The Quarterback and His Coach : Raiders: Jay Schroeder and Mike White, down and out before the season, are now riding high.

On their own, quarterback Jay Schroeder and assistant coach Mike White were two men in the depths of career crisis.

Schroeder’s fall was played out locally. He finished the 1989 season as the Raiders’ No. 2 quarterback behind Steve Beuerlein. Time was running out on Schroeder’s quarterback clock. He was pushing 30 and still couldn’t throw straight. Five NFL seasons had produced 13 more interceptions than touchdowns.

Schroeder gave up on a career in professional baseball because he couldn’t hit a curveball. He had, though, mastered the art of throwing a breaking pitch with a football, as his 1989 completion mark of 46.9% would attest.

For this, the Raiders had traded All-Pro left tackle Jim Lachey to the Washington Redskins.

White, 54, had left a recruiting scandal at the University of Illinois in 1988. He would land another job quickly as a volunteer assistant with his son’s football team at Newport Harbor High. Who knows, a good recommendation there and maybe a community college comes calling.

White considers it blind luck that he and Schroeder were thrown together this season as private coach and quarterback.

White admits quietly the break for him was no less a miracle. “There were guys who wouldn’t give me the time of day,” he said. “But this guy (Raider owner Al Davis) did.”

What united Schroeder and White was part luck, part timing, part foresight and part fate.

The results are such: Schroeder is a quarterback reborn, having led the Raiders to a 12-4 record and into Sunday’s divisional playoff game against the Cincinnati Bengals at the Coliseum. In 1990, Schroeder threw 10 more touchdowns than interceptions, 19 against nine. His completion statistic shot from 46.9% to 54.5%.

Schroeder was named the AFC’s offensive player of the month for December and finished the season with a higher quarterback rating than Joe Montana, Dan Marino, John Elway and Jim Everett.

White, riding out the Schroeder wave, is being mentioned for professional head coaching jobs around the league, a notion he finds astonishing in light of his recent stock. He claims he has performed no miracles with Schroeder and would rather stay out of the public arena. He stresses he has had no influence in the Raider offensive scheme or game plans. He was hired only to keep Schroeder’s passes and mind on the straight and narrow.

He likens his role to the golf pro hired to smooth out a player’s swing. Schroeder has knocked a few strokes off his handicap.

White and Schroeder met at a quarterback camp last spring at Stanford. The clinic was the brainchild of former San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh, now an NBC football analyst. Walsh had invited White, a close friend and former coaching assistant at California, Stanford and with the 49ers, to help conduct the teaching seminars. It was coincidence that the first clients were Schroeder and Beuerlein of the Raiders, who had made the trip north with Coach Art Shell and assistants Terry Robiskie and Joe Scannella. Two days later, Walsh closed the camp because NBC considered it a conflict of interest.

White came out the big winner. Impressed by his technical work, Davis hired White as his quarterbacks’ personal tutor. Interestingly, White’s time might have been spent equally on Beuerlein if not for his summer holdout, which vaulted Schroeder into the starting position, however conveniently.

Davis, determined to vindicate himself for the Lachey trade, demanded that White help Schroeder lower his woeful interception ratio, increase his completion percentage, raise his quarterback rating, improve his third-down conversion ratio and gain some much-needed confidence.

It was no small task. Some might say White inherited a mess in Schroeder. “He was just another bust in a lot of people’s minds,” White said.

Although 29 years old by the time training camp started, Schroeder was an inexperienced NFL quarterback, denied measurable playing time while at UCLA and sidetracked four more years by his baseball dream. In the NFL, Schroeder was scarred by a bitter quarterback controversy with Doug Williams in Washington, and the failure to justify the Lachey trade in the minds of most Raider fans.

It helped that Schroeder was eager to improve.

“You know, when you have some problems with your golf swing, you go find someone that knows your swing inside and out,” Schroeder said. “He sat there for a long time and just watched me throw, then said, ‘OK, your hips weren’t open and your feet weren’t set right.’ And I’d go back in next time and make sure they were set right.”

White gives most of the credit to Schroeder, who worked with the enthusiasm of a rookie, and the Raiders, who provided Schroeder with the best environment in which to excel.

For starters, Shell junked former coach Mike Shananhan’s complicated finesse offense and simplified the passing game. It gave Schroeder less to worry about. Shell also opted to keep the heat off his quarterback by spreading the ball around to a wealth of offensive talent.

Schroeder, who started all 16 games, threw fewer passes, 334, than any other quarterback in the AFC except New England’s Marc Wilson (265) and Indianapolis’ Jeff George (334), who were not full-time starters.

White’s job was to stay inside Schroeder’s head to ease him through the inevitable slumps. Schroeder’s dropoff came at mid-season, when he went five games without throwing a touchdown pass. The Raiders lost three in that span, and Schroeder felt the heat at home. The low point came on Nov. 25 against Kansas City, when Schroeder fumbled twice in a 27-24 loss to the Chiefs. He was cheered by the Coliseum crowd late in the game after being forced out because of a twisted left knee. The cries for Beuerlein, banished to street clothes all season, became louder.

“They’re cheering when you’re getting packed off the field in the Coliseum,” White said, summing up the mood. “What the hell goes through your mind?”

Remarkably, Schroeder never flinched. Again, White credits Schroeder for persevering under pressure, and Shell for issuing a resounding endorsement of his quarterback the day after his worst performance.

“The best thing that happened to Jay was the support that Art gave him,” White said. “That was the whole key. My role didn’t change. All of a sudden, the media were on him, and the fans, they cheered when he got hurt. Jay must have really reaffirmed the fact that he was going to earn the respect of everybody. And that’s what he’s done the last month.”

Schroeder responded with the December of his life, completing 59 of 99 passes for 918 yards with 11 touchdowns and two interceptions. His quarterback rating for the month was 119.

Schroeder, who had withered in the face of controversy in Washington, said it was a matter of hanging tough and growing up.

“It’s just the maturity factor,” he said. “There’s going to be good times and bad. You just keep plugging away. After that (Nov. 25) game, Art said if I could go, I was going to play. It gave me a lot of confidence knowing all I had to do was get my knee better and go out and play. I didn’t have to go all week answering the questions.”

Schroeder has answered most of the questions this season. So has White. It’s difficult to imagine another canceled quarterback clinic changing two lives more dramatically.

“To have this opportunity is a joke,” White said, “how it happened, how it’s worked. It’s amazing.”