Ray Ratto
Among the many fine American traditions the Brett Favre-Green Bay Packers mutual trouser-drop has ruined, the quarterback controversy might be the most sacred. Now this is not to rehash the Favre saga any further, except to say that our position has been, is and will continue to be thus: We want Aaron Rodgers to throw for 4,000 yards, we want the Packers to finish 4-12, and we want Favre to have his Willie Mays-as-a-Met year. But when you've got Favre and the Packers, it's hard to get all that enthused by something as plainly tepid as Cal's quarterback controversy. If we can't get Nate Longshore's car set on fire, and if we can't get Kevin Riley's locker filled with cement, then what we have here is not a quarterback controversy. What we have is competition, and how do you dress that up in a tight leather clothes and FFF (fall face first) pumps for our new media age?
Oh, sure, we realize that the Longshore-Riley competition is the only issue Jeff Tedford has to solve before the opener against Michigan State because everything else is fixed. Sure, we know that it is the third rail of Cal football as we know it. Of course we understand that if Tedford doesn't choose the right one that he must be fired, stripped to his shorts and forced to walk home in a downpour with only a cardboard box of mementos to protect him. Well, actually, what we realize is this: Tedford doesn't have to choose a full-time starter until the Washington State game, and probably won't. We also realize that the quarterback play was only part of the reason why the Golden Bears went into freefall last year, that a far greater problem was Tedford's blinkered obsession with play-calling that blinded him to a number of chemistry issues that melted the team's resolve in important moments. Put another way, if the quarterback was the only issue, they should have been blown out the entire last half of the year.
But that's not the story as preordained from Central Casting. We are apparently suckers for a great quarterback issue (see Nolan, Mike, and that twitch in his left eyelid), and with all due respect to the debates at Stanford and San Jose State, plus the matter of JaMarcus Russell's apparently balky elbow up in Napa, the Longshore-Riley argument is the longest-running spit-fest we have. Except for this: Now that Favre has re-defined the art, the Longshore-Riley battle is no such thing at all. Oh, folks will try to frame the debate one way or another and turn it into a huge and enduring deal, and unless the folks at the university are really smart about it, they will overreact to every spoken, written or telepathically transmitted word. Quarterback controversies are to be avoided under most circumstances, even to the point of choosing one in the spring. But when you do have one, the only way to deal with the story and its purveyors is to smile, tell as much of the truth as you can manage, and let the story run where it must.
That is, after you've sequestered the quarterbacks and forbidden them to read anything more potentially disturbing than the Sudoku puzzle. You see, the players read, and they read into what they read, and then they read into what their friends said about what they read. That's why one should always nail down the job in April so August isn't so disturbing.
But the up-side of the Favre degrade-o-thon, and the fact that Cal's own Rodgers is a victim of its effects, is that it reduces Riley-Longshore into something understated and almost benign. Unless one or the other comes out and says, "This job is mine, and woe betide any prematurely balding supervisor with a long contract who says otherwise," this is just a contest between relative equals that has a good month to run before someone is declared the temporary winner. It's not even a good squabble, because unlike the 49ers' messlet, no jobs are in jeopardy, and unlike the Packer nightmare, reputations have not been irreparably damaged.
On the other hand, there is still plenty of time for either Longshore or Riley to turn this into something ugly, unpleasant and potentially season-destroying. It will take time, thought, self-absorption, entitlement and some earnest contrivance, and a willingness to burn one's bridges well before they've been built, but if they want to tell their grandkids, "I was part of a quarterback controversy," they're going to do a lot more than they've done to date to make it happen. Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers have shown them the way. What they do with the bar now that it's been elevated is entirely up to them.
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