Nameless, but He’s Not Harmless

It was a black Saturday and Sunday for L.A. sports last weekend. But looking at it objectively, you can see why it happened.

I mean, sure, Atlanta, which has never been in a World Series, beat out the L.A. Dodgers, who have been in nine.

The University of California, which hadn’t won a game in L.A. since the first Nixon Administration, beat UCLA.

And the San Diego Chargers, who were 1-9 in games in L.A. since 1979, beat the Raiders.

But look who they did it with. Look at the guys they threw at us. I mean, there were Bud Black and Trevor Wilson--I think it’s Trevor, maybe it’s Clive--and there were Mike Pawlawski and John Friesz.

Wait a minute! John Friesz? Gidouddahere! They’re making that up. There’s no John Friesz in the NFL, is there? The Raiders don’t lose to guys you never heard of, do they? A guy whose name on the roster was misspelled in a program only two weeks ago as John Fariesz?

You know, you expect black Saturdays in the pennant races when you face, oh, say, Roger Clemens, maybe David Cone or Dave Stewart. Bud Black was 11-16 going into the pennant finale. Trevor Wilson never put anybody in mind of Christy Mathewson. He was 12-11 going into Saturday’s game, 22-23 lifetime.

At that, they were practically household names compared to John (Who?) Friesz.

John Friesz had never won a pro football game in his life. He never played a Division I-A college game. He completed passes for Idaho, Division I-AA.

You might expect Joe Montana to beat you. John Elway. Warren Moon. But the Raiders don’t lose to John Frieszes, now, do they? They bury rookie quarterbacks, right? No rook is going to stand up to a rush from Howie Long, Greg Townsend, Bob Golic and Scott Davis. He’ll be in an iron lung by the fourth quarter, right?

Well, John Friesz didn’t break any of John Unitas’ records Sunday. But he broke the Raiders with a four-receiver, run-and-shoot offense that had L.A. frequently defending the wrong part of the field.

The game turned on a fumble recovered and returned 53 yards by a linebacker. Friesz got sacked three times. But Friesz also threw a key touchdown pass, completely crossing up the Raiders, bunched up for the run, when he had first and goal on the two-yard line.

He completed 12 passes in all, and his second-quarter drive, which put San Diego ahead, 14-10, was as artfully crafted as any Bobby Layne ever put together. It chewed up the clock. There were 7 minutes 59 seconds on the clock when the drive started--and 2 seconds on it when it ended. L.A. never got back in it.

Is Friesz that good? Or are the Raiders in the business of turning journeyman quarterbacks into Bobby Layne clones?

It’s a neat problem. Sometimes, a new quarterback in this league succeeds precisely because no one has any clear idea what to expect from him. A lot of people around the game still think the 1979 Rams got in the Super Bowl precisely because the NFC had no clear idea of what to expect from their young quarterback, Vince Ferragamo. As a matter of fact, his own teammates didn’t either.

His coach, the late Ray Malavasi, used to joke that Ferragamo beat the Cowboys in a playoff game that year with two plays that weren’t even in the playbook. One was a pass to Ron Smith under the goal posts and one was a pass to Billy Waddy that not only surprised the Cowboys, it surprised Waddy.

Ferragamo faded as he became less a mystery to the league’s defense mavens. The Dolphins’ Dan Marino got in the Super Bowl his first year in the league, too. He hasn’t gotten in one since.

John Friesz acknowledged the pitfalls after the game Sunday.

“Won’t you tend to get better as you find out more about coverages in this league?” he was asked.

“It works both ways,” quickly advised Friesz. “Each week we play, I learn more about their alignments, but they pick up on my tendencies. I may know what they’re going to do, but they may get to know what I’m going to do.”

They say it takes three years to make a competent NFL quarterback. Before that, you’re playing in the dark.

Throw a quarterback in too soon and you may destroy him. The league points to the sad case of Archie Manning. Given the ball too soon, his self-esteem was soon shattered by repeated failure.

The same thing happened to Jim Plunkett. A Heisman Trophy quarterback, put at the controls immediately behind a porous, collapsible New England Patriots line, he almost couldn’t get the snap. It took the Raiders to reconstitute Plunkett. They put him behind a line that included Art Shell, Gene Upshaw, Henry Lawrence and Dave Dalby, and Plunkett could have read a book in the pocket, never mind get rid of a ball.

Friesz was drafted 138th overall by the Chargers. This usually means they just hope they can groom you to hold for kicks.

But the league should have sat up and taken notice when the Chargers dealt off their starting quarterback this season and gave the ball to Friesz.

The man he replaced, Billy Joe Tolliver, was supposed to be the next Dan Fouts. The team press guide had Tolliver all but glowing in the dark in its fulsome prose. Words like toughness , determination, fiery, charisma and leadership crept into the copy. You didn’t know whether they were talking about Terry Bradshaw or Winston Churchill. When they gave him a plane ticket out of town, you had to figure Friesz was special.

John Friesz looks the part. The phrase clean-cut was coined for guys like him. At 6-feet-4 and 210 pounds, he looks like an illustrator’s dream of a quarterback.

It behooves the press to learn how to spell his name. It behooves TV to learn how to pronounce it--Freeze! as in “Everybody against the wall, hands in the air!”

It behooves the league to learn what he’s going to do next. If they don’t, he’ll do what he did to the Raiders. If he beats the Rams this Sunday at Anaheim Stadium, he will have completed the bleakest week in the area’s history since the Long Beach oil spill.