Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Matt was a good athlete as a kid, a baseball player first —“probably my favorite sport even after I started playing football really well”—but eventually he blossomed into a football star. He was widely recruited but opted for Pittsburgh, where Johnny Majors was building a powerhouse led by a freshman running back named Tony Dorsett. Cavanaugh became a star at quarterback in his junior season, the year the Panthers went 12-0 and won the national championship, led by Dorsett, who won the Heisman Trophy. Cavanaugh had an outstanding year, good enough that he went into his senior year as one of the favorites to succeed Dorsett as the Heisman Trophy winner. That bubble burst in the opener against Notre Dame, when Cavanaugh broke his wrist trying to break a fall while scrambling. He came back at midseason to lead Pitt to a 10-2 record and was drafted in the second round by the New England Patriots. His first coach there was Chuck Fairbanks, who walked into his first meeting with the rookies, lit a cigarette, and said, “There’s not one of you in here that we need.” He was a part-time starter during his career with the Patriots before being traded to the 49ers in 1983, where he backed up Joe Montana for three years, including 1984, when the 49ers won the Super Bowl. “The first day I was there Bill Walsh greeted me and told me how thrilled they were to have me, how he thought they were a better team because they had me,” Cavanaugh said. “I learned a lesson right there: it isn’t that hard to make a player feel good about playing for you. He was the complete opposite of Fairbanks.”

  In 1986 he was traded to the Eagles and spent four seasons in Philadelphia before being cut by Buddy Ryan during training camp in 1990. “Buddy had told the front office to offer me a ten percent pay cut to come back,” Cavanaugh remembered, laughing. “Somehow, they got confused and offered me a ten percent raise. Naturally, I took it. Buddy said to me, ‘How the hell did this happen?’ I told him, they offered and I took. Not long after that he cut me.

  “It wasn’t a shock when it happened, but it was a shock, especially since I thought I’d had a really good camp. My wife and kids had stayed back in Rhode Island during camp because I knew there was a chance I’d get cut. I’d played twelve years, that’s a long time. But even so, it’s an awful feeling. I remember making that drive back home just feeling worthless. I mean, I knew better, but that’s the way you feel when you get cut.”

  Players call the trip home after getting cut “the drive of shame.” The feeling didn’t last long for Cavanaugh. About an hour after he walked into the house, the phone rang. The person on the other end was whispering. “You know who this is, right?” Cavanaugh was pretty sure he knew. “Okay, I can’t really talk to you until you clear waivers tomorrow, but I want you down here. I need a number three quarterback with some experience because I lost Jeff Rutledge to Washington and I’ve got a kid as my backup. Officially, we haven’t talked. Unofficially, you interested?”

  Cavanaugh hung up the phone. When his wife asked him what the call was about, he shrugged and said, “Officially, that was no one. Unofficially, I’m pretty sure it was Bill Parcells and he wants me to come to New York and back up Phil Simms and Jeff Hostetler.”

  The money was the same as he would have been paid as a backup in Philadelphia. Cavanaugh had made no plans for the 1990 season, so he said yes. As it turned out, Simms went down late in the season and Hostetler ended up leading the Giants to a Super Bowl win over the Buffalo Bills. Cavanaugh got into the Super Bowl for several plays when Hostetler got nicked during the game. He played one more year in New York and then retired after fourteen NFL seasons.

  “The two years in New York were like a bonus,” he said. “I ended up getting another Super Bowl ring, which I certainly didn’t count on, and I met Jim Fassel, because he came on staff in ’91. I was really lucky.”

  During the 1991 season Pitt coach Paul Hackett, whom he had played for while with the 49ers, called him. He knew Cavanaugh was coming to the end and he thought he should be a coach. Specifically, Hackett wanted him to come back to his alma mater as the offensive coordinator at the end of the season. Once, Cavanaugh would have laughed at such an offer. “When I first got out of college, I thought I would end up doing something involving criminal justice. That’s what my degree was in. What I really wanted to do was be in the FBI. I even took some night classes my first few years in the league to prepare for applying. But as time went on, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. I hadn’t planned to play for as long as I did. Starting in a new profession at thirty-six with no experience wouldn’t be easy. So, when Paul suggested coaching, I thought it made sense.”

  There was only one problem: Hackett got fired at the end of the season. The good news was that his replacement was Majors, rehired by Pitt (after being forced out at Tennessee) to try to re-create the Panthers’ glory of the ’70s. “I figured I was a lock to get hired by Coach Majors,” Cavanaugh said. “I thought I’d be offensive coordinator, quarterbacks coach worst-case scenario.

  Which is why he was stunned when Majors called to say he had one job left: tight ends coach. Cavanaugh took it. “Probably the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “It forced me to look at the game differently, to learn to understand blocking schemes and to see the game through the eyes of someone other than a quarterback.”

  A year later he had a chance to become the quarterbacks coach for Tom Coughlin at Boston College. He was preparing to go to Boston to finalize the deal when Buddy Ryan called. Ryan had apparently forgiven Cavanaugh for getting a 10 percent raise in 1990. He was now in Arizona and wanted Cavanaugh to join him as his quarterbacks coach. “I felt badly, because I had said yes to Tom,” Cavanaugh said. “But I thought coaching in the NFL would be more of a pure coaching experience. No recruiting. No classes to worry about. No limits on practice time.”

  He was in Arizona for two years, then spent a year in San Francisco before getting hired as the offensive coordinator by Dave Wannstedt (another Pitt grad) in Chicago. Two years later Wannstedt was fired and Cavanaugh was out of work involuntarily for the first time in his life—except for those six hours between the time he was cut in Philadelphia and the unofficial Parcells phone call. There was nothing to do except wait for the phone to ring, and Cavanaugh decided not to wait around for that to happen. He and his wife went on a winter vacation to see friends in Wisconsin. “The kids tracked me down out there and said some guy named Brian Billick had called.”

  Cavanaugh and Billick had never met. Billick was riding high as the coordinator of the record-breaking Minnesota Vikings offense. His name was being mentioned as the next head coach in several places. “All I knew about Brian was secondhand, from being on the opposite sideline,” Cavanaugh said. “I thought he was very good at what he did, very arrogant and extremely cocky.”

  Cavanaugh called Billick back. “I think I’m going to get a job whenever we’re finished playing,” Billick said. “I’d just like to have a chance to talk to you whenever I land someplace. If you get an offer before then, I’d appreciate it if you’d at least give me a chance to talk to you first. Obviously, I can’t take a job until we’re done.”

  Cavanaugh was surprised and flattered. “I decided he was pretty smart for someone who was arrogant and cocky,” he said, laughing. “I told him I wouldn’t take a job, if I was offered one, until I had a chance to talk to him.”

  As it turned out, Cavanaugh was offered a job before Billick was hired in Baltimore—by Tom Coughlin, who was now coaching in Jacksonville. Apparently, Coughlin hadn’t held a grudge against Cavanaugh for turning him down at the last moment five years earlier. Cavanaugh told Coughlin he had given his word to Billick to wait until he landed before taking another job. Coughlin pushed for a decision. Cavanaugh decided to wait. The day after he was named the Ravens coach, Billick flew to Mobile, Alabama, for the Senior Bowl. Senior Bowl week is one of the NFL’s conventions. Entire coaching staffs make the trip, as do scouting staffs, to look at top senior players but also to network and socialize. It is almost a tradition for newly minted coaches to set up in a hotel room in
Mobile and interview candidates for their staff. That was where Billick and Cavanaugh sat down.

  “When he showed me what he was doing on his computer, I was blown away,” Cavanaugh said. “He was way ahead of the curve in terms of using the computer to make the job more efficient. He had spreadsheets on practice schedules, breakdowns of practices, game planning, the works. I felt like I had a chance to get on board something that was going to be different and fun, plus a learning experience for me.”

  The only hard part was calling Coughlin—again—to turn him down. “When Tom got the Giants job [in 2004] I’m guessing I wasn’t on his list of guys to call,” Cavanaugh said, laughing.

  Billick told Cavanaugh that his plan was to start the season calling plays and gradually turn that job over to Cavanaugh. That was okay with Cavanaugh, who was learning a new offense and understood Billick’s reluctance to give up the offensive reins altogether upon starting a new job. Seven weeks into the season, the Ravens were 2-5 and struggling to score points. The old Browns were headed to Cleveland for the first time back there, to the new stadium that had not been built for Art Modell. Modell wasn’t going to make the trip, but his team was. Which made it a very big deal. To make things even better for the Ravens, Billick began the week by saying at his press conference that it would be tough enough dealing with the fans, but he was also pretty certain there was no way his team was going to get any calls from the referees, either.

  The next day Billick went into Cavanaugh’s office and told him he would be calling the plays on Sunday. “Between preparing for the game and going into Cleveland with the firestorm I created yesterday, I’ve got enough to do this week,” he told Cavanaugh. “You call the game.”

  Cavanaugh called the game, the Ravens won, 41-9—the refs were apparently not a factor—and Cavanaugh was the play caller after that. A year later the Ravens went five weeks without an offensive touchdown. Cavanaugh went to see Billick to ask him if he wanted to make any changes—including Billick’s calling plays again. “He told me, ‘Matt, if I thought the play calling was the problem, believe me, you’d know. Just keep doing what you’re doing until I tell you not to.’”

  That was the first time Cavanaugh came under fire. It ebbed when the Ravens won eleven straight games and the Super Bowl but never really went away, even with another trip to the playoffs the next year and through the rebuilding years of 2002 and 2003—the division title notwithstanding. Cavanaugh never blinked. “When I watch a game on TV I second-guess the offensive play calling, too,” he said. “The way football is, it is a lot easier to question the offense than the defense. When something goes wrong on defense, you can’t really be sure why. Was it a blown call or a blown coverage? Did someone use the wrong technique? It’s just tougher to tell. On offense, if you throw the ball and it doesn’t work, you should have run. If you run and it doesn’t work, you should have passed. It’s simple. Anyone can second-guess.”

  Cavanaugh and Billick had decided that Cavanaugh would move up to the press box for the 2004 season to call the game from there. This was done in part because a coach can see the whole field better from upstairs but also because both men felt that with Fassel on the field with Boller, it was okay for Cavanaugh to be upstairs. What’s more, Cavanaugh would be less of a target for the fans upstairs than he would be downstairs. That, however, was the least of Cavanaugh’s worries.

  “I told Steve [Bisciotti] when he came in to talk to me that if we don’t produce on offense this year, he won’t have to fire me,” he said. “I’ll quit just like [Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator] Greg Robinson did and Brian can cry at the press conference. Or they can fly Dick Vermeil in to cry.” Vermeil, the Chiefs’ coach, was famous for tearful press conferences, the most recent having come when Robinson had stepped down amid screams for his head in Kansas City.

  Cavanaugh’s approach to the season may have been best summed up when wide receiver Travis Taylor came to see him one day before minicamp began. Taylor was on the last year of his contract and, as a onetime number one pick, was viewed by most in Baltimore as Ozzie Newsome’s one failed top draft pick. “Travis, it’s you and me together this year,” Cavanaugh told him. “Either we’re going to fly together or we’re going out the door together.”

  He was smiling when he said it. He was also completely serious.

  The surprise of the rookie minicamp (except to Gary Zauner) was B. J. Sams, the dimunitive (five foot ten, 185 pounds) kick returner from McNeese State. As soon as the coaches saw him, they understood why Zauner had been so high on him. He had speed, he had the ability to make defenders miss, and he caught the ball—most notably on punts with defenders running straight at him—without fear. Every day at the end of special teams drills, Zauner would line up his returners—there were six or seven different players being asked to return kicks—and ask them how many balls they had dropped. Every day Sams’s answer was the same. “None, Coach.”

  Like most rookies in a new, somewhat frightening environment, Sams was quiet, even around the other rookies. He was the youngest of his mother’s four children and the youngest of his father’s twenty-six children. “He started young,” Sams said. “And he finished old.”

  Samuel Sams made a career in the air force, flying as a pilot in World War II. By the time he retired and moved to Mandeville, Louisiana, he had been through several marriages and divorces and had twenty-two children. He moved to Mandeville because he had relatives there and met Marian Smith—who was twenty-eight years his junior. They were married and had four children, the youngest of them named Bradley Jamar—B.J. to everyone in his family right from the start. B.J. was always small, but he loved to follow his brother Andrew to football practice. By the time he was eleven, Andrew’s friends had noticed that little B.J. could run and catch as well as the bigger kids, so he began playing with them.

  “Problem was, I was still tiny when I got to high school,” he said. “I played on the freshman team at four-eleven and eighty-seven pounds. All they let me do was run down on kickoffs and punts because I was fast.”

  A year later he had grown enough to play cornerback, and by the time he was a junior, he was five-nine and 150 pounds and was playing all over the field. “My coach felt like if they got the ball in my hands, good things were going to happen.”

  His speed and elusiveness attracted a lot of attention from college recruiters, but the fact that he hadn’t taken the ACT turned a lot of them off. “I procrastinated taking the test,” he said. “I think I was just nervous about it. Then when I took it, I did fine—passed it with flying colors. But by then, McNeese was the only one that still had a scholarship for me.”

  The blow of ending up at a 1-AA school instead of a 1-A school was softened by the presence of Andrew, who was a backup fullback on the team. As in high school, Sams needed a full year to get the attention of the coaching staff and to grow a little bit more. He was a starting wide receiver as a sophomore and returned all kicks. By the end of his junior year, he was thinking he had a shot at playing pro ball. But when the pro scouts came to town that spring to look at some of his senior teammates and asked him to run a 40, his time was 4.51. “For someone my size, they thought that was slow,” he remembered. “My coach [Tommy Tate] told me I had to get bigger and faster if I wanted to play in the NFL.”

  He worked out almost maniacally as a senior and did everything for a team that was 10-2. His 40 time that winter improved to 4.41—still not blazingly fast, but enough to earn him some predraft attention from the Ravens, Colts, Eagles, and Titans. The only team to bring him in for an interview was the Ravens. “When I met with Mr. Newsome, he said they really liked me but he was worried I was too slow,” Sams said. “I didn’t know if he was joking or not. But then he told me if he called me on draft day, he wanted me to say, ‘Mr. Newsome, when people watch Monday Night Football this year they aren’t going to remember who Dante Hall [the Chiefs’ Pro Bowl kick returner] is, they’re going to remember B. J. Sams.’ I told him, ‘Yes, sir, I ca
n do that.’”

  Newsome didn’t call on draft day, Zauner did—about five minutes after the draft ended (and about sixty seconds after talking Newsome into letting him make the call). He offered a free-agent contract with no bonus. Sams jumped at it. Two other teams—the Colts and Saints—called later, but Sams had already committed to Baltimore.

  “All I want is a chance to show what I can do,” he said. “That’s all I’ve ever asked for in football and whenever I’ve gotten it, I’ve done well.”

  Like the other rookies, Sams was living in the Hilton Garden Inn, which was about a mile down Owings Mills Boulevard from the Ravens’ practice facility. He had no car and was making $460 a week, all the while dreaming he would be one of the chosen few who would sign a $235,000-a-year rookie contract at the end of training camp. When the team wasn’t in a minicamp or a passing camp, his life consisted of hitching rides to the facility to lift weights and then go to a nearby mall. “I’ve seen every movie they have there,” he said. “My favorite day is Friday because the movies change and we get to see something new.

  “I know the coaches are saying nice things about me. The other day I heard Coach Cavanaugh say to one of the other coaches, ‘I think we’ve found a secret weapon.’ That made me feel good. But I’m not getting too excited. It’s a long way from here to opening day.”

  The notion of a free agent who had received no bonus at all making the team wasn’t new to the Ravens. Will Demps, who was penciled in to be the starting safety, had made the team in 2002 as an undrafted free agent. What was even more remarkable about Demps was that he had made his college team at San Diego State as a walk-on after not being offered any Division 1 scholarships as a high school senior.