The defense was almost as set: The line was led by Kelly Gregg, Anthony Weaver, Marques Douglas, and Jarret Johnson, all proven veterans. Dwan Edwards had caused some concern when he reported to minicamp weighing 320 pounds, but he was down to 308 by the start of camp and Ryan was convinced he would be in the rotation in the team’s 3-4 set. Third-year player Maake Kemoeatu was huge (six-five, 340) and improving. He would make the team. In all likelihood, Aubrayo Franklin would, too. Linebacker was more set than any position on the team: Ray Lewis was the star, and Edgerton Hartwell would start next to him on the inside. They would be backed up by Bart Scott and T. J. Slaughter, who were both ferocious special teams players. On the outside, Terrell Suggs, who had shown so much potential as a rookie, appeared ready to be a star. Adalius Thomas, who had made the Pro Bowl as a special teams player a year earlier, would start opposite Suggs until Peter Boulware was healthy enough to return or, more accurately, if Boulware was healthy enough to return, a major concern given that Boulware was a four-time Pro Bowler who had been having his best year in 2003 until he had torn up his right knee in the second-to-last week of the regular season. A couple of the young linebackers in camp, Brandon Barnes and John Garrett, had impressed the coaches, but, barring injury, there wasn’t going to be a roster spot for either. The secondary was the team’s other great strength: Chris McAlister had made his first Pro Bowl at cornerback the year before and many people thought Gary Baxter, entering the walk year of his contract, had almost as much potential. Ed Reed was a rising star in his third season at safety, and Will Demps, the other starter, was one of those guys the team kept looking to replace—except he continued to be better than those brought in to replace him. There was experienced depth here with Corey Fuller (who had been a starter his entire NFL career), Chad Williams, and Ray Walls, not to mention the looming specter of Deion Sanders. Javin Hunter, who had been converted from wide receiver to cornerback, Gerome Sapp—another excellent special teams player—and rookie Lance Frazier were essentially competing for one spot. Sapp, because of his special teams skills, was the favorite, although Nolan and secondary coach Johnnie Lynn had been impressed by Frazier.
Everyone else in camp was hoping to get someone’s attention—if not in Baltimore, then somewhere else. There were experienced players who were going to lose their jobs by the end of camp, and everyone knew it. One early candidate was Ron Johnson, a player who knew he was on the bubble—perhaps. Johnson had been a fourth-round pick two years earlier and had flashed potential at times. But he was flighty, picked up a lot of penalties, and seemed to think that he was a far bigger star than anyone else saw him as. Walking off the practice field one day, he had yelled at a staffer who wasn’t moving quickly enough to give him a pen so he could sign some autographs. The Sharpie was delivered. Johnson signed for a few people, tossed the pen on the ground, and walked into the locker room. He would have to be considerably better than his competition to retain his spot on the team. The scouts were already quietly campaigning with Billick and Newsome to make him an early cut.
Each night, while the players were winding up their position meetings, Newsome and his staff would meet to look at tape. They would go through every play of both practices, all of them making notes without comment. Only after the tape had been looked at thoroughly was there any discussion of what they had seen or about specific players. Newsome encouraged bluntness and disagreement, usually saying nothing himself because he didn’t want to influence the opinions of the scouts. When the coaches and scouts met together, he rarely said anything unless he thought an absolute mistake—keeping a player who shouldn’t be kept or cutting one he liked—was about to be made.
The scrimmage had for the most part confirmed what the coaches had thought about the players. With each passing day they were more and more sold on the tight end Daniel Wilcox. “The thing that makes you wonder is, how come he’s never caught on before now,” Billick said. “He can really play. I keep waiting to see the Achilles’ heel, but so far there hasn’t been one.”
Jamal Lewis appeared unbothered by his pending legal troubles, but Billick still ran practice long a couple of times to get extra carries for Chester Taylor and Musa Smith. The team had to be prepared if Lewis, who had now been told his trial date would be November 1, was away from the team for any extended period. The wide receivers weren’t going to blow anyone away, but the coaches were intrigued by Moore, the six-six rookie from Northern Arizona whom Newsome had had so much trouble finding on draft day. Billick liked tall receivers, and Moore could give the offense a dimension it lacked. He had been drafted initially with the notion that he would spend the season on the developmental squad, but that was no longer a certainty.
The most pleasant surprise of the camp, though, wasn’t a rookie or a wandering free agent. It wasn’t even someone the team expected—or wanted—to be a major contributor. It was Kordell Stewart. The Ravens had signed Stewart after Wright’s injury because he was available, because he was cheap ($760,000 as a ten-year veteran), and because they wanted to bring someone in whom the fans would not start screaming for the first time Boller threw back-to-back incomplete passes. The major concern in deciding to sign him had been how Stewart would respond to being a backup who had no chance to start, barring injury. Would he pout? Would he make life difficult for Boller?
The answer, as it turned out, was absolutely not. In fact, right from the start, no one on the team was a bigger supporter of Boller than Stewart. “I remember how some of my backups treated me in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I want to be the backup that I never had.”
The argument could be made that few players in NFL history had seen the highs and lows that Stewart had seen, especially during his eight turbulent seasons with the Steelers. Stewart had come into the league in 1995, having played on excellent teams at Colorado. Growing up in New Orleans, he had lived in projects that were directly across the highway from the Saints’ practice facility. His first football memories were of lying flat on his stomach along with his friends so he could see under the padded fence and watch the Saints practice.
“I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” he said. “I could lie there for as long as they practiced and watch. I just loved it. In the back of my mind, I said, ‘Someday, I’ll be inside and people will be trying to watch me.’”
He was a tagalong little brother who learned football—and all sports—playing with older kids. Even though his parents split when he was young, his father was always nearby. After his mother died when he was eleven, he and his brother and sister moved back in with their dad. “Needless to say, that was a tough time,” he said. “My dad did a great job of keeping the family together after my mom died. I can remember, when I was little, when they were still together, every night we’d get together as a family around their bed and read the Bible together. When we were older, after mom was gone, we did the same thing.”
Stewart was a running back when he first played football, but by the time he was in high school, his arm strength was such that he was moved to quarterback. This was in the late 1980s, when it was just coming into vogue not to convert talented African American athletes to running backs or wide receivers or cornerbacks. Doug Williams had won a Super Bowl playing for the Redskins at the end of the 1987 season, and Stewart was part of the first generation of young quarterbacks who did not have “black” attached to their name every time they were referenced in print, as in “Black quarterback Kordell Stewart . . .”
He was just talented quarterback Kordell Stewart when he opted to go to Colorado, which was coming off a controversial co-national championship (the Buffaloes won one game because they were given a fifth down by officials, and the Orange Bowl on a shaky clipping call that negated a Notre Dame touchdown) and had a controversial coach in Bill McCartney, who would eventually leave coaching to form Promise Keepers, the evangelical Christian group that preached (among other things) that men had to be in charge of their families at all times.
Stewart liked McC
artney as a coach and as a person. When Rick Neuheisel was hired during his junior year to be the offensive coordinator and coach the quarterbacks, Stewart blossomed. The Steelers took him in the second round of the draft, and he arrived in Pittsburgh as a promising backup behind the veteran quarterback Neil O’Donnell. It quickly became apparent to Steelers coach Bill Cowher that Stewart was much too talented to wield a clipboard every week. He began experimenting with him, putting him in as a running quarterback in goal-line situations and then using him on occasion as both a running back and a wide receiver. When Cowher was asked to describe Stewart’s role, he shrugged and said, “I guess he’s a quarterback slash running back slash wide receiver.” Thus, Stewart’s nickname was born: Slash.
He was an All-Pro in the slash role the next year, backing up Mike Tomczak while playing the other two positions. In the final game of the regular season he started at quarterback and had an 80-yard touchdown run, the longest run from scrimmage by a quarterback in NFL history. A year later he became the starting quarterback and appeared destined to be a big star for years to come. He passed for more than 3,000 yards and rushed for almost 500 more and was a Pro Bowl alternate. But the following season, his star faded: he threw more interceptions than touchdowns, the team struggled, and Stewart was booed. There were even whispers around town that he was gay. Six years after the fact, Stewart laughed when the subject of that season came up. Back then, it wasn’t even a little bit funny.
“There are always going to be people who are ignorant,” he said. “There were people who didn’t want me to succeed because I was a black quarterback, but I honestly think by 1998, they were a distinct minority. To tell you the truth, I feel sorry for people like that. It’s their problem, not mine. I sincerely doubt that any rumors would have started if we had kept winning. But when you don’t win the way people think you are supposed to win, people come up with all sorts of wild ideas.”
The next three years were a roller coaster for Stewart. He was benched the last five games of ’99 and moved back to wide receiver. He became the starter again in 2000 and then had a Pro Bowl season in 2001, leading the Steelers into the conference final. But the Steelers lost that game at home to the New England Patriots, and a lot of people blamed Stewart for the loss. A year later he was benched after three games in favor of Tommy Maddox and, with his contract up at the end of the season, he knew his days in Pittsburgh were numbered. Stewart insisted there were no hard feelings about those final days in Pittsburgh, but when he talked about them, it was evident that there was still some bitterness.
“I’ll never forget the game in Tennessee when Tommy got hurt,” Stewart said. “I have to go in and I look over at the sidelines, and Cowher has taken off his headset. To me, the message was crystal-clear: Kordell’s in the game, why bother? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Then we score twice, we get back in the game, and, what do you know, the headset’s back on. I knew that day it was over, if there was any doubt before then.”
Stewart thought about signing with the Ravens that off-season but landed eventually in Chicago for the simple reason that the money was better and he thought he would have a chance to start. He did start—seven games—but the team was bad, and understandably, they decided to go with rookie quarterback Rex Grossman at the end of the season. On March 1 Stewart found himself looking for a job for the second time in twelve months. There was some irony in landing in Baltimore. Not only were the Ravens and Steelers bitter rivals, but Stewart had often tortured the Ravens, having some of his best games against them even in years when he was struggling. “These colors do feel a little bit funny,” he said his first day in minicamp, eyeing the purple uniform he had on. “But I’ll get used to it.”
That he fit in well was evident at the end of training camp when the players held their annual vote for “the ugliest man in camp.” This was another ritual—a bonding one, really, because the “award” never went to the ugliest man in camp. It went to someone who was popular, who was being accepted into the group, who everyone knew could take the ribbing and laugh about it. Billick had won it one year; Corey Fuller had won it a year earlier, his first full year with the team. The winner in 2004 was Stewart, who accepted the robe (a purple towel) and scepter (a plunger) with great joy and thanked everyone in the room for allowing him to flourish with the team. “You have allowed me,” he said, “to bring out my true ugliness.”
The wild cheers made it clear that the Ravens were very pleased to have Stewart, and all that came with his presence, among them.
After two weeks of near-perfect weather, the morning of the exhibition opener against the Atlanta Falcons dawned rainy and ugly. It was one of those August days when being outside is miserable. It was warm and humid and the rain just kept coming down all day and all night. If the Baltimore Orioles had been scheduled to play across the street in Camden Yards that night, the game would have been postponed by noon. But neither rain nor snow nor dark of night stops football games—lightning can, but that’s it—so the two teams arrived at M&T Bank Stadium to play before a crowd announced as a sellout (69,299) even though the number of fans disguised as empty seats grew throughout the evening.
Very few coaches make a big deal of exhibition games. Most have a set plan on exactly how much their starters will play and then how much time the veteran reserves will play before getting a look at the players fighting for roster spots. Billick’s goal for his starters is for them to play at least one full game over the course of the four exhibition games: a series or two in the opener, perhaps a quarter in the second game, a full half in the third, and then back to a series or two in the finale. The first two games are really an opportunity for the players trying to get noticed to get on the field for a long period of time.
The opener did not start auspiciously. After Falcons quarterback Mike Vick, who was going to play exactly one series, was sacked on his team’s first possession, the Falcons punted and Lamont Brightful fumbled the punt. The fact that the Falcons got the ball back wasn’t all that important, but Brightful’s having trouble catching the ball—albeit a wet one—was a disturbing continuation of the previous season. It was another step toward cementing his fate. When the Ravens did get the ball, Boller was sacked on two of the first three plays. Offensive line coach Jim Colletto was screaming at the offensive line, Billick was demanding to know what in the world was going on, and the stadium was silent, except for a few scattered boos.
It got better after that. Falcons rookie quarterback Matt Schaub simply had no chance against the Ravens’ defense—starters, backups, third-stringers. Billick kept the offense on the field for an extra series in the second quarter, and Boller completed a 12-yard touchdown pass to Dan Wilcox to finish off a 95-yard drive. Stewart then led a 74-yard drive in the third quarter, and the final was 24-0. The Ravens had just dominated a team that would end up in the NFC Championship Game.
The defense appeared to be everything they thought it would be. The offense had showed signs of being effective. Billick always tells his players to enjoy wins—any win—and he told them just that. But he also told them there was a lot of work to do. He was concerned about Brightful’s fumble and about Stewart’s taking a sack at the end of the first half that denied the team a field goal opportunity inside the 10-yard line. He wasn’t thrilled when Wilcox was penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct after an overly enthusiastic spike following his second touchdown catch of the game.
Billick had mixed emotions about the mistakes. On the one hand, they concerned him, especially since two of them were mental errors. Brightful’s fumble was especially worrisome since Derek Abney, who had handled punts in the second half, had separated his right shoulder in the fourth quarter and was headed for IR. That meant he had Brightful and Sams—who still hadn’t caught a kick in a game and wasn’t yet ready to play—as his returners. He was certain now that he didn’t want Brightful returning kicks for another season. But it made him nervous to think about throwing a rookie in without any preseason play.
The good news about the mistakes was that they gave him a chance to keep after his players, who he knew, exhibition or no exhibition, would be feeling just a little bit cocky after winning so easily. Billick waited until the end of the following Monday’s practice, the team’s first full workout in pads after the exhibition opener, to make his points about what he didn’t like. After each full workout, Billick always gathered the team in a circle at midfield. Sometimes he did nothing more than remind them about the schedule for the rest of the day. Other times he would make a joke or tell a story, frequently based on something he had gleaned while surfing the Internet. Billick was such a techno-geek that the New York Times had done a story for its business section on the NFL coach who had become a computer whiz and how he used his knowledge in his job. One way he used it was to search for tidbits he could relate to the players that he thought sent some kind of message.
Next Man Up Page 20
