It’s That Time : At 29, Everett Is in the Heart of His Career; How Well He Does Is Heart of the Matter for the Rams

The moment was right. The quarterback was ready. The way was clear.

Everyone saw his long legs and noticed the soft flick of his wrist and the subtle, sharp flight of his passes. Everyone said Jim Everett was the next great one.

Two years ago, Everett was 27 years old and throwing touchdown passes with regularity. If Joe Montana and Dan Marino weren’t going to leave the top of the mountain voluntarily, Everett was going to bump them off.

Everett turned 29 in January, and the top of the mountain is still in the distance, farther away now than ever.

In 1990 and ‘91, clamped to a team that had lost its way, Everett found out how frail anyone’s claim to greatness is.

The more he demanded himself to play better, the faster his decline. The more he fell, the harsher the criticism.

Now, with his second NFL head coach, on a team given little chance to make the playoffs, Everett finds himself at the crossroads of his quick-rise, quick-fall career.

He has proved he can be a great young quarterback and proved he can also be a bad young quarterback. The unanswered question: Can he be a great quarterback, plain and simple?

“As a quarterback, I’m at an age where I’m right in middle age, and I should be getting things done,” Everett said recently. “I’m not the young guy on the block any more. There’s a lot of other young guys on the block.

“It’s a point where, yeah, I want to get myself back on the right track. If it’s a crossroads, if it’s whatever . . . but I want to make that right turn and get going.”

This will be Everett’s sixth full season as an NFL starter. He has started 80 games. Only six quarterbacks starting this season’s openers have started more games.

Only one, Marino, has started more games consecutively than Everett’s 64.

A young quarterback? Not any more. Everett has thrown 112 touchdown passes and been sacked 139 times and been interviewed thousands of times.

He has a history now and a losing record.

The Rams are 37-43 in games he has started. Montana’s record as a starter is 100-39. John Elway is 81-48-1. Jim Kelly is 53-33. Jay Schroeder is 53-25. Does that mean Everett should be considered beneath all of them?

“I don’t really look at it that way,” Everett said. “I say that if you look around the league and you look at maybe the top five or top 10 quarterbacks in the league, I rank myself right up there.

“Now, so far, we didn’t get things accomplished as a team last year. I didn’t get things accomplished as a quarterback as I would have liked to. That’s where I’ll become mentally more tough--not allowing myself to (fall) into the (downward) swings of a team.”

Everett has won some games pretty much on his own, in the last seconds, wildly and brilliantly. He has lost games, too, fumbling away snaps, throwing misguided passes. Some things, he has blamed on inexperience. Some, he has not.

He is not young any more, and the Rams, under Chuck Knox, are clinging to him for offensive stability.

“There’s no question he’s coming into the heart--the heart--of his career,” said Ted Tollner, his new position coach and a longtime quarterback mentor. “God willing on injuries, everything’s in front of him. He’s an experienced guy who has had big seasons, who has had poor seasons.

“I think that makes us all better. He’s gone through the good and the bad, and he’s young and he’s talented. Really, I mean, for his position, he’s right where you want a guy to be. You love to get a guy with his background that’s 29 years old, that’s done it and had some problems, too.

“You look at the guys that have really been top quarterbacks in the NFL over a period of years, when they come into their late 20s, early 30s and they have had a chance to play like he has. I mean, they’re ready to really blossom into something special.”

In the beginning, it seemed as if Everett would never know failure, would never be facing questions about his climb to the top. He blossomed at 25.

In his first game in his first season, he threw three touchdown passes. In his third season, he threw for a team-record 3,964 yards and 31 touchdowns. His fourth season, he threw 29 touchdown passes and for another team-record 4,310 yards, leading the Rams to the 1989 NFC championship game.

But many observers point to his infamous no-touch sack in that playoff game--in which he threw himself to the ground in the pocket, anticipating a 49er defender--as the beginning of the fall. The once-dominating Ram offensive line was fraying, and so was Everett’s confidence and poise.

“There’s been experiences that were very, very good here,” Everett said. “And there are some times I wonder if I handled those so well, if I really appreciated what was going on.

“And when things went bad, I wonder if I handled those things so well. It’s easy to get down on yourself. But the hard part is saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to stick in there and be even a better player, no matter what people envision, no matter what’s going on around me.’ ”

Around him, the over-achieving Rams crashed into reality a year later. In 1990, under pressure to win games by himself, Everett saw his courage questioned, his team lose 11 games and his statistics fall back into the pack. Statistically, it was not an awful year for him, but the 11 losses spoke louder than any quarterback rating could.

In 1991, with the Rams’ running game and John Robinson’s coaching tenure a shambles and Everett without a quarterback coach to turn to, he hit bottom. He had 20 passes intercepted and threw for only 11 touchdowns, went the first five weeks without a touchdown pass and saw his quarterback rating plummet.

When the criticism rained down on him--that he could not handle the pressure of a sustained pass rush, that he had “happy feet” in the pocket, that his fundamentals were dismal--Everett often went into a shell.

“Jim is such a nice person,” Ram offensive coordinator Ernie Zampese said. “I think when he hears or reads criticism about himself, I think he’s a little shocked. He probably wouldn’t do it to somebody else.

“So all of a sudden, ‘My gosh, I’m a nice guy. Hey, why are they saying these things about me?’ When they’re not really saying it about Jim Everett, they’re saying it about the guy that plays that position. Sometimes that’s hard to separate.

“You take everything so personal. And it’s natural. I think we all do to a certain extent, varying degrees and levels. But you’ve got to understand that it comes with that territory. If he doesn’t do good, then he didn’t do good.”

But Everett, with an off-season to calm him and a new coaching staff to steady him, still does not want to hear suggestions that he is not tough enough or fundamentally sound enough to be a great quarterback.

“No one ever puts their feet inside my size-13 shoes and walks around, so they don’t have a clue,” Everett said. “Not too many guys are the quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams, standing back there having to deal with some of the things that are going on.

“Same with the theory about the happy feet. There’s certain mechanic things that I do that are inherent to Jim Everett. Some of them are effective. In 1989, you didn’t notice a single one of them. Do the same thing in ’91 and you do.

“As long as you’re successful downfield with the ball, that’s the key part.”

Everett says he understands the nature of his position dramatizes both the highs and lows. It does not make it any easier to deal with 13 losses and 20 interceptions.

“I’ll never forget how things were,” Everett said of his first few seasons with the Rams. “And I won’t forget last year, either. Now, I’ll try to learn from it. And also learn from the good times, knowing that you have to continue to prepare and continue to focus what you have on hand if you’re going be successful next Sunday.

“Because it doesn’t make a difference what you did last Sunday or 10 Sundays ago or 200 Sundays ago. It’s what are you going to do this Sunday?”

This season, the Rams have brought in Knox to replace Robinson, and Knox has pledged to keep Everett as comfortable as possible. But how comfortable can a quarterback be on a team that has no dominant running backs?

Knox has told everyone who has asked that Everett is the most talented quarterback he has coached. Knox hired Tollner specifically to keep Everett on solid ground when the land begins to shake. Knox and Tollner both hope the bad times have made Everett more mature, stronger.

But Everett is not sure whether the struggle has made him a better quarterback.

“You certainly hope so,” Everett said. “But I’m not going to be a fool and stand here and say I’ve seen the light. I’d be the biggest idiot in the world to say that. It’s foolish.

“I’m in the position now where I’m hungry to do things correctly. I’ve been wanting a position coach the last two years and I got one. I think I’ve been through quite a bit of experience on the field and off the field, and I feel pretty confident in my ability and the people around me. So I think it’ll work out all right.

“The last couple years, struggling a little bit, as all my teammates (were), I think you get that hunger inside. . . . Call it experience, call it whatever you want. It’s good to know that you can get something done and know also that you have that fear in your stomach that says things can go haywire.”