Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  But the early signs weren’t good. Owens had been lost, and now one of the two men who would appear on the cover of the media guide was likely to spend the season with drug charges and possible jail time hanging over his head.

  The Ravens knew that Lewis had been around drugs growing up in inner-city Atlanta and they knew he had used marijuana, having been suspended in 2001 for testing positive a second time. They also knew that since then he had been in the very stringent NFL drug-testing program, in which a player can be tested up to ten times a month, year-round, and had been clean in every test. “I’ve smoked marijuana,” Lewis admitted. “I never smoked it like Ricky Williams [the Miami Dolphins running back who would walk away from the game in July rather than give up marijuana] but I smoked it. That’s it, though. Nothing else.”

  In fact, the charges against Lewis did not allege that he had used drugs of any kind. When Cass began to gather information, he came away convinced —“albeit through biased eyes,” he said—that Lewis had been set up by a good-looking woman. The woman was named Michelle Smith and she had a rap sheet slightly longer than one of Yao Ming’s arms. She had been in federal prison when she made a deal with the FBI to act as bait in a sting the agency wanted to run in Atlanta designed to catch college athletes who had taken money from sports agents while still in school. The targets of the sting were the agents more than the athletes. Smith was able to find no evidence that Lewis had taken money from any of the targeted agents, but she did glean that some of his boyhood friends and acquaintances were familiar with the drug scene in Atlanta. That hardly made Lewis different from anyone else who had grown up in his neighborhood.

  “Where I grew up was like a lot of places,” he said. “You had a choice—drugs or sports. I chose sports. I was never into the drug scene. But, of course, I knew people who were.”

  After Smith had become “romantically” involved with Lewis—or so he thought—she asked him if he could help her get some drugs. He called a friend on his cell phone to set up a meeting for her. It was that phone call that made him, according to the prosecutors, an accomplice in a drug deal even though he never received any money and never purchased any drugs.

  The Ravens were baffled and angered by the charges. Why now, three and a half years after the event had taken place? The answer, according to the prosecutors, was that Lewis was a small piece in a massive case that was just now coming together. The Ravens were convinced that his celebrity had a lot to do with it, especially after his record-breaking season had made him a national figure. “Part of it may have been publicity seeking,” Cass said. “But I also think, to be fair, that part of it was concern that if someone came across Jamal’s name in the files, which was entirely possible, and it came out that they had him on a cell phone setting up a deal and never prosecuted him, that they’d get nailed for not charging him.”

  Regardless of the reasoning and regardless of the fact that Lewis was twenty when the incident occurred and not even technically a Raven yet, the news was another blow to a franchise constantly dealing with image questions. In the NFL world according to Paul Tagliabue, every player is supposed to come across like those who appear on the carefully crafted United Way commercials: men whose hearts are as big as their bodies, men who give back to their communities, men who spend their free time helping those in need. That image crafting was one of the reasons Tagliabue had gone ballistic over the ESPN series Playmakers, which fictionalized a dark side of pro football life: players doing drugs, hitting their wives, staying out until all hours every night, lying and cheating at every turn.

  It was a measure of the power of Tagliabue and the NFL that ESPN canceled the show after one season rather than risk the wrath of the commissioner and the league in the next round of TV rights negotiations, which were scheduled to begin late in 2004. When Tagliabue and company screamed, ESPN backed down in less time than it takes to tape a United Way spot.

  In truth, the Playmakers portrayal of life in the NFL is no more accurate than the United Way portrayals. Football players do get into trouble. But there are also football players who are as charitable as the Tagliabue-created United Way bits make them out to be. The majority fall someplace in the middle. In the Ravens’ media guide, every player bio contains a note in unmissable block letters about some charitable act performed by the player.

  Jamal Lewis’s arrest would not make the media guide. But it would make a lot of headlines and take up a lot of time around Owings Mills in the months ahead.

  With Owens headed to Philadelphia and free agency essentially a non-starter for the Ravens, they turned their full attention to the draft. For years, this had been the strength of the franchise, beginning with the historic 1996 draft that had brought them Jonathan Ogden and Ray Lewis. Newsome was justifiably proud of the work he and his scouts had done through the years, not just in the first round, where teams are expected to find good players, but in the later rounds and with undrafted free agents.

  The two key men for Newsome in preparing for the draft were Phil Savage and Eric DeCosta, neither of whom looked like, sounded like, or had the background of a typical NFL scout. Savage was thirty-nine, a graduate of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he had played both football and baseball in Division 3. He had joined the organization in 1991 as an assistant coach, the same year Newsome had retired as a player, and had started to learn the ropes of coaching and scouting. He and Savage had worked together almost daily in Cleveland and Baltimore for fourteen years. When Newsome had been promoted to personnel director after the team’s move in 1996, one of his first decisions had been to promote Savage to director of college scouting.

  Seven years later, when James Harris, who had been the team’s director of pro scouting, left to become personnel director in Jacksonville, Newsome promoted Savage to director of player personnel. By then, Modell had made Newsome general manager. When Savage moved up, DeCosta was given his job, making him, at the age of thirty-one, the youngest scouting director in the NFL. He had also played college football, at Colby College in Maine, another school with outstanding academics but hardly a proving ground for future NFL players or scouts. George Kokinis, who was the Ravens’ director of pro scouting, had graduated from Hobart—another Division 3 school known more for academics and lacrosse, not football.

  What the three had in common was a hunger to succeed. Each had started on a bottom rung of the business, Savage as a graduate assistant coach at Alabama, DeCosta as a graduate assistant at Trinity College, and Kokinis as an intern with the Browns. Newsome had trained them, nurtured them, and promoted them, and all of them believed they formed the nucleus of the best scouting staff in the NFL.

  There was ego in that, but there was also a track record. Going into 2004, seven of the eleven first-round draft picks selected by the Ravens had been Pro Bowlers at least once. Ten of the eleven were still with the team, and two of the Pro Bowlers—Ed Reed and Todd Heap had been late first-rounders (twenty-fourth and thirty-first) who had gone on to make the Pro Bowl in their second seasons. In all, fifty-four of the sixty-four players the Ravens had picked in the draft had made opening-day rosters, an uncommonly high number. What’s more, they could point to several success stories in free agency, notably Priest Holmes, who had become a Pro Bowl running back as an undrafted free agent before moving to Kansas City, and Mike Flynn and Will Demps, who were currently the team’s starting center and starting strong safety. Newsome was as respected as any general manager in the game, and Savage was considered a GM-in-waiting. He had almost become the general manager in Philadelphia three years earlier and had almost gone to Jacksonville in 2003. Everyone in the organization believed it was only a matter of time before he was given his own team to build.

  Even so, this draft would be different from others because there was no first-round pick. That pick was already on the team in the form of Boller, a decision they had made a year earlier that he was not only the best quarterback they could get in that draft but better than any qua
rterback they would be able to get in this draft. “We would have been drafting twenty-first,” Newsome said on the morning of the 2004 draft. “There are two quarterbacks [Eli Manning from Mississippi and Ben Roethlisberger from Miami of Ohio] who graded a tiny bit higher than Kyle and one quarterback [Philip Rivers from N.C. State] who graded the same as Kyle. They’ll all be gone long before we draft. So I think we did very well getting Kyle when we did.”

  So it was going to be a long wait during the first round. The NFL draft has somehow become a major sports event in the United States. Every minute of the draft, from noon on a Saturday in late April until about 6 p.m. on Sunday evening, is televised by ESPN. The draft dominates sports pages and sports telecasts and sports talk radio for weeks, before and after it takes place. Mock drafts are held all over the country, and a number of people have made themselves into cult figures by becoming draft experts. Mel Kiper Jr., the ESPN draft guru, isn’t even a cult figure—he’s a celebrity, period. Not only is the draft heavily attended by “draftniks” in New York City, it is watched for hours on end by people who really and truly want to know who Baltimore will take in the seventh round. In all, there would be 255 picks in the 2004 draft, and each one would be analyzed at length. After all, Tom Brady, the New England quarterback who might be the league’s most important player, had been taken with the 199th pick of the draft four years earlier. One never knew where the next Brady lurked.

  The week of the draft, with the Ravens as with all teams, is one of great excitement and speculation—not only among fans but within the team. Assistant coaches spend large chunks of time campaigning with Newsome and the scouts to get certain players chosen. Position coaches point out their needs and how a certain player might fill those needs if the chance to draft him were to arise. When Marvin Lewis was the Ravens’ defensive coordinator, he would often set up a chair outside Newsome’s office and wait for him to break from his meetings with scouts so he could tell him what he wanted and why he wanted it. Every coach had a list of players at his position and an idea of when they might be drafted and which of them might be available when the Ravens had a chance to draft.

  The entire staff gathered on the morning of April 24, a bright, clear day, to go through the process that the NFL officially calls its “Annual Selection Meeting.” The Ravens’ draft room was just barely big enough to fit everyone involved. A long conference table sat in the middle of the room, with Newsome, wearing a blue shirt, khaki pants, and loafers with no socks (in fact, none of the three major personnel decision makers on the Ravens—Newsome, Billick, or Bisciotti—wore socks on draft weekend), seated at one end with two telephones in front of him. His staff fanned out around him: Phil Savage and Eric DeCosta were to his right; Pat Moriarty, the capologist, to his left. Dick Cass sat midway down on the right, and George Kokinis was across from him. Daniel Jeremiah, one of the team’s younger scouts, was on a phone hookup to New York, where another scout, T. J. McCreight, sat relaying the names of the players being selected a few seconds before Tagliabue actually announced them.

  About an hour before the draft began, Newsome briefed the room on what he expected from the day. The Ravens had approached the draft, he said, no differently than in the past, even though they had no first-round pick. They had ranked 150 players and expected that the ten picks they had—one second, one third, one fourth, two fifths, two sixths, and three sevenths—would come from that list. A trade into the first round was highly unlikely. Newsome had talked to some general managers about swapping second-round picks and might try to move up in the second round if that meant getting a player he wanted. He had also spent a good deal of time during the week shopping for a wide receiver. Several veterans would be available, he thought, once teams had drafted a wide receiver. There were four realistic possibilities: Joe Horn from New Orleans, Dennis Northcutt from Cleveland, Jabar Gaffney from Houston, and Kevin Johnson from Jacksonville. Keenan McCardell of Tampa Bay was also a possibility, but Tampa Bay GM Bruce Allen wanted a first-day pick (the first three rounds are conducted the first day) in return. “I’ve only got two of them,” Newsome said. “I don’t think I want to give one up.” The other four could probably be had for mid-round draft picks because of age, salary, baggage, or a combination of all three. Newsome thought the deal most likely to happen was a deal with Jacksonville, which would bring Johnson for either a fourth this year or a third-round pick in next year’s draft.

  Directly behind where Newsome sat was a board with a five-by-seven card for each of the Ravens’ top two hundred prospects. They were listed by position with the top-rated player at the position at the top of the board and the others lined up below him. To Newsome’s left was a second board with cards for every other player the Ravens had scouted or had a scouting report on. There were more than four hundred cards on the side board, which Billick jokingly called “the leper board.” Good players came off the leper board in virtually every draft. Will Demps and Mike Flynn, both now starters, had once been on the Ravens’ leper board. Billick traditionally put up $100 for the person on staff who picked the name of the first player chosen (by anyone) from the leper board. He also put up $300 to go to the person who picked the most players chosen between the tenth and twenty-fifth picks. (The first nine were considered too easy.) To Newsome’s right was an empty board, with a helmet logo for each of the thirty-two teams. As players were drafted, their cards were moved from the draft board to the drafted board. The fourth wall of the room consisted of an empty greaseboard, a screen used to look at tape and, in the corner, a cabinet behind which Billick kept the names of the fifty-three players he expected to be on the roster in September. That was, of course, subject to constant change. Some of the players drafted would go right onto that list.

  The draft boards represented months and months of work by the scouts; thousands and thousands of hours of traveling, making reports, and breaking down tape. The total cost for putting the board together was about $2 million. Each player’s card was filled with information. It had his name and uniform number, his exact height down to a hundredth of an inch, weight, and 40-yard-dash time. It also had his college, the number of years he had started, and his score on the Wunderlik test. The Wunderlik is the NFL’s version of an IQ test. Virtually every player takes it, most at the weeklong combine (the term comes from combining all NFL teams in one place) in Indianapolis, where all thirty-two teams gather to meet and greet (and test and retest) most draft prospects. Some teams put great emphasis on the Wunderlik; others virtually ignore it. The Ravens probably fall somewhere in between: a high Wunderlik doesn’t mean they are going to draft someone and a low one doesn’t mean they won’t, but they factor the score in along with the other information they gather. In 1996 Jonathan Ogden had the highest Wunderlik score of anyone on the draft board. That was nice. The fact that he was six foot nine, 345 pounds, and quick was nicer.

  Each player was given a number grade by the scouts after adding up all factors. The highest you could grade was 8.0, and that had happened twice: to O. J. Simpson and Bo Jackson. A player who was 6.5 or higher was considered a surefire NFL starter. Anyone over 6.0 would play in the league. Anyone in the 5.5-6.0 range had a chance to make a roster. Anything lower than that was a long shot. In scoutese, Manning and Roethlisberger were “sixty-sevens”— 6.7s—as was Iowa’s massive tackle, Robert Gallery. A player considered an “eighty”—an 8.0—was the football equivalent of a perfect ten. There were no Bo Dereks in this draft.

  The back of each card contained even more details: a player’s 10-yard-dash time, his “box score” (an agility test), his hand size, and any other notes that might be pertinent. Some of the cards contained black dots. That meant that someone on the scouting staff had raised a serious concern about a player for one reason or another. In some cases, it was because of an injury. In others it was drug use or an arrest record. The NFL’s security staff kept teams apprised of any arrests that it was aware of involving players. There was also a Web site that tracked any alleged drug us
e, positive drug tests, or arrests involving players. One significant player, Michigan running back Chris Perry, had been black-dotted by the Ravens because scout Joe Douglas had seen him dislocate a shoulder during a workout. Another player had been black-dotted because the Ravens had learned in their background research that he was a witch doctor, meaning he did not take conventional medicines. A light brown dot indicated that a player might be a medical question mark. A blue dot meant he was a punt/kickoff returner. A dark brown dot meant he was a long snapper.

  Newsome began the day holding out long-shot hopes that one of three receivers—Lee Evans of Wisconsin, Michael Clayton of LSU, or Rashaun Woods of Oklahoma State—might fall into the second round. “If one of them is still there, we’ll try to trade up to get them,” he explained to Bisciotti and Art Modell, who sat at the far end of the table next to Bisciotti.

  This was the first draft in which Bisciotti had been the majority owner and Modell a minority owner. Everyone in the room knew this was not going to be an easy day for Modell. Bisciotti was supremely conscious of that and peppered Modell with questions about drafts past, knowing that Modell loved to tell stories. “One year there were two guys named Brian Lawrence in the draft,” he said. “One was a defensive lineman, the other a wide receiver. We drafted the receiver. We call him and I get on the phone, introduce myself, and say, ‘We were very impressed with your forty time.’ He says to me, ‘Forty time? What kind of scouts do you guys have up there in Cleveland?’ Turns out we’d called the defensive lineman.”