Slimmer Pagel Trying to Pull His Weight : Rams: Backup quarterback, who played well against the Seahawks, is focusing his new-found energy on staying sharp.

If Chuck can do it, why can’t you?

That could have been the first line of the letter Mike Pagel received from the new Ram coaching staff this spring, playing off Coach Chuck Knox’s victory in a national ad campaign during which he lost more than 60 pounds.

But the Knox regime doesn’t deal in cute and the letter had more of a militant tone. In fact, it was strongly worded enough to make anyone want to get slim fast.

“When you get a letter in the mail that says you will report at 207 pounds or less and you will be below that weight every day during the season, you kind of take notice,” Pagel said.

The Rams’ backup quarterback was pushing the scales to 224 at the end of last season. Of course, the team had lost its last 10 games, and Pagel is not the first guy to eat a little too much when depressed.

So Pagel started counting calories--and laps around the track--and showed up in training camp at just under 200 pounds.

“It’s one thing to maintain your weight during camp when you’re going twice a day and working so hard,” he said, “but when the regular season starts and I’m home and my wife (Danita) is cooking these extravagant meals, it’s kind of hard to say, ‘No, honey, I can’t.’

“You don’t want to hurt any feelings and it’s so good, I’ve got to eat it. So I wanted to give myself an eight- to 10-pound cushion. I wanted to be able to work my weight up to 207.”

Pagel, who said he hadn’t weighed less than 205 since his rookie season, never really thought of himself as being overweight until he went on the diet and then looked back at the Rams’ 1991 team picture.

“It’s funny how the mind works. You tell yourself, ‘Oh, you can handle 215, 220,’ ” Pagel said. “I knew 225 was too much, though. I just love to eat and I guess I enjoyed myself a little too much at the dinner table last year.

“But you’re lifting a lot and you tell yourself, “You’re strong. You can carry it.’ Then I looked at myself in the picture and said, ‘No way.’ I was chubby in the face and had more rolls than a Hostess bakery. I compare it to now, and I looked like a beached whale then. It was disgusting.

“I can’t believe I spent six or seven years of my career over 210. I feel like I can move better now, move my feet quicker. And I don’t get as tired, which is a really big thing.”

It’s hard to imagine Pagel, who completed 11 of 27 passes for 150 yards last season in five brief appearances, getting tired. But there was a time in his career when endurance was a factor. In four years with the Colts, between 1982 and 1985, Pagel started 47 of 51 games. In 1985, he set career highs in pass attempts (394), completions (199), yards (2,414) and touchdowns (14).

Now, like all No. 2 quarterbacks in the NFL, Pagel has to focus his energy toward staying prepared for the day when disaster strikes. And since practice time in the regular season is devoted to keeping the starting quarterback sharp, Pagel must lay the groundwork in the summer to have a chance for success if called upon in the fall.

“It’s an important time for him to get the reads down and to know where to go with the football,” Knox said. “He’s got a good understanding of our offense, but it’s important to get in there and have some contact around him and get the feel for the game, because the backup quarterback is only one play away from being in there.

“You’ve got to be mentally and physically prepared to go out there and do the job, regardless of how many reps you get. People don’t want to hear about how many reps you got, you just have to go out there and do the job.”

Pagel says he is one of the few players on the team who really enjoys training camp.

“When the regular season starts, I spend the week being the other team’s quarterback in practice,” he said, “so the chance to run our offense for a few weeks and get some playing time (in the exhibition games) is both fun and very important to me. It’s good for me. It’s something I need every year.

“Sure, realistically, I probably won’t get to play much this year, but there’s always that very small chance--hopefully a very tiny chance--that Jim (Everett) gets hurt and I might have to carry the team for weeks.”

So far, so good. The new, lighter Pagel had some pretty hefty statistics against Seattle last week, completing nine of 12 passes for a game-high 122 yards passing and one touchdown.

“Everything was coming out smooth,” he said, smiling. “A lot of the time, the primary receiver was coming right open and it’s a lot easier when you can just drop back, set up and let it go. It’s like playing catch.

“But it gets a lot tougher when you have to wait for the second, third, or fourth receiver to come open. I’m sure Saturday against the Raiders, it won’t be that easy. It can’t be that easy, week in and week out. Otherwise, we’d all be making nine mil for three years like (Washington quarterback Mark) Rypien.”