While Samms Struggles At Qb, Kramer Defends Garske Decision

Mike Kramer claims he hasn’t heard it. Not directly, at least.

But the grousing is out there. And it grows louder with each sub-par performance by Eastern Washington quarterback Chris Samms.

Some fans are wondering whether the best quarterback on Eastern’s campus might be the one watching home games from the Woodward Stadium bleachers.

That would be Griffin Garske, the fifth-year senior whose name appears on the career top-10 list of every Eastern passing category. That would be Griffin Garske, who started 17 games and threw for 4,216 yards and 33 touchdowns prior to being chased from the team following last year’s disappointing 5-6 finish.

That would be Griffin Garske, who is spending his final year of collegiate eligibility helping coach high school quarterbacks at University, while the Eagles struggle to generate any semblance of a passing game.

In fairness to Samms, a sophomore from Kent, it must be pointed out that his is hardly the ideal situation. In a perfect world, he would be a backup this year, watching and learning behind junior college transfer Fred Salanoa.

But the much-heralded Salanoa went down with a season-ending knee injury in practice prior to the fourth game of the season and Samms has been forced to learn on the fly.

It hasn’t been pretty - or much fun to watch.

Eastern (4-4 overall, 3-2 in the Big Sky Conference) has won three of Samms’ four starts, but the Eagles have done it with little production through the air.

Samms has completed just 65 of 143 passes (45.5 percent)for 893 yards. He has thrown 11 interceptions and ranks 10th in the Big Sky in passing yards per game (127.6). In addition, he doesn’t even register among the top 10 in passing efficiency (97.2 percent) after last Saturday’s 12-for-32, five-interception effort in a 25-7 loss at Montana.

It’s enough to make some Eastern followers long for the return of Garske, who quit the team last winter after being informed he would not be allowed to compete for the starting quarterback spot.

And it’s enough to force Kramer, the Eagles’ sixth-year coach, to defend his decision to give up on Garske in order to lure Salanoa.

There are those who argue that Garske - had he been allowed to remain on the roster and compete for the starting job - would give the Eagles a much better chance to win, now that Salanoa is injured, than the inexperienced Samms.

Perhaps Scott Mitchell, the other casualty in Kramer’s off-season quarterback purge, best summarized the concerns of many fans.

Mitchell, who was recruited out of Kennewick to become the heir apparent to Garske’s starting job, was also informed at the end of the ‘98 season that he was no longer a part of the Eagles quarterback plans.

He was asked to move to defensive back, but transferred, instead, to Western Washington, where he has thrown for 1,499 yards and 15 touchdowns for the Division II Vikings in seven games this fall.

“I got a pretty bad deal, not getting a chance there,” said Mitchell, who played only sparingly as a redshirt freshman at Eastern last fall. “But with Griff … well, programs don’t just throw away people, and they threw him away. They told him you’re not going to ever be our quarterback again, yet he was good enough to be a quarterback for three, four years- however long he was there, and to start 20, or however many games he started.

“Why did it take them three years to realize he wasn’t a quarterback? They said he wasn’t good enough to even be a backup there, and that’s ridiculous. He put up some good numbers.”

In response to such criticism, Kramer simply declares the point moot, explaining that Salanoa probably would not have signed with Eastern if Garske had still been a part of the program.

In this day and age, Kramer explained, it is next to impossible to recruit a top quarterback - especially from the junior college or Division-I ranks - without at least giving the appearance that the starting job will be his.

And he said it was essential, in his opinion, that the Eagles land one of the three top transfer quarterbacks - Salanoa, Drew Miller or Ricky Ray - who were being recruited by four different Big Sky schools.

Eastern recruited all three but cancelled scheduled campus visits by Miller and Ray after Salanoa, a standout at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, gave them an early commitment.

Miller, who had decided to leave BYU after two seasons, ended up at Montana where he has become the Big Sky’s most proficient passer. And Ray, following a stellar two-year career at Shasta (Calif.) Junior College, is having a sensational junior year at Cal State Sacramento (4-4, 2-4), which invades Woodward Stadium this Saturday for a 1 p.m. game against Eastern.

“To be honest with you, I don’t think we’d have gotten Fred, or Ricky Ray, or Drew Miller, had Griff still been our quarterback,” Kramer said. “Each one of those guys was looking for a starting opportunity, and if you return a fifth-year senior at quarterback, they’re going to say, `Coach, I’m looking elsewhere.’

“If we don’t get Salanoa, then we’re stuck with Griff, and that’s not where we wanted to be. Without Fred, we as a coaching staff, felt like we had no hope.”

Kramer said it was during last year’s 31-25 road win over Sac State that that feeling of hopelessness came to a head. Garske went 9 for 21 for just 88 yards and threw two interceptions in that game.

Kramer said he wanted to take Samms off redshirt status following that game, but was talked out of doing so by his assistant coaches.

“The point is, I have a lot more confidence in Chris Samms than I had in our previous two quarterbacks,” Kramer insisted. “Now it’s time for Chris to respond back to the confidence I showed in him (last winter) as we made the decision to make sure those other two quarterbacks were out of the way for Fred and for him.”

Had Salanoa stayed healthy, Kramer is convinced the controversy would have died.

“We got one of those three (coveted) quarterbacks, just like we had hoped,” he explained. “But of the three, our guy got injured.”

Salanoa didn’t exactly rock the college football world with his early season performance, completing only 45 percent (38-85) of his passes for 515 yards and four touchdowns. But he showed improvement each week, and the Eagles are confident he will receive an extra year of eligibility under the NCAA’s medical hardship rule.

“Maybe it’s even a positive thing for us,” said Kramer. “We’re going through another trial, but at the same time we still get Fred for two more years.”