Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Before the playoffs began, Bisciotti, Newsome, and Billick made plans to get together the week after the season ended—whenever it ended—to begin making plans for the future. They all knew that there would be a lot of general talk about how they would proceed with Bisciotti now the boss, as opposed to Art and David Modell. But they also knew there were a number of specific issues that needed to be addressed—most notably, the offense, with an emphasis on the future of one man: offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh.

  “I’ll see you Thursday,” Bisciotti said to Billick after the Tennessee game ended the 2003 season. He would be flying to Florida to unwind for a few days.

  “Looking forward to it,” Billick said, meaning it.

  He knew Bisciotti was going to want to talk about Cavanaugh. That was fine with him.

  Bisciotti was still in Florida when someone in his office faxed him a story written by Mike Preston in the Baltimore Sun two days after the Tennessee loss. Preston is the most outspoken member of the Baltimore media when it comes to the Ravens. A former beat writer turned columnist, he can be sharply critical of Billick and the team. Billick is very good at disarming the media. Those who know him well understand his sometimes prickly sense of humor and know that the best way to deal with his occasional antimedia tirades is to go right back at him. Those who don’t know him frequently find him intimidating or annoying.

  Preston knows Billick and is willing to trade barbs with him, both in print and in person. Billick has no problem with that even though he is often angered by what Preston writes. Now Preston was campaigning for Cavanaugh’s firing, saying that Bisciotti’s first act as owner should be to insist that Billick fire the offensive coordinator. When Preston asked Billick if he expected to address the issue with Bisciotti, Billick’s answer was direct: “There is no issue. Matt’s the coordinator. End of discussion.”

  When Bisciotti read Billick’s comments to Preston, he blew up. “I do have a temper,” he said. “I’ve always been aware of the fact that there are times when I need to rein it in because I’ll say things I don’t want to say when I’m angry. But when I read this I was really angry. Brian knew that Matt was one of the issues I wanted to discuss with him when we sat down. When he makes that comment, it comes across to me as ‘I don’t want or need input from anyone, and anyone who doesn’t agree with my position doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ By the time we sat down on Thursday, I was still hot.”

  Billick and Newsome arrived at Bisciotti’s house, which looks down on the Severn River, prepared for a long day of discussions about personnel—both on and off the field. They already knew that Dick Cass, the Washington lawyer who had worked on Bisciotti’s purchase of the team and had also worked on the sale of the Washington Redskins from the Jack Kent Cooke estate to Dan Snyder, was going to replace David Modell as team president. As part of the deal, Modell would remain on the payroll for another year at a salary of $1 million as a consultant. Beyond that, they had no idea what changes—if any—Bisciotti was contemplating.

  Bisciotti wasn’t planning any major changes. He didn’t see any reason to tinker with success. The Ravens had been in the playoffs three years out of four, had won a Super Bowl, and gone through a salary purge, coming out on the other end as a playoff team two seasons later. He was very happy with the direction of the team. But he was angry at his coach.

  When he confronted Billick on the Cavanaugh issue, Billick was repentant about his comments to Preston but not about his belief that Cavanaugh should remain on the job. “I told him that Mike had backed me into a corner,” Billick said later. “I wasn’t going to sound as if I was on the fence on the issue, because I wasn’t. If I had said, ‘That’s something Ozzie and I will discuss with Steve,’ it would have sounded as if I was hedging publicly on Matt. I didn’t want to do that. But my intent was not to make it sound as if I didn’t want to hear what Steve had to say.”

  That explanation softened Bisciotti . . . a little. “I had decided this was the time to kind of lay everything out for Brian, not just on Cavanaugh. I didn’t want him to think for a second that he wasn’t the guy I wanted to be my coach for the next ten years, because he absolutely was. But there were some issues that related to the way he dealt with people that I wanted to get out in the open right away, and the Cavanaugh thing crystallized them for me in many ways.”

  When Bisciotti talks, on almost any issue, he does so with great passion. His voice is almost always scratchy because he speaks so rapidly and so intently once he gets on a roll. When he is upset about something, the words come tumbling out and can take people by surprise because most of the time he is a hail-fellow-well-met. Now there was no sign of the outgoing, gregarious guy who had been hanging around the Owings Mills facility for the past four years.

  “You have some bad habits,” he said to Billick. “For example, you always address me as ‘young man’ when you see me, and my wife as ‘young lady.’ First of all, I’m five years younger than you, I’m not some kid and neither is my wife. Second, I’m about to become the owner of this team—your boss—and you greet me the same way you greet some kid coming up to you for an autograph. That’s disrespectful.”

  Billick was rocked. Who had kidnapped the smiling, friendly guy in the blue jeans and replaced him with this suddenly in-your-face new boss? “I don’t mean it as a sign of disrespect,” he said. “It’s just a habit.”

  “I know you don’t,” Bisciotti said. “Because you aren’t really that way. But that’s the way it comes across. It’s a bad habit.”

  He wasn’t finished. “Another thing you do is you don’t show our scouts enough respect. To begin with, you’re always getting right up in their face when you talk to them. You’re six foot five, most of them are about five-eight. That’s uncomfortable and intimidating. One of the first things I teach my salesmen is to give someone they’re talking to a full arm’s length of room, especially if you’re taller than the other guy. Do not ever look straight down at someone. It’s not fair. And you need to make a point of telling them how much you respect the work they do because they work thousands of hours trying to get you the best players they can and then you act as if they don’t even exist half the time you’re with them. Half the time when [personnel director] Phil Savage is trying to talk, you don’t let him finish a sentence.”

  Now it was Billick’s turn to be angry. He didn’t think Bisciotti understood the natural—and healthy—scrimmaging that went on between the personnel and coaching staffs. He was, in fact, proud of the fact that he and Newsome could often disagree without ever getting personal about it. The same went for the two staffs. “I’ve always liked the fact that we can sit in a room, really go at it, motherfuck one another at times, and then come out of it understanding we all want the same thing. I didn’t think Steve understood that was the way the building worked, in some ways it was what made the building work.”

  Billick also believed that Bisciotti tended to have warmer feelings for Newsome and the personnel people than for him and his coaches. “It was only natural,” he said. “When Steve came to practice, the coaches were working, Ozzie and the scouts were watching. So he spent more time with them. It was understandable that he would see their point of view more than ours.”

  When Billick made that point, Bisciotti didn’t disagree. The meeting filled the entire afternoon. They hadn’t even really gotten to the Cavanaugh issue. The next morning Billick called Bisciotti. He wanted him to know he understood where he was coming from but sensed the new boss still had more to talk about. Bisciotti agreed. They decided to meet on Saturday morning at the facility, knowing it would be virtually empty since the staff was away on brief postseason vacations. When the two men arrived the next morning, Billick couldn’t find a key to his office—usually the offices in the building were left unlocked—so the two men ended up sitting down in Cavanaugh’s office (which wasn’t locked) to discuss Cavanaugh.

  By his own admission, Bisciotti was looking at the offense from a fan’s poin
t of view. The passing game was pathetic—last in the league—and had never been good in the six years Billick had been the coach and Cavanaugh the coordinator. “Sometimes you just have to make hard decisions, that’s what you get paid for,” Bisciotti told Billick.

  “Steve, don’t you see, the easy decision for me would be to fire Matt,” Billick shot back. “I’d make you happy, I’d make the media happy, I’d make the fans happy. It’s almost like a magic trick. Fire one guy, make thousands, including your boss, happy. But it wouldn’t be right or fair. The reasons for our failures on offense go beyond Matt. For one thing, I’m the one who decides what our offensive strengths are. This year it was the run, so we ran the ball and we ran it very well. For another, we had a rookie quarterback for half the season and an ex-third stringer for the second half. For another, we’re not real strong at wide receiver. Firing Matt would be easy, not hard. But it wouldn’t be right.”

  Bisciotti is, if nothing else, a good listener. He can be tough, as Billick had learned, but he’s also fair. They continued talking until Bisciotti had to leave to go to a basketball game one of his sons was playing in. They agreed to meet one more time, the next day back at Bisciotti’s house. “I was feeling better about things by then,” Bisciotti said. “And I was pretty close to convinced Brian was right about Cavanaugh. But I’m not sure Brian was feeling better. That’s why we needed to meet again.”

  Bisciotti was right about Billick. The two meetings had shaken him. The last thing he had expected was an owner who got right in his face when he disagreed with him. “It occurred to me that Steve reminded me of somebody,” he said. “Me. He came right at you, told you what he thought, and if you didn’t like it, tough. I certainly respected that; I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t. But it unnerved me. I honestly wondered if the two of us were going to be able to work together.”

  Bisciotti had no such qualms. He knew he had shaken Billick up, and that was okay. But he also knew that, one way or the other, he was going to make Billick understand that even if they disagreed at times, they could work together and that he was going to do everything he could to provide Billick with what he needed to win another Super Bowl. “As a boss, if someone’s good at what they do, you might shake them up every now and then to try to make them better, but you make it clear to them that you support them and want them to be there.”

  Uncertain what to do next, Billick called his old boss and mentor Denny Green. “Don’t bother trying to change,” Green told Billick. “For one thing, you can’t do it. For another, if you win, that’s the ultimate answer. If you don’t win, you can do everything the guy wants you to do and you’re going to get fired anyway.”

  In short: Just win, baby.

  The Sunday meeting was the most relaxed of the three. Bisciotti felt he had made the points he needed to make to Billick, and Billick was relieved and pleased that Bisciotti had come around to his way of thinking on Cavanaugh. Even though Billick’s contract specifically said that he had complete control over the hiring and firing of coaches, the last thing he wanted was to begin the new owner’s regime with a confrontation. Bisciotti told Billick that he had won him over on the subject of Cavanaugh and that he planned to tell Cavanaugh just that when he returned from vacation.

  The two men shook hands at the door. Bisciotti told Billick he felt a lot better than he had three days earlier. Billick said he felt better, too.

  They both meant what they said. Or, at the very least, they hoped they did.

  3

  Ozzie Transcends Us All

  WHILE BRIAN BILLICK WAS HAVING A DIFFICULT FIRST WEEK dealing with his new boss, Ozzie Newsome had no such problems. Bisciotti had asked only one thing of him during the transfer of power: “If you’re going to do something that will make news, let me know before you do it so I don’t hear about it from one of my friends.”

  An NFL general manager could hardly ask for greater carte blanche from an owner. That was pretty much the way it was for Newsome in the Ravens’ organization. Years earlier Kevin Byrne, the team’s vice president for public relations, had half-jokingly said, “Ozzie transcends us all.” Billick repeated the line so often that newcomers thought it was his. What Byrne meant and others understood was that no one who worked for the Ravens questioned Newsome. Not the old owner, who viewed him as an adopted son; not the new owner, who respected and trusted him completely; not the head coach, who was almost awed by his lack of ego; and not anyone else who worked in the building.

  Much of that respect centered on Newsome having been part of the organization for his entire adult life: He had been drafted by the Cleveland Browns in 1978 as a first-round pick out of the University of Alabama. He had played for the team for thirteen years and had retired having caught more passes (662) than any tight end in NFL history. He was a beloved figure in Cleveland, and Art Modell asked him to stay on as a scout, an assistant coach, or both—whatever he wanted. He eventually chose scouting, and when the team moved to Baltimore and Modell fired Bill Belichick, Newsome was put in charge of personnel decisions.

  If there was any doubt about his ability to run a team, it was put to rest only a couple of months after he had taken over, during his first draft. Almost everyone in football was convinced that the Ravens, with the fourth pick, were going to take the supremely talented but supremely troubled Lawrence Phillips, the controversial running back from Nebraska. Modell thought Phillips was worth the risk and told Newsome so. Newsome and his scouts thought Jonathan Ogden, the mammoth left tackle from UCLA, was a better player who came with less risk. Over Modell’s objections, he took Ogden.

  “Looking back on it, the reason I’m still here today is because I took Ogden and not Phillips with that pick,” he said, laughing. “I knew what Mr. Modell wanted but I also knew what I thought was the best thing for us to do. I figured if I was going to fail, I was going to fail doing what I thought was right.”

  Later in the first round Newsome, with a pick the team had acquired the year before from San Francisco, took Ray Lewis, a ferocious linebacker out of Miami, considered too small by a lot of scouts and too much of a troublemaker by some others. Three linebackers—Kevin Hardy, John Mobley, and Reggie Brown—had already been selected before Newsome took Lewis with the twenty-sixth pick of the first round.

  Nine years later Ogden and Lewis are the centerpieces of the Ravens and lock Hall of Famers when their careers are over. One draft, two Hall of Famers. A pretty good start for anyone. In 1999 Newsome was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A year later the Ravens won the Super Bowl. In 2002 Modell made official what had been fact for six years and named Newsome general manager. That made Newsome the first African American to hold that title with an NFL team.

  “To be honest, I didn’t think much about it at the time, because I’d been doing the job for six years,” he said. “So, while it was nice to have the title, it didn’t change my life on a day-to-day basis at all. But then I was on a radio show with [former Georgetown basketball coach] John Thompson and he said to me, ‘What’s important about this is that African American kids can now look at you and say, “Why can’t I be an NFL general manager, too?”’ That was when it seemed like a big deal to me.”

  What makes Newsome transcendent is that very few things are a big deal to him. He grew up in Alabama, born in the town of Muscle Shoals, which is part of a quadrangle of four midsize towns in the northwestern corner of the state. His father, Ozzie Sr., was an entrepreneur. He operated restaurants and a cab company and sold bootleg alcohol at different times during his life. His mother, Ethel Mae, worked on occasion to make sure her five children (Ozzie was the third) had whatever they wanted, but she spent the majority of her time making sure the children stayed on the straight and narrow—did well in school, made it to church every Sunday—at the very least.

  “If the sun was up and something was going on at church, we were there,” Newsome said. “Most Sundays, we showed up at nine in the morning and didn’t get out until midafternoon. Every Sunday it
was shoutin’ and praisin’ and preachin’ and prayin’ and we held hands and then we prayed some more. The church was an important part of life for blacks in the South because it was one place we could go where we felt we had some control of our lives. The sanctuary in the church was ours, no one else’s. There was still a good deal of segregation when I was young, and then when integration did start, there was a lot of tension. But in our church [Cave Springs Missionary Baptist Church] there was no tension. It made you feel grounded in life no matter what else was going on. It wasn’t just about religion or about God, it was about learning discipline and how to conduct yourself and do the right things.”

  It was natural for Newsome to be drawn to sports. His grandfather was a huge fan of the Atlanta Braves, who moved to the South when Newsome was ten. His dad had been a renowned catcher as a semi-pro player in the Negro Leagues. “My dad was five-six and probably weighed about two-ninety,” Newsome said. “He was a big man. When I was a kid, people always told me about how he could throw runners out from the sitting position. He never stood up, just whipped the ball from the sitting position and threw people out.”

  At the age of ten, Newsome was presented with an unusual opportunity by his mother. Segregation was slowly going away in the South. Newsome can still remember going as a young boy to Sheffield, the largest town in the area, and seeing separate entrances for whites and “coloreds,” separate drinking fountains and bathrooms, too. Now, with schools becoming integrated, Ethel Mae Newsome asked her son if he wanted to go to the same school he had been attending, which was more than 90 percent black, or go to sixth grade down the road at a school that was 90 percent white.