Quarterback U. Who?

The Stanford quarterback position, usually passed down by pedigree, is in the hands of an unassuming--but energizing-- upstart these days.

Who’s the player in Cardinal lobbing strikes all over the field, leading the Pacific 10 (which is not lacking light-’em-up quarterbacks) in total offense and taking UCLA to the brink of bowl championship series detonation?

Who has the USC defense scrambling to prepare for his aerial assault Saturday at Stanford Stadium after throwing for an average of 401 yards in his last three games?

Todd Husak might have been born to fill John Elway’s shoes, but it sure took everybody a long time to figure it out.

“I think being kind of anonymous like I am, nobody really knowing about me, that’s made my job easier,” Husak said this week. “There’s no pressure on me to go out and perform extremely well, and if I do go out and do have a good game, people start to notice.

“Now that our offense is doing so well, it’s a lot of fun.”

Husak is an admittedly late bloomer who did not start at Bellflower St. John Bosco until his senior season, who didn’t get a single recruiting call or letter from either UCLA or USC, and whose own father warned him about the perils of making it as an unheralded recruit at Quarterback U.

Even if he got a shot at Stanford, his father wondered, wouldn’t there always be another hot-shot, cannon-arm coming to campus gunning for his job?

“We had a long talk,” recalled Husak’s father, Bill, who is the athletic director at Loyola Marymount. “He really wanted to go somewhere he could play, and Stanford was always his No. 1 choice. . . . He really didn’t look at anywhere else except Stanford.

“I said, ‘Over the course of what could be a five-year career, you’d probably have to compete against six to eight of the top high school quarterbacks in the nation.’ I said, ‘Are you ready to be disappointed or maybe be in a back-up role?’

“He wasn’t afraid of the challenge, never even blinked twice. He felt he was good enough to play there.”

Todd, a gangly kid in high school who has filled out even as he has grown taller in college, said he understood his father’s concerns, but said he knew what he was doing--and it wasn’t as if the whole world was banging down his door, anyway.

“I knew what I was getting myself into,” Todd Husak said. “I knew I could be just as good or better than the competition.”

Said Bill Husak: “Todd was pretty confident. He’s been confident all along. And he just felt if he did what he was capable of doing and continued to improve that he would be the person who would lead the Stanford team this year. And that seems be to the way it worked out.”

The 6-foot-3, 210-pound (“and I’m still growing”) junior backed up highly touted Chad Hutchinson for two seasons--with spot playing time last year.

In those spots, Husak’s soft touch and accuracy were impressive enough to give him consideration for the starting role this season, even though Hutchinson still had two more years of eligibility.

Lurking on the horizon was just what Bill Husak had warned: The year after his son went to Stanford, Coach Tyrone Whillingham landed Randy Fasani, the No. 1-rated prep quarterback in the nation and pegged to be a sure-fire NFL signal-caller someday.

Then Hutchinson, a star pitcher for the Stanford baseball team, signed a huge baseball deal with the St. Louis Cardinals in the summer, and suddenly, Husak was No. 1, with a shrug.

“Of course, Chad leaving made my job a lot easier to step in and to take over,” Husak said. “But even if he had stayed, I would’ve been more motivated to work as hard as I can to beat him out--which I thought I could do, anyway.”

Though he outplayed Fasani in spring practice, everybody was just waiting for Husak to give way to the next Stanford superstar.

“I never viewed it that way,” Husak said of the assumptions that the job would eventually be Fasani’s. “I think a lot of other people did--Randy being as highly touted as he was and me being as anonymous as I was.

“But I’ve always been confident in my ability. It was just a matter of time before people took notice. As long as the coaches see what’s going on, I’m all right.”

As a barometer of the Cardinal coaching staff’s uncertainty, Husak wasn’t officially named the starter until Sept. 1, two days before the opener.

But from then, even as the Stanford season turned into a flaming mess, Husak, throwing behind a stalwart offensive line and to a talented array of receivers, has been an offensive constant.

Though he doesn’t have the strong arm of Elway or Fasani, Husak has thrown at least one touchdown pass in every game this season (a total of 14) and only six interceptions.

Husak is on a late run that includes two of the top three pass performances in school history--a school-record 450 yards against Oregon State followed by a 335-yard effort in a near upset of Arizona State and last Saturday’s 419-yard torching of the UCLA defense, No. 3 on the Stanford pass list.

Without much of a running game or solid defense, Husak is putting the ball up at a rate that is shocking, even for Stanford--an average of 43.6 attempts a game.

“The thing we’ve asked Todd to do is play within his abilities and execute our system, and he has done a marvelous job of doing that,” Whillingham said. “His production is high, his mistakes are low.

“Any time you have a quarterback doing that in your system, you have real chance at being successful. He’s just putting up all-conference numbers. I know we’re in a conference that has some great quarterbacks, but you look at what he has been able to do, it is tremendous.”

But Whillingham still occasionally lets Husak know Fasani, and the other back-up, Joe Borchard, are in the picture--most recently by employing a three-quarterback, play-by-play rotation in the Arizona State game.

Whillingham says he might go back to the three-quarterback rotation at any time.

And even if Husak finishes this season on the torrid run, what’s to stop everybody from assuming Fasani won’t just take over next year?

“I think a lot of people view it that way about the people I have behind me,” Husak said. “But as long as I do what I have done in the past and and work as hard as I can to be better, I don’t see anybody knocking me off.”

SATURDAY

USC at Stanford

3:30 p.m.

Channel 9