparantly he can locate the seams on the ball. The Chargers selected him in the sixth round, so this isn’t Troy Aikman. They stashed Friesz on injured reserve Sept. 4 for future considerations, never thinking they’d be considering him this soon.
If Friesz seems rusty, it’s because he did not take a snap with the first-team offense until this week, and then it wasn’t a pretty picture. Let’s just say the Raiders’ leading sacker, Townsend, did not lose sleep this week worrying about Friesz.
“If he was good--and I’m not saying the guy’s not good--but if he was good enough to give us a lot of problems, they would be playing him,” Townsend said.
Even San Diego Coach Dan Henning admits Friesz is “raw as an egg.”
So is this a future quarterback or an omlet? That’s what Henning intends to find out at the expense of one regular-season NFL football game.
Henning thought he had his future quarterback in Billy Joe Tolliver, but Tolliver has exasperated his coach so thoroughly in recent weeks with crippling mistakes that Henning, with all the tact of a schoolmarm, rapped him on the knuckles this week and sent him to the bench.
Tolliver’s last mistake was an interception thrown last week with 1:48 remaining in a 24-21 loss to Kansas City. The Chargers were driving for what could have been the winning touchdown when Tolliver launched a throw that passed 15 feet over the head of the nearest Charger into the waiting arms of Chiefs’ safety Deron Cherry.
“I fully believe Billy has made excellent progress,” Henning said. “He has to get over that propensity he’s had in the last few weeks of making a rotten throw that takes a drive away that could win the football game.”
Henning said Friesz’ performance today will help determine the future of the franchise, which is asking a lot of a rookie who is just learning the playbook.
“Nothing’s ever easy,” Henning said. “You have to start somewhere. . . . It behooves us to find out as a franchise and as a team to find out whether he is legitimate competition as we develop Billy Joe Tolliver. If he’s not, then we have to find other and more competition.”
The move doesn’t bode well for immediate backup Tom Vlasic, who might be charting his last game from the sidelines.
Henning said the Friesz experiment is not some one-series ploy to complicate Raider preparations.
“He’ll be in there as long as we can compete,” he said. “If I think he’s being a detriment for us competing, then we’d go back to Billy. If we’re in there, and we’re in the ball game, he stands to play the whole game.”
Raider Notes
Entering the last game of the regular season, receivers Willie Gault and Mervyn Fernandez are tied for the team lead with 49 receptions. Gault needs 45 receiving yards today to surpass 1,000 yards for the first time in his career. . . . Tight end Ethan Horton has established his career high for receptions with 31. . . . Quarterback Jay Schroeder needs 313 yards passing today to surpass 3,000 for the season. Schroeder’s nine interceptions are the fewest he’s thrown since part-time work in his rookie season in 1985. He has thrown twice as many touchdown passes, 18, in 1990. Schroeder had thrown 13 more interceptions than touchdowns entering the season but has cut the gap to 68 touchdowns versus 72 interceptions. . . . The Raiders have invited to today’s game the entire crew of the USS Antietam, which has just returned from a tour of duty from the Pursian Gulf. . . . In the race for the team rushing championship, Bo Jackson leads Marcus Allen, 670 to 652. . . . The Raiders lead the series against San Diego, 38-21-2. . . . Because of a foot injury, Chargers fullback Marion Butts has lost his NFL rushing lead to Buffalo’s Thurman Thomas, who has gained 1,297 to Butts’ 1,225. Butts was inactive for last week’s game against Kansas City and is not expected to play today. Neither is defensive lineman Burt Grossman, who suffered cracked ribs last week.
