Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  One day, on the field, he quoted something Redskins coach Joe Gibbs had said about training camp and the need for “every practice to matter to every single person on the field from the first snap to the last.” Gibbs had gone on to talk about how mistakes could not be tolerated and had explained that some practices were so important that they had to be absolutely secret and away from any and all prying eyes.

  When Billick was finished quoting Gibbs, he looked around at his players, standing or kneeling in a circle around him. “Let me tell you something about Joe Gibbs. He is and always will be a better coach than I am. He’s won three Super Bowls. Now, we’ll be okay when we play them because we’ve got better players and better assistant coaches. But I want to tell you one other difference between Joe Gibbs and me: I’ve won a game in this century.”

  The players thought about that one for a second, then cracked up. Gibbs had retired from the Redskins following the 1992 season and had been lured out of retirement by Redskins owner Dan Snyder in return for a five-year, $25 million contract. Since he hadn’t coached a game since 1992, he hadn’t won (or lost) in the twenty-first century. Billick did respect Gibbs, but he couldn’t resist the joke.

  Now, on a sultry Monday afternoon, Billick didn’t want to talk about any other teams or coaches or anything he had learned on the Internet. He wanted to talk about mistakes. There were five things he had seen, three in the game and two in practice that morning, that he believed a team with Super Bowl aspirations couldn’t allow. The first three he had talked about briefly after the game: the Brightful fumble, the Stewart sack, and the Wilcox spike. “You can’t get a team three-and-out on the first series of the game and then give them the ball back,” he said, referring to the fumble. “Just can’t do it.” On Stewart, who had already admitted he had gotten carried away trying to make a play and should have known better, he said, “You have to think logically in that situation even though football’s an emotional game. We don’t need a touchdown there. If we get a field goal and it is 17-0, game’s over. Psychologically, the other team knows that unless we start committing turnovers, they’re not scoring three times on our defense.” Wilcox’s gaffe was the most understandable: a young player overexcited about making a play. “I didn’t even think what you did was that big a deal, Dan,” he said. “But we simply cannot give the officials the opportunity to blow their whistle. Don’t put the game in their hands in any way.”

  He was also disturbed that the offense had not been able to get the ball in the end zone from the 2-yard line in practice that morning and that Josh Harris had fumbled the snap on the last play of the morning. “Remember what kind of team we think we can be,” he said. “Jamal does not have to rush the ball for three thousand yards for us to win. Ray does not have to make seven thousand tackles for us to get to the Super Bowl. But you have to play intelligently. I need fifty-three guys who will not make silly mistakes when the lights come on. I’ve told you I know fifty guys who are going to be here. You have to help me pick the other three. I know you’re all starting to feel a little pressure now. The games are started. I know a lot of people are going to make a big deal out of this game [in Philadelphia] Friday night. I understand. But those mistakes can’t keep happening, not if you want to go to the Super Bowl and win the Super Bowl. If all you guys want to do is be a playoff team, maybe play a game or two, that’s okay. But tell me now and I’ll go spend the next month on my boat and meet you in Cleveland for the opener. I wouldn’t get on you about this if it was stuff you couldn’t do. But these are basics. Repeat mistakes like these and we won’t come close to getting what we want out of this season.”

  Billick wasn’t concerned—yet—about the mental errors. He just wanted to reinforce sooner rather than later the need not to make them. His reference to feeling pressure, the last thing he wanted anyone feeling in mid-August, came on two fronts: T.O. and Deion. Both were unavoidable. The day in March when the special master had allowed Terrell Owens to go to Philadelphia, the Ravens had known they would face Owens and the Eagles twice, both times in Philadelphia: once in the exhibition season and again on Halloween. Billick didn’t really care about the outcome of the exhibition game. He would stick to his plan regardless of the score. But he knew there would be questions about Owens and about the anger Ray Lewis had expressed after Owens had ditched the Ravens in favor of the Eagles. He wanted it downplayed as much as possible.

  Deionmania had now taken on a life of its own. Within the team, it was now a given that Sanders was coming. Billick was still pushing to get him into camp soon. Training camp would actually break before the third exhibition game, so this was the last week that Sanders could be in a camp atmosphere to try and get into football-playing shape. Newsome was still negotiating a contract with Sanders’s agent, Eugene Parker. He had laughed when Parker, an old friend, had thrown out the notion that Sanders’s return had nothing to do with money.

  “Eugene,” Newsome had said. “You know and I know, it’s always about the money.”

  Newsome had, in fact, offered a $1 million contract laced with incentives based on playing time and performance. Even though it wasn’t about the money, Parker had told Newsome straight-up that it wasn’t acceptable. Newsome wasn’t surprised. Business was business.

  Sanders had stayed in touch with Lewis and Fuller, updating them on his workouts and his progress. His plan was to be in camp before the last exhibition game on September 2 in the Meadowlands against the Giants. Ideally, he wanted to play in one game before the season began but wasn’t certain if that would happen. He had surprised Newsome by tracking him down on the golf course one afternoon when Newsome and the scouts were holding their annual golf tournament. “I need some tapes,” Sanders had said. “Tapes of your defense and of the first three [regular-season] opponents. I want to do some studying.”

  Newsome was happy to hear Sanders say that. Clearly, he was planning to show up as prepared as he could be. Publicly, the team was saying nothing about Deion. Whenever Newsome or Billick was asked about him, their answer was direct and honest if not complete: “The man’s retired.”

  The Ravens prepared for each exhibition game the same way they prepared for a regular-season game, with the exception that everyone in uniform would play, regardless of the score. The offensive and defensive coaches put together a game plan and a complete scouting report.

  The details in an NFL scouting report nowadays are almost mind-boggling. Thanks to computers, there isn’t a tendency or a fact or a statistic that is unavailable to a coaching staff. Each week Jedd Fisch put together the offensive breakdown, and Mike Pettine put together the defensive breakdown. The report included things such as how many times a team threw on third and less than four vs. how many times it ran; how often it ran left or ran right; how many times the quarterback attempted passes of more than 10, 20, 30 yards; and how many times a team lined up in a double-tight-end set vs. its regular set vs. a three-wides, four-wides, or a five-wides look. The same things were charted on defense: blitz tendencies, when a team went to a nickel or dime package (extra defensive backs), when it went to a heavy (extra lineman) set, and on and on and on. One could completely drown studying everything the computer spit out. The coaches went through most, if not all, of the computer information among themselves, then passed on the highlights to the players.

  Fisch and Pettine were part of a new breed of coaches in the NFL. Expertise on the computer was part of their job. Neither coached a specific position—though both aspired to do so—but worked instead as an assistant to the coordinator on his side of the ball. That didn’t mean they didn’t have on-field responsibilities during practice, but they weren’t as specific as for coaches working with one group of players. Pettine was thirty-nine and had grown up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where his father was a successful high school coach. He had played at Virginia under George Welsh, then had worked for his dad before becoming a high school head coach himself. He had been very successful his last five years—winning forty-five gam
es—and had received some national fame when his team was featured in the first edition of ESPN’s The Season, the once original (though now completely hackneyed) idea of following a given team from up close for all or part of a season. He had come to the Ravens in 2002 and was now considered more than ready to move up to being a position coach if, as expected, members of the staff moved on to other jobs at the end of the ’04 season.

  Fisch was already in his fourth season in the NFL at the age of twenty-eight. He was Jim Fassel’s officemate, sharing an office that probably wasn’t a quarter as big as the one Fassel had occupied a year earlier as the Giants’ head coach. Fisch and Fassel were an interesting pair: Fisch soaking up Fassel’s coaching experience, Fassel learning about computers from the younger man. Fisch had decided as a high school senior in Livingston, New Jersey, that rather than pursuing a tennis scholarship to college, he wanted to go to the University of Florida and learn coaching from Steve Spurrier. He had watched Spurrier’s teams play, knew coaching was what he wanted to do, and figured Spurrier was the best teacher he could possibly have.

  Of course, he had absolutely no connections at Florida and, even though he could have played tennis at a number of Division 1 schools, Florida—consistently ranked in the top ten nationally—wasn’t one of them. So he applied early-decision to Florida. And no place else. He didn’t get in. Undeterred, Fisch picked up the phone and put in a call to the admissions director. He introduced himself and explained that he had applied early-decision to Florida and failed to get admitted.

  “Which means you and I have both got a problem,” he said. “I have a problem because I haven’t applied to school anyplace else and if I’m not in school next fall, my parents will kill me. You have a problem because fifteen years from now when I’m an NFL head coach and I’m looking to give my alma mater a million dollars a year, that school isn’t going to be Florida.”

  Whether that little bit of cockiness swayed the admissions director is hard to say, but Fisch was eventually admitted. He then talked his way into the football office as an undergraduate assistant and had on-field duties by the time he was a senior. He also worked, while still in college, as an assistant coach at a nearby high school. After Fisch coached one year of semi-pro ball, Spurrier brought him back to Florida. In 2000 he recommended him to Dom Capers, who was looking for a young coach to help him start putting together the expansion Houston Texans. The only setback to his coaching career had been a major health problem. In April of 2003 he had returned from a run and found himself unable to breathe. He ended up in the hospital and had to undergo emergency surgery for an aortic tear in his heart. He was completely recovered, although he still had a long scar running down his chest as a reminder of what he had been through.

  Fisch and Pettine were responsible for getting the computer breakdowns to the coaches early each week so they could begin studying them to formulate a game plan. The coaches also received a scouting report on the upcoming opponent from George Kokinis or Vince Newsome, who usually took turns watching the next opponent play in person the week before it played the Ravens. With the Eagles there weren’t a lot of secrets: everything they did on offense started with quarterback Donovan McNabb. They would throw deep often and would try to find Owens deep early. Their secret weapon was diminutive running back Brian Westbrook. On defense it was even simpler: the Eagles would blitz, blitz, and then, for variety, blitz some more. The question was knowing where the blitz would come from, not whether it was coming.

  The preparation was really practice at this point in the summer. The coaches wanted the players to study their scouting reports and the tape they showed them so they would be in the habit of doing those things and know what to look for when they received their first real scouting report of the season prior to the opener in Cleveland. Everything now was geared to being ready to play at 100 percent on opening day. This is more true in football than for any other sport because the season is so short. No one wants to stumble out of the starting blocks in September. History has shown that an 0-1 start isn’t a disaster, 0-2 is courting disaster, and 0-3 means you are finished. In other sports an 0-3 start is meaningless. In football, it simply can’t happen if you consider yourself a playoff contender.

  Billick wanted the focus for the week to be on viewing the game simply as another step toward the goal of being ready to play on September 12. He didn’t want anyone—especially Ray Lewis—engaging in any kind of war of words before the game with T.O. “Someone asks you about it, the answer is simple,” he told his players. “He didn’t want to be a Raven. That’s fine with us. It isn’t worth further discussion.”

  Even as he said those words in the meeting room, there was still just a hint of anger. Owens had dissed his team, his organization. But Billick wasn’t going to allow it to become a focal point. Certainly not in August. Since the Olympics had just ended, Billick threw up a photo of Michael Phelps, the brilliant swimmer from Baltimore who had won eight medals—six of them gold. “The kid lost two races, one of them a relay, and people say he didn’t meet his expectations,” Billick said. “But he didn’t stop because of that. He went on and won the rest of his races. We got a shutout last week. No reason not to get another one this week, but if they score, we don’t let down. We try to shut them out the rest of the game.”

  The team traveled to Philadelphia on a chartered train, something it had been doing on East Coast road trips—Philadelphia and the Meadowlands—for several years. The train was big enough that everyone had room to spread out, and it took little more than an hour to get from Baltimore to Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia. From there, they bused straight to the stadium. For an exhibition game, there was no point in staying overnight. Because the game was on CBS and would start at eight o’clock, it would be after two o’clock in the morning before they got home.

  An NFL exhibition game is a real game in the sense that the public has to pay full price for the tickets, the games are on TV and radio, and all sorts of judgments will be passed by media and fans based on what they see in the game. It is also real in the sense that major injuries occur because football is always a physically dangerous game, whether the game being played counts in the standings or not.

  But the atmosphere in the locker room is different than for a real game. For one thing, especially on the road, everyone is packed in tight because there are more than eighty players dressing in a locker room built for about fifty. The coaches are far more relaxed. Billick and Fassel sat in Billick’s office prior to kickoff, trading stories about their days as college coaches. The assistant coaches, all dressed in NFL-required Ravens gear, all had their shirts pulled out so as to be more comfortable on a warm, humid night. Except for Mike Nolan, the staff’s fashion plate. His shirt was neatly tucked in. “No Andy Reid/Mike Holmgren look for our man Coach Nolan,” Rex Ryan kidded, referring to two of the heftier NFL head coaches, one of whom would be on the opposite sideline for this game.

  Fassel asked Billick what the latest was on the Deion watch. “I’m hoping next Thursday,” Billick said. “But it may be after the Detroit game.” Detroit was the next week’s exhibition opponent. There would be only one more preseason game left after that.

  Because NFL teams play only ten home games a year and charge fans a lot of money for all of them, every game is an event. In most stadiums these days, a number of fans pay extra money for the privilege of standing on the field behind a rope and watching the players warm up. Player introductions—for the home team—are long and loud. In Philadelphia, the introduction of the Eagles was sponsored by Levitra, the male sexual-enhancement drug, which was one of the league’s corporate sponsors. NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue had no trouble taking sponsorship money from Levitra or putting out calendars of the various team cheerleaders dressed in very little, but he had been shocked by the infamous Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl. Imagine what might have happened if Timberlake had been using Levitra.

  The loudest cheer of the
pregame introductions was for Owens. The screeching player intros, complete with fireworks, a fight song, and the players running out of a giant Eagles helmet through a cordon of pom-pom-shaking cheerleaders, climaxed with a video tribute to Philadelphia’s most famous fictional athlete: Rocky, complete with the music. Then, finally, it was time to play.

  It didn’t take long for the defense to lose its shutout. After the offense had failed to move the ball, Dave Zastudil punted and the Eagles took over on their own 19. On the opening play, McNabb play-faked, freezing Gary Baxter for an instant. Owens raced behind Baxter, caught the perfectly thrown ball in stride, and was gone. Touchdown. The Eagles’ new stadium, Lincoln Financial Field, isn’t nearly as loud as Veterans Stadium, the old concrete bowl the team played in for more than thirty years, because, unlike the Vet, it is open at both ends and the noise escapes. But as Owens raced into the end zone, the roar was deafening.

  Of course, there really is no such thing as a big play in an exhibition game. The most significant moment of the night would come on the next series, when Eagles running back Correll Buckhalter would suffer a season-ending knee injury. But the way the Owens touchdown occurred, so swiftly, so decisively, sent a shiver through the Ravens sideline. The CBS cameras would show Lewis comforting Baxter after the play, and Nolan would later blame himself for not having help on the left side of the defense for Baxter, but there was an unmistakable feel—if only for an instant—that perhaps the defense wasn’t as infallible as it had appeared a week earlier.

  “It’s just football, G.B., that’s all it is,” Lewis said, repeating one of his mantras. “Sometimes you get beat. It’s part of the game. Nothing more. Next play. Move on to the next play.”