Ewu Wants To Avoid Rushing Qb Coach Kramer Says Freshman Garske Most Likely Won’t Start Right Away

Mike Kramer, while speaking Saturday morning to broadcasters and sports writers at the 16th annual big Sky Conference Football Kickoff, all but declared redshirt freshman Griffin Garske out of the immediate running for the starting quarterback job at Eastern Washington this fall.

But the third-year Eagles coach made it clear he still considers the 6-foot-4, 227-pounder from Mead High his quarterback of the future. And he hinted that unless projected starter Harry Leons dramatically improves his consistency, the future could arrive as early as the second half of EWU’s Sept. 7 season opener at Weber State.

Leons, a 6-2 junior, started five games last fall, including the last four after sophomore Brian Sherick went down with a knee injury. He threw for 1,041 yards and seven touchdowns, but was intercepted 13 times.

With Sherick, who has since quit the team, sidelined because of his injury, Leons and Garske waged what appeared to be a heated battle for the starting quarterback job all spring.

But Kramer admitted the battle was not as heated as it appeared.

“I wouldn’t call it a fight,” Kramer explained, “because I’m just not willing to give Garske the keys to the car and say, ‘Drive it.’ I think he’ll be an outstanding quarterback, provided we handle him right and don’t push him onto the field too fast.”

Then, after describing Leons as a poor practice player with an arthritic right elbow, he said he expects to start him over Garske.

Kramer pointed to former Eagles quarterback Mark Tenneson, the school’s career leader in passing attempts, completions, yardage and touchdowns as a living testimonial to his concerns.

“Mark Tenneson was a great quarterback for us in 1992 and 93,” he said, “but we were not productive when he was playing for us as a redshirt sophomore. Only when he became a redshirt junior did we become good at quarterback, good on offense and good at football.

“Maybe it’s our style, maybe it’s our offensive teaching, maybe it’s our system, but rookie quarterbacks have not had very much success at Eastern. When we’ve been good, it has been because we have a mature quarterback.”

And Kramer would prefer - for the time being, at least - to let Garske mature as a backup to Leons.

Grizzly readout

This year’s Toughest-Act-to-Follow Award goes to first-year Montana had coach Mick Dennehy, who was named to replace Don Read just months after the Grizzlies captured their first Division I-AA national football championship with a 22-20 win over Marshall.

Read retired after rolling up an 85-36 record and 10 consecutive winning seasons a UM. “Coach Read did a pretty good job at Montana,” joked Dennehy, a long-time Grizzlies assistant. “So I know this isn’t going to be the easiest job in the world. But if there’s any comfort at all in me being here at this point in time, it’s the fact that we return nine starters on offense and eight on defense.”

Record-setting quarterback Dave Dickenson, who won last year’s Walter Payton Award as the most valuable player in I-AA, is not among those returning starters.

“It’s the $6 million question,” Dennehy said. “They all want to konw who’s going to play quarterback. Well, it’s a secret.”

Actually, Dennehy plans to pick Dickenson’s successor early in fall camp and is expecting either junior Josh Paffhausen or sophomore Brian Ah Yat to win the job.

Dennehy said both are good enough to win, provided the supporting cast lives up to expectations. “But we’ll never have another Dickenson,” he added, “and it would be unfair to compare those guys to him.”

Transfer heaven

Big Sky newcomer Portland State, which won’t become eligible to compete for the conference football title until 1998, is counting heavily on an army of transfers to help smooth out the school’s sudden transition from Division II to I-AA.

Coach Tim Walsh has 41 such recruits on his preseason roster, but insists that is not the way he plans to do business in the future.

Walsh, who lost 37 letterwinners from last year’s 8-5 playoff team because of graduation and the NCAA’s more stringent eligibility rules that govern I-AA schools, loaded up on transfers the past two seasons in anticipation of the attrition that normally results from such an upgrade.

He could have signed more high school players and let his Vikings take their lumps for a couple of years while preparing his young players for a run at the Big Sky title in two years.

But he said such an approach would not have been fair to veteran players who decided to stay at PSU despite the school’s probationary status with the NCAA.

“Now that we’ve made the move, we hope we can sign between 15 and 20 high school players each year and take that transfer thing, at a certain point, down to six or seven guys,” Walsh explained. “But this year, there was some immediacy to bring (transfers) in again because of the competitive thing that we want to be now.

“I owed that to the Neil Fendalls and Sammy Aumuvaes who have played in our program for four years and are used to winning. I can’t be too selfish and say, ‘OK, I’m going to do this thing in three years, so what I’m going to go out and find 25 high school guys and, Neil, you just do the best you can, have some fun your senior year and we’ll go 2-9.”

Notes

In the past 10 seasons as a Division II independent, Portland State was 10-6-1 against Big Sky teams, but did not play Montana or Idaho. … Since the start of the 1990 season, 13 Eastern Washington offensive linemen - including tight ends - have been named to the All-Big Sky Conference first team. … They seem to prefer keeping things in the family at Montana, where Bruce Read, the son of the recently retired Grizzlies coach, is a special teams coach and Jake and Mark Dennehy, sons of new head coach Mick, are players.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

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