It’s Perfect Time for Chargers to See if Tolliver’s Time Has Come

Well, here it is, fourth and long on another Charger season. It’s not even Halloween, and the Chargers are two and five and barely alive. Scary.

Obviously, only one game plan makes sense at this point.

Punt the season.

What? And give up on making the playoffs?

The University of Houston will win a Good Scout sportsmanship award before the Chargers get into the 1989 National Football League playoffs.

After all, it figures to take a 10-6 record to have much of a shot, and I haven’t seen anything yet that would lead me to believe this team can go 8-1 down the stretch. It will be much closer to 1-8.

Football is much more predictable than baseball and thus less susceptible to dramatic turnabouts in fortune. A 6-1 Denver team may come back a bit, but it’s hard to imagine it would come back so far that a 2-5 team could catch up with the limited improvement it might be expected to make.

If the Chargers are going to do anything dramatic at their sorry end of the spectrum, they have to take a chance. Biggest gains, after all, come with speculation.

Yes, it is time to see what Billy Joe Tolliver can do.

Give the young man the ball.

And this is not a rap at Jim McMahon.

Tolliver is healthy, whereas McMahon has so many injuries that he is eligible for group medical coverage all by himself. Give him the ball, and he will go out there without complaint, but also without much of a chance. He is too crippled to be effective.

Indeed, the New York Giants rudely implied he was lacking in courage last Sunday, hitting on him for not wanting to take a hit. His own coach, Dan Henning, conceded he might have prematurely fled the pocket on occasion but conceded that injuries undoubtedly were key factors. You wouldn’t take a car in such condition out of the garage. It was time to spare him. Give him a rest.

Time to go to the bench.

David Archer, theoretically, is the backup, but you skip him because that is what he is destined to be . . . a backup. He is not the quarterback of the future.

At this point, the idea is to find out if Billy Joe Tolliver is the quarterback of the future.

No one knows for sure.

However, the Chargers certainly raved about their good fortune in getting this kid down in the bargain basement section of the draft’s second round. You would never have known he was the third player they picked for all the carrying on.

What’s more, Tolliver went right out and excited the multitudes during the exhibition season. Among Charger quarterbacks, he was clearly Mr. August. He got down to the last second of the last exhibition game before a broken collarbone knocked him out of the first six weeks of the season.

In truth, Tolliver was not running the most complicated offense nor running against the most sophisticated defenses in those exhibitions. While he was not running against the No. 1 defenses, it might also be noted that he was not running with the No. 1 offense . . . presuming the Chargers have such a thing.

Regardless, this is an excellent time to see what Tolliver can do in a genuine NFL regular season game.

One thing is certain, and that is that Tolliver has the arm strength to get the ball to Anthony Miller when he is two time zones behind the secondary.

Another certainty is that giving Tolliver an opportunity gives fans cause to remain interested for at least a bit longer. The multitudes hereabouts are beginning to think of Sunday afternoons as ideal times for picnics, movies or maybe a little early Christmas shopping.

Of course, there are negatives to going with Billy Joe Tolliver.

This Sunday’s game will be in the Seattle Kingdome, which has not exactly been a pleasure palace for the Chargers. They have lost seven in a row in Seattle, a number of those with a rather experienced gladiator named Dan Fouts at quarterback.

Given this recent history, it would seem a rather difficult spot in which to expose a rookie and a rookie’s psyche.

That could be the other negative, putting Tolliver into a position in which his confidence might be shattered.

However, one of the things you want to know about the kid is how tough he is. If he ends up crawling under the rug, he’s probably not going to be the answer down the road.

Maybe Tolliver isn’t ready to do any more than dangle his feet in Puget Sound for a week and give McMahon a break. Maybe Mac will be and maybe even should be back in a week or so.

But McMahon is not ready now.

We know that.

We don’t know if Tolliver is.

But it is time to find out.