He Throws Away the Doubt : Redskins: Rypien has done everything asked of him this season. The Bills are hoping he can’t do it for one more game.

In a league full of passing fancies, Mark Rypien is the rarest of Super Bowl quarterbacks--ready, willing and able to melt into the background of his team’s vanilla personality.

Rypien, a private, cerebral man in the very public position of starting for the Washington Redskins, emerges only when there is blame to be assigned, fingers to be pointed, losses to be explained.

While the Jim Kellys and Joe Montanas of this world are known by how far they can take a team on their own, Rypien seems to be defined not by what he has done and can achieve, but by the things he cannot do--and the games he could not win.

He arrived from three years of backup obscurity to lead Washington to two winning seasons, but wasn’t he still gawky when he moved out of the pocket, frequently getting hurt and fumbling the football at vital moments?

He took the Redskins into the NFL playoffs last season, but didn’t he throw two crucial interceptions in the 28-10 loss to the San Francisco 49ers?

He had a league-leading 28-11 touchdown-to-interception ratio and led the Redskins to a 14-2 regular-season record and two easy playoff victories this year, but if he’s so good, why are the Buffalo Bills saying that their defensive goal in Super Bowl XXVI is to force Rypien to pass as often as possible?

“They don’t ask him to do very much,” Buffalo defensive coordinator Walt Corey said about Rypien. “He’s got a rating of 92-point-something, but he only throws 17 times a game.

“I’d sure like to get them throwing the ball. If the choice comes down to whether I want them to run the ball or throw it, I want them to throw it.”

For Rypien, a sixth-round draft choice out of Washington State in 1986, every day is a new chance to prove his legion of doubters wrong, the Super Bowl a shot at answering all the questions everyone has ever had about him.

“The question was, could he stay healthy for the whole year, (and) he stayed healthy for the whole year,” Redskin wide receiver Gary Clark said. “Then the question was, could he take the team back to the playoffs, (and) he took the team to the playoffs.

“Then the question was, could he take us to the Super Bowl, (and) he’s gotten us to the Super Bowl. Now the last question he has to answer to all his critics out there is, can he win the Super Bowl?”

Without doubt, Rypien is well protected in the Redskin scheme, and rarely drops back to pass without seven or eight big blockers to give him the time to get his feet under his not-so-agile 6-foot-4 frame. He was sacked only nine times this season.

He also has Clark, Art Monk and Ricky Sanders to throw to, perhaps the best and most wisely used group of receivers in the league, and a running attack fashioned to grind up defenses.

But whatever he did, everyone concedes, it was not enough if it did not produce postseason success. After that loss to San Francisco last January, Rypien recognized that he would not be given many more chances.

In a move that former Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann calls “really gutty,” Rypien signed a one-year, $1.5-million contract last summer, gambling his future on his ability to get the Redskins into Sunday’s Super Bowl.

“I think he hit the lottery,” Theismann said this week, citing $10 million over four years as his suggested long-term Rypien figure. “I’ve got to be honest with you, the kid went out and bought a Virginia lottery ticket, and (Redskin owner Jack Kent) Cooke is going to wind up paying for it.”

Rypien said: “As I look back at it now, it was a big step for me, a big step for this team. It boils down to when this year came about, I kind of saw the writing on the wall that it was a make-or-break year for me, a year that I needed to step up and play at a level that’s going to lead us to where we needed to go.

“And if not, then of course, the questions have always been there and . . . I probably wouldn’t be here at this time.”

Then, after sounding assured and confident, Rypien reverted to the insecure-sounding and at times surly quarterback of the past.

Asked about his 20 fumbles in 1988 and ‘89, Rypien’s first reaction was a snarl.

“That was years ago and it’s over with now, so let’s not bring up the (past),” he said sharply. “I’ve commented about 10 times on that over the years, and you’ve even asked that question before and you’ve been there when people have asked the question.”

Later, Rypien explained that he has beaten this fumbling tendency by making quicker decisions in the pocket, being sure that the ball is gone before defensive linemen come crashing.

Rypien will never be a Theismann-style dancer and improviser, but Theismann himself said Rypien this year is exactly what Coach Joe Gibbs prefers with his intricate, thinking-man’s brand of offensive football. Gibbs now gives Rypien four or five audible choices off of a particular play, as opposed to the none or one he used to allow Theismann.

“First of all, (Rypien) dropped almost 15 pounds (from 240 to 225), so you’re not sitting there like a big, fat duck waiting for somebody to hit you,” Theismann said.

“Plus, you count how many times Mark Rypien drops straight back five steps or seven steps to throw passes. It’s just not going to happen.

“What Joe (Gibbs) basically is saying is, ‘Mark, I don’t think you can do that effectively, so we’re not even going to worry about it. We’re going to do what Mark can do. We’re going to move you a little this way, move you a little that way, we’re going to run the football to protect you and we’re going to give you a chance to put it up deep.’

“Oddly enough, I think Mark is the perfect style quarterback for Joe Gibbs. He’s bright, he’s tough, he throws the deep ball very well.”

Gibbs said: “The league is still learning about him. He kind of misleads them. He isn’t a pretty athlete. He’s kind of big and clumsy. . . . He’s also kind of a genius. He has that great arm, he’s tough, but the main thing is that he’s so bright.”

Rypien spent the first two years of his career hidden on the Redskins’ injured-reserve list, and while Gibbs moved from Jay Schroeder to Doug Williams, Rypien bided his time.

“The thing I remember about Mark in the beginning, the very first scrimmage he was in, he really got rocked about five times and got right back up,” Gibbs said. “So the first thing I remember about him was he was tough. Second thing is probably his smarts.

“The rest of it, you can kind of guess, but you never really know until you go out and play the games. You don’t know how good a quarterback is going to be at this level.”

With a potential Super Bowl victory ahead of him, Rypien could easily say those who made snap decisions about him were small-minded and dead wrong. But so far, he has not.

“I’ve never held grudges,” Rypien said. “The comments people have made sometimes are true and sometimes make you work harder. I’ll never say, ‘I told you so,’ I’d never say that.

“I guess when your back’s against the wall, sometimes you find out what type of person you are, what you’re made of, and it almost makes you perform at a higher level.

“That’s kind of what’s enabled me to keep going and strive to get better. (Because of) the fact that some of the things that were said about me were true, I wanted to come back and settle those things.”