Now He’s Passing On His Knowledge

You figured they were going to make quite a pair at USC, kid quarterback Carson Palmer and his coach, former New York Jet quarterback Ken O’Brien.

There was one catch.

“Sad to say, I never had heard of him before,” Palmer said with a wan smile. “All these people were coming up to me saying, ‘That’s great, you got Ken O’Brien.’ I was saying, ‘Ken who?’ ”

It’s a lesson in how young 18 is. Palmer was 3 when O’Brien was a first-round NFL draft pick in 1983, turned 6 the season O’Brien led the NFL in passing in 1985, and was 12 the last time O’Brien made the Pro Bowl in 1991.

“My dad watched him a lot and told me about him and all he did,” said Palmer, who will turn 19 in December. “Now he’s by far my favorite coach on the team. Everybody wishes he was their coach.

“But I really didn’t know who he was.”

Nobody had to tell starting quarterback Mike Van Raaphorst.

“I knew,” Van Raaphorst said. “I’m two years older, I guess. I remember watching him with the Jets. I thought he threw the deep ball better than just about anybody.”

Coach Paul Hackett is the quarterback guru, the stickler for technique and footwork, but O’Brien is the guy USC’s young quarterbacks look to for a different kind of insight, even for comfort.

“He’s laid-back,” Van Raaphorst said. “Coach Hackett and [offensive coordinator] Hue Jackson are high-strung and up-tempo. He’s more, ‘I’ve been there. I’ve done it. I’ve thrown plenty of interceptions. I’m not going to yell at you.’

“It’s a good mix to have both.”

O’Brien, 37, is just getting started as a coach, after 11 seasons as an NFL quarterback and a couple as a sportscaster in Sacramento.

“It was fun, the local stuff,” O’Brien said. “But I didn’t care much what was going on in hockey back in Philadelphia.”

Last year, he made up his mind he wanted to coach and returned to UC Davis--his and Hackett’s alma mater--and coached the quarterbacks.

The Davis connection eventually brought them together.

Hackett, who handled the quarterbacks himself in his first head-coaching job at Pittsburgh, had been looking around for somebody because he was intent on not taking on too much again at USC. (Not that you could tell during training camp, when Hackett was absorbed with the quarterbacks and O’Brien looked like no more than an observer.)

But as the season has gone on, Hackett has been drawn into other aspects of the team, and O’Brien has learned some of Hackett’s system.

“He was with the New York Jets and they had a totally different concept,” said Hackett, who runs a variation of the West Coast offense. “Ken has learned our offense from myself and Coach Jackson. He’s more and more comfortable with it, doing the drills and having conversations with the quarterbacks. It’s an ongoing process.”

So is O’Brien’s evaluation of his new career.

“I was real fortunate to be able to go back and coach at Davis,” he said. “But the way they do things couldn’t be more different than USC. Davis was nonscholarship until this year, and now it’s partial. Nothing about it compares. The games have a local atmosphere. It’s not a job for the players like it is here. Their aspirations are nothing like here. They just play and go to class.”

Now he’s working with guys who are trying to get to the NFL, after making the hard decision with his family to move from Northern California, where he and his wife grew up.

But there isn’t as much difference in the players’ attitudes at USC as he had imagined, and he thinks he’ll stick with college coaching.

“I like working with the kids a lot,” O’Brien said. “I was really pleased to find out here . . . the kids are more talented, they’re a lot bigger, but they all have the same hunger to listen and achieve something in this game.”

That goes for Van Raaphorst and Palmer, former starter John Fox, injured freshman Jason Thomas and even walk-on Matt Dalton. All seem to have taken a liking to O’Brien.

“Since he’s been a player in the past, he knows what it’s like to play,” Palmer said. “He knows how you feel when you throw a bad pass and says, ‘That’s all right.’

“He knows what it’s like, and he sees things on the sideline. If they’re blitzing a lot, he can tell you where the pressure’s coming from, and where you’ve got to step.”

You pick up a few things in the 11 NFL seasons that left O’Brien second to Joe Namath on the Jets’ passing yardage list with 24,386 yards.

“The future these quarterbacks have is going to be tremendous,” he said. “I made a lot more mistakes than they do. At any position, but quarterback especially, a young guy’s confidence is so important. You can’t put too much on their shoulders. If they make a mistake, as long as they learn from it . . .”

So anyway, how much difference is there between, say, the Carson Palmer of today and the Ken O’Brien of 20 years ago?

“Nowadays, high school programs are a lot more sophisticated,” O’Brien said. “When I played, it would be four yards and a cloud of dust. Throwing 30 times a game was unheard of.

“I don’t know if I was a project, I could always throw, but I just hadn’t had much experience yet. [Palmer is] real polished, real dedicated.”

Now they’re both recent arrivals at USC.

“He’s just like me,” Palmer said. “It’s his rookie year. He’s just getting used to college football.”