Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  The Ravens played two seasons in Memorial Stadium, waiting for their new stadium to be built. They also moved into the Colts’ old facility in Owings Mills, which had been used as a police academy by the city of Baltimore, and found it as antiquated and outdated as the old stadium. That problem would have to wait, though. The immediate focus was on getting into the new stadium.

  The new place finally opened in September of 1998, a gorgeous, modern stadium right across the street from Camden Yards, the jewel of a baseball stadium that had opened in 1992. By then, Bisciotti was furious with Ravens management. When the time had come to select his club seats in the new stadium, he had been informed that he was being given the best available seats—on the 30-yard line.

  “I blew up,” Bisciotti said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, I put my money up in 1993 and the best I get is the thirty-yard line? They told me that the suite holders had the option to buy club seats and they got first crack. I told them that I was going to go and look at my seats and if I didn’t like them, I wanted my money back. The contract said nothing about it, but I threatened to go to the Sun. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll let you do it that way and call it the Bisciotti Rule.’”

  Bisciotti eventually decided his seats were acceptable. That same year, he had been contacted by Bank of America, which had been hired by Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga to identify possible buyers for his team. Because he had been a Baltimore Orioles season ticket holder and appeared to have the kind of capital needed to buy a franchise, Bisciotti was asked if he wanted to take a look at the confidential prospectus being sent to potential buyers.

  “I was intrigued,” he said. “I already had a home in South Florida and I figured as I got older I’d be spending more time there. I liked the fact that the team was in the National League because I wouldn’t have been comfortable competing on a regular basis with the Orioles. But when I read the prospectus, it turned out that John Henry had already been designated as the managing partner in any deal and was just looking for investors who wouldn’t have any real input in running the team. I wasn’t interested in that.”

  A year later Bank of America came back to Bisciotti with another potential deal: the Minnesota Vikings. “I was certainly interested in the possibility of owning an NFL team,” he said. “But when I talked to Renee about it, she asked me if I intended to move to Minneapolis. The answer, of course, was no. So were we then going to fly to every game? No. The deal was good enough that I might be able to buy the team and sell it for a good profit, but that wasn’t the point of buying a team to me. I wasn’t looking for a business deal, I was looking to get involved in something that would be fun to do.”

  Having let the Vikings deal go, Bisciotti settled into the role of season ticket holder. In the meantime, things were not going so well for the Ravens or the Modells. Soon after deciding to move the team, Modell had decided to shake up the team’s leadership. He had fired Coach Bill Belichick, who had also been the team’s de facto general manager since he had final say on all personnel matters. In his place, Modell named Ozzie Newsome, an all-time Browns great as a tight end, the team’s personnel director and Ted Marchibroda, who had been the last man to coach the Colts in Baltimore, the new coach.

  The team began its new existence on September 1, 1996, with a victory, but things spiraled downward after that and the Ravens finished their first season 4-12. A year later they improved to 6-9-1 and began the 1998 season in the new stadium with legitimate hopes—or so Modell and Newsome believed—of making the playoffs. “Everything went wrong right from the beginning that year,” Newsome remembered. “First play of our first game in the new stadium, Matt Stover kicks the ball out of bounds. We go on and lose [to archrival Pittsburgh] and it was downhill from there.” Before season’s end, it had been decided that Marchibroda would not be asked back. Newsome and David Modell were put in charge of the search committee to find a new coach.

  In the meantime, even with the infusion of money from the move to Baltimore, the Modells continued to struggle financially. There were cost overruns on the new stadium that the Modells had to help finance. The profit levels for the Ravens were not enough to make up the losses suffered in Cleveland and in some of the other investments made by the Modells. By the time the 1998 season ended, the Modells were over the NFL’s debt limit for owners. During the owners’ meetings that winter, Art Modell was politely told by his fellow owners that he needed to find new money for his team, that he could not be allowed to continue to operate over the debt limit because of the precedent it would set. Modell began searching for minority ownership.

  Midway through the 1999 season, with Brian Billick now coaching the team, it was apparent that no one was going to step forward with the kind of money the Modells needed in return for nothing. “What is a minority ownership?” Bisciotti asked rhetorically. “Essentially, it is an interest-free loan to an owner in return for a suite and a parking spot. No one is going to give someone a hundred and fifty million dollars for that. The only way the Modells were going to get anyone interested was with an option to buy.”

  Shortly after Thanksgiving in 1999, Bisciotti and his business partner Jim Davis were approached by John Moag, the man who had brokered the Browns/Ravens deal on behalf of the Maryland Stadium Authority. Moag had been less than happy when the Modells had hired Alex. Brown, a Baltimore-based investment firm, to try to find a minority owner. He had set out on his own looking for an investor, figuring, according to Bisciotti, that if he couldn’t get in on the Modells’ side of the deal, maybe he and his company, Legg Mason, could get involved on the other side.

  Moag explained to Bisciotti and Davis that, according to his NFL sources, the Modells were running out of time. If they weren’t able to come up with financing to cover their debts by the time the NFL owners met after the season, the league might very well put the team for sale by auction. That would mean the Modells would have no control over the amount the team would be sold for, who it would be sold to, or how quickly—most likely right away—the new owners would take control. Because of all that, Moag believed the Modells might be willing to make a deal that would include an option to buy at some point in the future.

  “If there’s an option, I’m interested,” Bisciotti said. “Otherwise, forget it.”

  Moag asked if he could approach the Modells to set up a meeting. Bisciotti and Davis agreed. Within a week, the two men had been invited to Owings Mills for a get-to-know-you visit. They watched the end of a practice one afternoon, met Billick and Newsome, and were then introduced to Art Modell, who was sitting, as he did every day, on his golf cart, watching his team practice. When practice was over, Modell took Bisciotti and Davis upstairs to his office, introduced them to David, and then left the room.

  “You have to understand,” David Modell explained to his surprised visitors. “This is very hard for him. Even being in the room discussing turning the franchise over to anyone else is difficult.”

  Bisciotti and Davis said they understood. The barest parameters of a possible sale were discussed. David Modell explained that if an option to buy was to be included in the deal, then the up-front money had to be more than the $150 million that Moag had talked about. Something close to double that was what they were looking for. A meeting was set up for Friday, December 17, to try to hammer out an agreement.

  “This was really moving fast,” Bisciotti said. “When David started talking about three hundred million dollars, I had to get Bank of America moving fast to figure out if I could come up with that kind of liquidity and to put everything in place before the meeting. John Moag wasn’t happy because he thought he should be doing all that. I made him part of the negotiation but told him I needed Bank of America. He wasn’t happy. I told Bank of America he had to be in the deal because he had brought it to us. They weren’t happy. So, by the time we got to the meeting, the guys negotiating for me were already unhappy.”

  On Bank of America’s recommendation, Bisciotti had hired Dick Cass to head his nego
tiation team—even though Cass’s work for and friendship with Cowboys maverick owner Jerry Jones made him nervous.

  When Bisciotti walked into the meeting on the morning of December 17 at the downtown law offices of Hogan & Hartson, the first thing he did was tell everyone in the room that this would be a one-day negotiation, that he was prepared to stay as late as necessary, but that if there was no deal by day’s end, there would be no deal. “I had made a point of staying under the radar my entire adult life,” he said. “If I was going to become a public figure, it was going to be for a deal I made, not for one that didn’t get made. I knew if we dragged on, eventually the negotiation would leak and I’d be in the papers, working on a deal that might not happen. Was there a little bit of negotiating ploy there? Probably. Because if they’d come back two weeks later and said, ‘Okay, we acquiesce, we’ll give you what you asked for or close to it,’ I’m not gonna tell you I’d have said no. But my basic approach going in was it was today or never.”

  By the time the two sides broke for a late lunch, Bisciotti was convinced there would be no deal. The Modells had started at $700 million for the team, with the option kicking in after five years. Bisciotti wanted to pay $500 million and have an option to buy after three years. By midafternoon, they had closed the gap from $200 million to about $100 million but had made no progress on the option or on other crucial terms—like how much interest the Modells would pay on the money Bisciotti would be, in effect, loaning them prior to the option. Bisciotti went home briefly, told Renee he didn’t think there was going to be a deal and suggested she have the limousine they had hired for the evening pick her up shortly before six o’clock and then come get him at the law office so they could go to Washington to meet ten other couples for their annual pre-Christmas dinner.

  Shortly before six, he called Renee back and told her to delay the limo driver for a while. A deal might get done.

  “We were willing to go to six hundred million, and my sense was so were they,” he said. “But we were far apart on the terms, so far there really didn’t seem room for compromise. I finally said to my guys, ‘I want to talk to Art alone.’ They thought that was a bad idea, but I said, ‘What have we got to lose? Right now, the way we’re going, this isn’t going to happen.’ They agreed. When the two groups were back in the room together, Bisciotti asked to speak to Modell one-on-one. Modell agreed. They went down the hall to a small conference room. It was the first time they had been alone.

  “I remember when we started talking I instantly liked him,” Bisciotti said. “There was a warmth to him. He wasn’t hardballing; this was difficult for him. He told me there was no way his people would let him make the deal for less than six hundred million dollars. I said I understood, but if we were going to six hundred million, it had to be our terms—interest rate, three-year option, things like that. I suggested he go back and tell his group that and we agree that in the next fifteen minutes we either have a deal or walk away. We shook hands on it. Fifteen minutes later they came back in and said if we would compromise at four years on the option, we had a deal.”

  Two hours later, with the lawyers still hammering out details, Bisciotti slid into the limo next to Renee and whispered, as much in shock as in glee, “We got it. We got the Ravens.”

  The final deal was actually for $580 million, plus a commitment by Bisciotti to spend at least $20 million on a desperately needed new practice facility.

  Twenty-four hours after the paperwork was signed, Keith Mills, the weekend sports anchor at Channel 2 in Baltimore, broke the story that the new owner of the Ravens would be Steve Bisciotti, a thirty-nine-year-old local businessman. Very few people knew who Bisciotti was, except perhaps those who regularly attended University of Maryland basketball games and couldn’t help but notice the casually dressed guy with the slicked-back brown hair who sat in the front row at midcourt and kept up a running commentary on the work being done by the officials. That was intentional. Once he became wealthy, Bisciotti had no desire to become famous. Now, though, he would have little choice. He was about to become a member of one of the world’s most exclusive clubs: NFL owner.

  “I did a couple of interviews on the weekend of the sale,” he said. “Ron Shapiro [a prominent Baltimore lawyer who represented, among others, Cal Ripken Jr.] told me I should get it over with, let a photographer take some pictures of me [none though of his family], and that would keep them from stalking me. So I did that. Once that was over, though, I was determined to go underground for the next four years. It was still Art’s team and I didn’t want anyone to think different for a minute until it was time for me to take over.”

  Now that time had come. While the public still didn’t know much about Bisciotti, those who worked in the Ravens complex felt as if they did. He was the friendly guy with the wide smile who insisted on being called Steve. He came to know everyone in the building by name, sat in on the draft and other meetings, but offered input only when asked and didn’t even ask for office space. If he needed to talk to someone, he went to that person’s office.

  “I was learning,” he said. “Let’s face it, what I knew about an NFL team was no more, no less than any other fan. I had opinions, but they certainly weren’t based on expertise. I wanted to come in and be someone who could help the people running the team, not be a burden to them.”

  The Ravens’ fortunes changed radically during 2000, Bisciotti’s first year as a minority owner. After finishing 8-8 in their first season under Billick, they upgraded their defense radically during the off-season—notably with the predraft signing of free-agent defensive tackle Sam Adams—and emerged as a defensive powerhouse. They improved the offense by adding future Hall of Fame tight end Shannon Sharpe. After a 12-4 regular season, they swept through the playoffs, winning road games at Tennessee and Oakland to reach the Super Bowl before routing the New York Giants, 34-7, to win their first championship. They became known as a swaggering, cocky team, that attitude personified by Billick and by Ray Lewis, the brilliant linebacker who had been involved in a bizarre stabbing incident a year earlier during the Super Bowl in Atlanta that had landed him in jail, accused of a double murder. The murder charge was eventually dropped and Lewis pleaded guilty to an obstruction-of-justice charge, based on his initial conversations with police on the night of the murders. When Billick began Super Bowl week by lecturing the media to leave Lewis alone and not ask questions about what had happened in Atlanta, he made himself the media’s target for the week.

  Which was exactly what he wanted. The Ravens won the game easily and earned the enmity of most of America in the process. They didn’t much care in Baltimore. The championship was the city’s first in any sport since the Orioles won the World Series in 1983 and first in football since the Colts had beaten the Cowboys in 1971 in Super Bowl V.

  The Ravens returned to the playoffs a year later, winning a game before losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Then, like many NFL teams, they were forced to purge a number of veteran players because of the salary cap and they began the 2002 season almost back at square one again. “We had some great players on the team,” Billick said. “We still had Ray, we still had [All-Pro left tackle] Jonathan Ogden, and some other very solid guys. But not many. When I looked at the roster that spring, I couldn’t have told you twenty guys who would be on the team for sure. I remember thinking, ‘Please, God, don’t let me be the first coach to win a Super Bowl and then go 0-16 two years later.’”

  The Ravens did considerably better than that. Even though Ray Lewis suffered a season-ending back injury in the fifth week of the season, they were 7-7 with two weeks to play and still in contention for a playoff berth. Those hopes ended when the new Browns—then in their fourth season—drove the length of the field in the final two minutes to pull out a 14-13 victory in Baltimore. That victory helped the Browns make the playoffs. The Ravens lost their finale, 34-31, at Pittsburgh and finished 7-9.

  In all, though, it had been an encouraging season, considering that the Ravens
were the youngest team in NFL history. Newsome and Billick and their scouts believed they needed to strengthen the quarterback position, an Achilles’ heel throughout Billick’s regime, in order to make a playoff run. After some major draft-day maneuvering, they traded their number one pick in 2004 to New England for the Patriots’ pick—the nineteenth in the draft—and used it on Kyle Boller, a strong-armed kid from the University of California-Berkeley who had blossomed as a senior under a new coach. Most people, the Ravens included, figured the team would at least begin the season with Chris Redman, a four-year veteran from Louisville, at quarterback to allow Boller to learn from the bench before being thrown into the fire.

  It didn’t work out that way. Billick decided during training camp that Boller had progressed so quickly that it was pointless to let Redman start the season, and named him his starter, almost unheard-of in the modern NFL. Boller and the Ravens took a licking on opening day in Pittsburgh, but with running back Jamal Lewis putting up record numbers, they took a 5-3 record into St. Louis. Late in the first half, Boller took a hard shot in the thigh, damaging his right quadriceps muscle.

  After Redman played a miserable second half in Boller’s place that day, Billick made another radical decision, deciding to hand the quarterback job to third-stringer Anthony Wright in Boller’s absence. It was a difficult decision because he liked Redman but was convinced that Wright was more capable of getting the team to the playoffs. He was correct. Wright led a miraculous fourth-quarter comeback from 17 points down against Seattle, and the Ravens ended up 10-6, winning the AFC North Division by two games over the Cincinnati Bengals and four over the Steelers, who stumbled to a surprising 6-10 finish.

  Even after the loss to Tennessee, the sense was that 2003 had been just a beginning. The Ravens were still the third-youngest team in football and would bring back almost all of their starters—including a healthy Boller, whom Billick named as his starter the day after the season ended to make sure there would be no Boller-Wright controversy during the off-season or in training camp. The team would also search for a big-play wide receiver to help balance the offense, which had become almost entirely dependent on Lewis’s running during 2003.