Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Of course, what I was asking was different. Allowing access behind the scenes during camp and exhibition games is one thing. Giving an outsider complete access when the real games start—not to mention during the draft—is quite another. Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti was comfortable with the idea right away, but he set up a meeting with general manager Ozzie Newsome and Coach Brian Billick because, as we both agreed, there was absolutely no point in starting the project if the general manager and coach resisted it.

  The first question Ozzie Newsome asked during my initial meeting with the Ravens was “Why would I let you [a complete stranger] into my draft room when I won’t let ESPN [an NFL business partner] in there?”

  It was a good question. The answer is this: live television, even a cut-up, taped segment, is essentially unfiltered. A book has the advantage of context, setting up why something happened as opposed to merely showing what happened.

  The other question raised during the meeting was the one I had most expected: “Are you looking to write the book version of Playmakers?” (It wasn’t phrased just that way, but that’s what the question was.) The answer was no. As I pointed out, if a Raven got into serious trouble, all of that was going to be reported in the newspapers. If anything, by earning the trust of the players, I might be able to provide readers with—again—context on what actually happened. There’s no more perfect example than Jamal Lewis. Within a week of my initial meeting with the Ravens, the story broke about his arrest on drug-trafficking charges. It has since been adjudicated, and as I write this, Lewis is spending four months in jail as part of a plea bargain. There are people who will always believe that Ray Lewis is a murderer, and many of those will always also believe that Jamal Lewis is either a junkie or a drug dealer. The fact is that he’s neither. He made, by his own admission, a stupid mistake as a twenty-year-old, taken in by a good-looking woman. He was guilty of being twenty and naive as much as anything. The fact that the judge who handed down his sentence after the plea bargain said to him in open court that he was convinced there was almost no way Lewis would have been found guilty had the case gone to trial is fairly compelling evidence of that.

  Some will no doubt say that makes me an apologist for Jamal Lewis. I understand. One of the perks of being a star athlete is that your fans will think you innocent of just about anything as long as you are performing (exhibit A: Barry Bonds in San Francisco). The flip side is that some fans of the opposition will consider you guilty, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. I have a tendency to deal in facts.

  Maybe that’s why the Ravens said yes. They knew when they let me into their world that if one of their players was found guilty of a crime or acted like a jerk, I would report it. The Ravens aren’t perfect. As team owner Steve Bisciotti says, “If you have fifty-three rich young guys, they’re going to make mistakes.” Every team in the NFL is evidence of that. But they had enough confidence in the people in their organization to open it up to me. Billick was comfortable with my involvement, but all of Newsome’s football-player and general-manager instincts told him that you simply can’t let an outsider inside the secret society that is the NFL. Still, he gritted his teeth and agreed to go ahead, and for that I’m grateful. I think this book proves that they knew what they were doing.

  My access, as you will read, was pretty much complete. Billick never once asked me to leave a room, and the players, who weren’t quite sure who I was or why I was there—many referred to me early on as “the book guy”— became, I believe, comfortable with my presence. Deion Sanders even took the trouble to pull my jacket collar up while we were standing in the tunnel in Pittsburgh, saying, “Man, you have to at least try to look good on the sideline.”

  Steve Bisciotti’s role in this book cannot be overstated. He was my first contact with the Ravens because of our mutual friendship with Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams. Bisciotti is one of the more remarkable people I’ve ever met. As Kevin Byrne, the Ravens public relations honcho pointed out, “When you spend a little time with Steve, you understand that his success was not an accident.” Bisciotti is one of those very rich and successful people who feels no need to explain why he’s rich and successful. My friend Rob Ades, a lawyer who represents a lot of college basketball coaches, tells a story about playing golf with Bisciotti a couple of years ago and asking him what he did. “I’m with the Ravens,” Bisciotti answered.

  “I thought he was in marketing,” Ades said. “We got along very well, so a couple months later I called and asked him if he wanted to go to a Maryland game because I had pretty good seats. He thanked me and said he actually had tickets of his own. I get to the game and I look across and he’s sitting in the front row at center court. I asked someone how he had gotten those seats because they seemed a little bit expensive. The answer I got was ‘Don’t you know who he is? He owns the Ravens.’”

  At the time Bisciotti owned a mere 49 percent of the team. Now he owns 99 percent—former owner Art Modell retained a 1 percent stake when the final deal was cut on April 9 of 2004. At that first meeting back on February 10, 2004, I walked into the Ravens complex in Owings Mills a couple of minutes early and was explaining to Vernon Holley at the security desk that I had a ten o’clock appointment. Just as Holley picked up the phone to let someone know I had arrived, the door opened. Holley put down the phone and pointed behind me. “Here’s Steve now,” he said as Bisciotti walked up.

  Think about those three words: “Here’s Steve now.” In how many NFL offices do you think the employees routinely refer to the owner by his first name? (I guarantee not in Washington, the one place where the NFL team owner is actually younger than Bisciotti, who is forty-five—four years older than the man his close friends and family call Mister Snyder).

  My hope when I first approached Steve Bisciotti was to come away with a deeper understanding of what an NFL season is like. Certainly a 9-7 season was not what the Ravens had in mind when they planned that year. But the ups and downs the Ravens experienced certainly provided a fascinating story, full of more nuance and emotion than any amount of television commentary and capsule biography could deliver. There were great highs—a come-from-behind victory against the Jets—and great lows—a blown 20-3 lead at home against Cincinnati that ultimately cost the team a spot in the playoffs. There were conflicts, within the team and within the coaching staff, but as I came to understand, such disagreements are inevitable, especially on a team enduring a rocky season. I was asked often during the season if anything really surprised me. The answer was (and is) yes: the constant tension. The NFL is the most insecure world there is in professional sports because the season is so short, leaving little margin for error—injuries can occur quickly and in devastating fashion and today’s star can be tomorrow’s cut. Just check the small print in your newspaper’s sports section every March and every June.

  I also got a better understanding of the hold the NFL has on people’s lives. The passion of the fans in every NFL city is a tribute to the quality of the game, to the league’s marketing, and to the fact that over the past forty years the league has become a cultural monolith. The hardest thing for everyone in the NFL to do, I think, is not to take themselves as seriously as the fans and the media do. That’s not easy. When you are treated as though you are special everywhere you go, it is easy to forget that it is the uniform you wear, not you, that makes people think you’re special. Just ask ex-players who were not stars how quickly those perks disappear.

  Which is why I have to give Brian Billick credit. Many find him arrogant. Certainly he has the extreme self-assurance that virtually anyone who is very good at something has. But he also has a self-deprecating sense of humor that many people miss. On the last Sunday of the season, with the Ravens almost certain to miss the playoffs after a loss at Pittsburgh the previous week, Billick made his traditional walk from the team hotel in downtown Baltimore to the stadium. As he and Vernon Holley approached the entrance to the stadium, most of the fans waiting in line to be patted dow
n by security moved aside for them, as they do every week.

  One yellow-jacketed security guard planted himself between Billick and the entrance. “Sir, I need to pat you down,” he said.

  Before Billick could say anything, three other security people jumped in and pointed out that the coach of the home team didn’t need to be patted down. Billick walked away, smiling.

  “See what happens when you’re 8-7,” he said. “Everyone wants to pat you down.”

  Everyone may not want to pat you down. But they certainly want to second-guess you at best, fire you at worst. To play, coach, or work in the NFL is to breathe rarefied air. But it can be very thin air at times, and breathing can be very difficult.

  Which is what makes each week in an NFL season such a compelling story. The Ravens’ season in 2004 was a roller-coaster ride, filled with both chills and spills. This is the story of that ride.

  1

  Unexpected Good-byes

  January 3, 2005

  FROM A DISTANCE, it looked like any other football Monday in Owings Mills, Maryland. The coaches arrived early at the spectacular, brand-new $32 million facility located at the optimistic address of 1 Winning Drive. They grabbed quick cups of coffee from the first-floor cafeteria and headed up to their offices to begin their day by preparing for their morning meeting. The players came later. Like the coaches, they stopped in the cafeteria, but they sat at the round tables in groups of three and four, eating lunch before gathering in the posh auditorium that served as the meeting room when the entire team was together.

  But this was a Monday like no other in the nine-year history of the Baltimore Ravens. There wasn’t a soul in the organization who had thought before the season began that this would be the day when everyone said good-bye. In his first meeting with the entire team, on the morning that the veterans’ mandatory minicamp began in early June, Coach Brian Billick had made his expectations clear: “We have a two-, perhaps three-year window to win the Super Bowl,” he said. “In this room, we have the talent, the experience, and the understanding of what it takes to win to get to the Super Bowl and to win it. We can do it this year, we can do it again next year, and perhaps the year after, the way we’re structured. We’ve built to this the last two years. We’re ready for it.”

  Billick had repeated that message at training camp and on the eve of the first game in Cleveland. He had clung to it throughout the fall as the team sputtered and the dream began to fade before it finally teetered like an aging Christmas tree and collapsed with a crash on the day after New Year’s. There would be no Super Bowl; there wouldn’t even be a playoff game. Instead of being one of twelve teams preparing for the National Football League playoffs, the Ravens were one of twenty teams making plans for next season.

  That wasn’t just a cliché, either. When football coaches say next season begins on the last day of this season, they mean it. In fact, Billick had been meeting with team owner Steve Bisciotti, team president Dick Cass, and general manager Ozzie Newsome since early December to discuss the team’s future. By the time the coaches met at 11 A.M. that morning, two coaches—long-embattled offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh and defensive assistant Phil Zacharias—were gone. One office over from where the coaches sat with schedules Billick had handed them for 2005, Cavanaugh was starting to clear out his office. Two phone calls had already come in from teams interested in talking to him about a job.

  For everyone involved, this was a difficult day. The hallways in the building were quiet, no one knowing quite what to say to one another. In the locker room, players went through the ritual of putting their things in boxes to carry to their cars while saying good-bye to one another. Deion Sanders, the future Hall of Fame defensive back, limped around on a foot that would need surgery for a torn tendon and paused to sign autographs for younger teammates who thought there was at least a 50-50 chance he would not be back when veteran minicamps began again in June.

  It had been less than twenty-four hours since the 2004 season had ended with a too-little, too-late 30-23 win over the Miami Dolphins. The victory had left the team with a 9-7 record. Had they been part of the National Football Conference, those nine victories would have easily put them into the playoffs. But in the American Football Conference, it left them a win short of the 10-6 record required to earn a playoff spot. “Only one team finishes the season satisfied,” Billick told his players when they gathered for their final meeting before heading to their homes to begin an off-season full of questions. “But we all know we’re sitting here because some of us didn’t do our jobs as well as we could have or should have. We’re all emotionally spent because of the energy we’ve put into the last twenty-five weeks.

  “That’s why I’m not here to put a lot on you right now. I appreciate the fact that a lot of you have played in a lot of pain these last few weeks. You’re tired and you’re hurt and I admire you for doing what you did. But we have to take a good, hard look at ourselves.” He held up a spiral notebook. “I’ve got about ninety pages of notes in here about things that need to be looked at and improved upon before next season starts. About five of them are for the coaches; another five are for you guys. The rest are for me.

  “The simple fact, though, is this: we didn’t reach our expectations. I think we have a Super Bowl-caliber team in this room. There are any number of reasons why we’re sitting here today having this talk instead of getting ready for a playoff game. What we have to think about going forward is this: how do we get from 9-7 to being an elite team, I don’t mean a 10-6 team like last year, but a 13-3, 14-2 kind of team. That’s the kind of team we all think we can be. But we have a lot to do to finish the job. That’s our challenge for next year—finish what we began this season.”

  Billick had been far more blunt when he met with his coaches that morning. The mood of the meeting had been somber, almost glum. Everyone in the room knew what had happened already to Cavanaugh and Zacharias.

  “A good man is going out that door because of what we and I haven’t done,” Billick said, referring to Cavanaugh. “There are also additional changes I need to make, and we’ll talk about them starting tomorrow.” He paused. “Don’t get me wrong. This is a good room. There are good people in here. I don’t like what happened today with Matt or what we’re going to have to do. It’s what will drive me out of this business eventually.”

  The coaches looked at one another. Each was scheduled to meet individually with Billick the next morning. The message was clear: others would be going out the door, too. In front of them, in addition to a schedule that told them their responsibilities from now until the first day of training camp, was the team’s roster. On the right-hand side was a list of fifteen players who would be free agents. Some would not be back. The coaches would meet on January 17 along with Newsome and his staff to talk about every single player who had played for the Ravens the previous season.

  Newsome and Billick had already reached the conclusion that they had not been aggressive enough the previous season. “The question we need to ask,” Newsome said, “is, did we take the safe route last year by bringing back twenty-one of twenty-two starters? Did we allow continuity to become more important than upsetting the applecart and bringing someone else in who might be better than what we have?”

  The questions were rhetorical. Newsome and Billick had won a Super Bowl together following the 2000 season and they wanted to win another one. Both now believed that they had overestimated some of their players based on what they had accomplished in 2003. “The biggest mistake I made was thinking that the experiences we had last year, winning the division and going to the playoffs, made us a more mature team than our collective age would have indicated,” Billick told his coaches. “We were still a young team this season and we didn’t handle some things that came at us very well. That’s why we have to take a hard look at ourselves and at our players. I want you guys to tell me exactly what you need at each position to get better. You want a better player, find him, tell us who he is and why
he’s better than what we’ve got, and we’ll go get him. We’re in great cap shape. We’re going to attack in free agency.”

  The Ravens have never been a team that makes headlines in March with big-name free-agent signings. They probably weren’t going to make any major headlines in March of 2005, either, but Billick’s message was clear: we need to get better. It didn’t take a football genius to know that the Ravens were lacking at the wide receiver spot or that the offensive line had been through a disappointing season. The defense would be reconfigured to try to make life easier for Ray Lewis, the heart and soul of not only the defense but the entire team. Hard decisions had to be made on good players who were about to become free agents and might not be worth the money they could command on the open market. There were a number of older players, men who had been solid contributors throughout distinguished careers but simply couldn’t perform at the same level anymore.

  There are no guaranteed contracts in the NFL. The only money a player is guaranteed is the money in his signing bonus. From the moment that check is cashed, contracts go in one direction: the team’s. A player who signs a seven-year contract is committed to that team for seven years. Once the bonus check is paid, the team isn’t committed to the player for seven years, seven months, seven weeks, or seven days. That’s one reason why there is no job in professional team sports as insecure as that of an NFL player. Players frequently go from starting to cut in one year because a team decides he isn’t worth what he will be paid for the next season or because a team has to off-load salary because of the salary cap. Often players are asked to restructure contracts for less money. When that happens, most players are given two options: take a cut or be cut.