Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Billick nodded. “I think if I tell him man-to-man that we’re absolutely planning on him being here all season, he’ll be okay. I think he knows I wouldn’t lie to him.”

  “What if something happened,” Savage asked, “and we had to cut him?”

  Billick was silent for a second. “Cross that bridge if we get to it,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t.”

  There was one other issue. The plan all along had been to put Clarence Moore, the six-foot-six wide receiver the Ravens almost hadn’t drafted in the sixth round because they had a wrong phone number, on the developmental squad. He had shown flashes during preseason of being ready to contribute right away, but the feeling was that he should start the season on developmental.

  “You can’t do that,” David Shaw, the wide receivers coach, said, seeing Moore’s name on the developmental list. “Every game we’ve played, the first question the receivers coach on the other team has asked me is about Moore. There’s absolutely no way in the world he’ll make it through waivers. We’ll lose him.”

  No one argued with Shaw’s analysis. They could all see Moore’s potential. Someone was bound to take a chance on him. The Ravens didn’t want to lose him.

  Billick clicked a few buttons on his computer and, magically, Moore’s name was removed from developmental and moved to the fifty-three-man roster. That decision meant that Josh Harris, the team’s other sixth-round draft pick, would end up on the developmental squad instead of being kept on the roster as the number three quarterback. “Who’s our third quarterback if Kyle and Kordell both get hurt?” Billick asked Matt Cavanaugh.

  “Randy Hymes,” said Cavanaugh, referring to the wide receiver who had been a quarterback in college.

  Everyone hoped Hymes would spend the following Sunday catching footballs, not throwing them.

  Saturday morning got off to a bad start. There had been discussion the previous day about what to do with Brandon Barnes, a rookie linebacker the coaches wanted to keep around on the developmental squad. It was the wide receiver position that created the dilemma. Several of them were nicked: Travis Taylor had a pulled groin and was questionable for Cleveland, and Devard Darling, the rookie, was also a question mark with a leg injury. That meant a wide receiver—in this case, Todd Devoe—who would have been cut had to be kept around at least for an extra week.

  Somehow during the course of the debate, there was a communications mix-up: the defensive coaches thought Barnes was being kept around. When he arrived the following morning, he was sent to the weight room for his normal morning lift. When George Kokinis saw the cut list without Barnes’s name, he realized something had gone wrong. It was Mike Singletary who had to go into the weight room and tell Barnes he needed to take him upstairs to see Billick. As fierce a football player as he once was, Singletary is a soft-spoken, deeply religious man with a gentle streak never evident on the football field. He looked almost as stricken as Barnes when he brought him into Billick’s office.

  Even Billick was a little bit pale. Cutting a player was one thing. Cutting him less than thirty minutes after he thought he had survived the cut was another. “I am really sorry about this,” he said. “There was miscommunication. We’re waiving you today. There’s still a chance we’ll bring you back for developmental, but you’re free and clear to sign with anyone else.” Technically, that’s true of every player put through waivers. The ones the Ravens wanted for developmental were told to “sit tight,” unless someone picked them up for their active roster. “You have to hang loose the next couple days and see what happens.”

  Barnes was in pain. “Oh man, Coach,” he said, almost pleading for a reprieve.

  “I know,” Billick said. “I’m sorry. There’s no good way to do this, and we’re doing it in a very bad way.”

  The rest of the morning wasn’t a lot easier. Billick tried to explain to Lamont Brightful that he believed he had lost his confidence somewhere and needed to get it back. He told Javin Hunter he honestly believed he could be an NFL cornerback. “You showed me you can do this,” he said. “We have injuries, we might very well call you back.”

  “Coach, I think I can play the position in the NFL,” Hunter said.

  “So do I,” Billick said.

  He wasn’t as encouraging when Dave Revill, a safety from Utah, asked if there was any chance he might be brought back to the developmental team. “Dave, we’re stacked at cornerback,” Billick said, not mentioning there had been no discussion about keeping him for developmental.

  The last player Billick had to cut was Ron Johnson, who showed up in the locker room just a few minutes before the team’s scheduled nine o’clock meeting. He was walking into the locker room when Chisom Opara, again playing Turk along with Jeremiah and Washburn, spotted him. “Ron,” Opara said, waving an arm to indicate he needed to talk to him.

  As soon as Johnson saw Opara, he went pale. “Oh shit,” he said.

  Opara explained that Billick needed to see him upstairs.

  Stunned, Johnson made the long walk up the back steps. Jeremiah was standing outside the office when he got there. Johnson didn’t even look at him as he went by. When he sat down, Billick thought, for the first time since he had met him, he saw fear in his eyes. “The thought suddenly occurred to him that this might be the end for him,” he said.

  He was honest with Johnson. “You have the ability to play in this league, Ron,” he said. “You need to think about why you’re sitting here right now. You’ve never embraced the idea of special teams. Look at someone like Harold Morrow. You have more ability than he does, but he’s in the league because he’s embraced the idea of being a special teams player. You need to do that with your mind, your body, and your soul. You do that, you can still play in this league.”

  As Johnson left, Jeremiah asked him about his playbook.

  “It’s at my house,” Johnson said. “I’ll get it to you.”

  “How about if I follow you back there when you’re done here and save you the trouble,” Jeremiah said, trying to be diplomatic. In the NFL, there are no ifs, ands, or buts about turning in playbooks once you are no longer with a team. In fact, during the season, players are required to turn in their game plans from the previous week before they get a new one just in case the old one somehow falls into the wrong hands down the road sometime.

  Johnson gave Jeremiah a look that told him he hadn’t bought his attempt at diplomacy.

  “What, you don’t trust me?” he said.

  “Ron, you know it has nothing to do with trust,” Jeremiah said.

  Billick watched Johnson and Jeremiah walk down the hall and sighed. It was a couple of minutes before 9 A.M. and it had already been a long morning.

  “Whenever I have to make these cuts, I always think about what Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven: ‘When you kill a man, you not only are ending his life, you’re taking away everything he ever had or is going to have.’ Every one of these guys has to emotionally sell himself on the dream to even have a chance to play. Then, one day, I sit in front of them and say, ‘You’re fired.’ Maybe the dream isn’t dead for all of them, but it is for some of them.”

  The roster was now set. They would have to sweat a little bit when the eight players ticketed for developmental went through waivers. Newsome had heard through the grapevine that a couple of teams, notably Tennessee, might try to sign Josh Harris. The only light moment in the entire cutdown process had come when Newsome had finished his exit interview with Rashad Holman, a free-agent cornerback.

  “Mr. Newsome, before I go can I ask you a favor?” Holman had said.

  “Sure,” Newsome said. “I’ll do it for you if I can.”

  “Would you sign an autograph for me?”

  Newsome laughed. That he could do.

  The meeting room had empty chairs for the first time that morning. “This is our sixty-one,” Billick said. “We’re all in business together for the next seventeen weeks and we know what kind of potential we have. Every single person in this room
will impact the kind of season we’re going to have.” He paused and smiled. “You guys might as well get comfortable because this is going to be one of my long speeches.”

  Billick picks his spots when it comes to long speeches. He knows most football players get antsy if they’re squeezed into chairs for too long, and he would rather have them looking at tape while doing that than listening to rah-rah, win-one-for-the-Gipper talks. A few times a year he makes exceptions to that rule: at the start of the first minicamp, the first evening of training camp, and the first week of the season. After that, if he talks for more than five minutes in a meeting, it is only because there is some kind of crisis to be dealt with.

  His theme for 2004 from the beginning had been based on a self-help business book called Good to Great. That was an appropriate slogan for this team. It had been 10-7 a year earlier, a division champion and a playoff team. That was good. Now was the time to move up to great. Any lengthy Billick talk is peppered with computerized graphics and photos and words of wisdom. He went through the basics of the book, things such as “Simplicity of Purpose—when you are working, work, when you’re off, be off.” The point being, come to practice focused and not show up tired because you are partying at night. Another point: “Confront the Brutal Facts.” Injuries were going to happen. The Jamal Lewis situation remained unresolved. There would be personal crises. Mike Singletary’s mother had died suddenly the first day of minicamp. Orlando Brown’s mother was near death as they spoke. Mistakes would be made. All these things had to be confronted.

  There was more. “Culture of Discipline.” (Billick showed a photo of his father in his test pilot’s uniform as an example of someone with a job in which the smallest mistake could be fatal.) “Momentum as a Force” was another building block.

  Then came the potential pitfalls: “Separate Agendas, Selfishness, Pulling a [Building] Block Out,” and the always critical “Listening and Reacting to Those Who Don’t Know or Care.” That led to a film clip from The Natural, in which Robert Duvall explains the power of the press to Robert Redford.

  Billick gets along well with the local media in Baltimore most of the time and with many in the national media because he’s accessible and quotable and, encouraged by Kevin Byrne, makes his team more open than almost any in the NFL. But like most coaches, he will use the media as a blocking dummy when it suits him. Frequently, he will stand in the circle at the end of practice and nod in the direction of the media, standing well out of earshot, waiting for practice to end, and say something like “They don’t understand what this is about. . . . They are going to ask you questions there is no reason to answer.”

  This time, Billick talked about the media’s agenda, which has to be different than a team’s. “They want to control what you say, and you can’t let them do that,” Billick said.

  From there, he launched into a lengthy analysis of what the team had accomplished in the past: the number of Pro Bowl appearances, the lock Hall of Famers in the room (Ray Lewis, Jonathan Ogden, Deion Sanders), the statistics from prior seasons. The realistic goal, according to Billick, was to go 12-4. That should be good enough to win the division and perhaps home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. The way to do that was to go 8-0 at home and no worse than 4-4 on the road. He even broke the season down into blocks and what a realistic record for each block would be: 4-1 before the bye week was not an unreasonable goal. There wasn’t a team on the schedule the first five weeks they couldn’t beat: at Cleveland, Pittsburgh at home, at Cincinnati, Kansas City at home, at Washington. Only one of those teams (Kansas City) had finished above .500 the previous season. The first three were division games, meaning they had a chance to take control of the division early.

  The last graphic was right to the point: It showed a calendar with “September 12th at Cleveland” highlighted. Underneath were two words: “It Begins.”

  As soon as that graphic disappeared from the screen, another film clip came up. This was entirely different from the one from The Natural. It was from the crime family movie GoodFellas. In the scene, Ray Liotta’s future wife has complained about being hit on by her neighbor across the street. Liotta doesn’t say a word, he simply walks across the street and pummels the neighbor brutally, leaving him screaming for mercy. It is a visceral, bloody moment.

  The players loved it. As soon as the clip ended, the lights came up. “Doesn’t matter what they say this week,” he said. “There’s no need to respond at all. Just make sure we walk across that street on Sunday.”

  Standing on the sideline during the final moments of the Giants game, left guard Edwin Mulitalo took a deep breath as he watched the rest of the offensive linemen enjoy the victory. “It’s all different from here on in,” he said. “I remember my rookie year, being shocked at the difference in intensity between the exhibitions and the regular season. It was like two different sports.”

  That was evident the minute the Ravens began preparing for the Browns. There was less joking around on the sideline. Each series, each play seemed to have more purpose. Mistakes were corrected quickly and sharply. There was a crispness to what was being done that hadn’t been there in August. There was also considerable concern that the schedule sent them to Cleveland to open the season.

  The new Browns were beginning their sixth season, and the days when a Ravens trip to Cleveland was a media circus were, for the most part, gone. The fans in Cleveland were far more focused on the question of whether Coach Butch Davis could right a sinking ship than on their anger over the departure of the Art Modell Browns. But that didn’t mean this would be an easy game. The Ravens had embarrassed the Browns twice in 2003, beating them 33-13 in Baltimore and 35-0 in Cleveland. What’s more, Jamal Lewis had run roughshod over the Cleveland defense, setting an NFL single-game record with 295 yards in the first game, then settling for 205 yards in the second. The Browns had a new quarterback, free-agent signee Jeff Garcia, and a lot to prove to themselves and their fans. The setting would be emotional, and the Ravens had to be prepared to deal with it. That was why Billick had tried to set a tone early with the GoodFellas clip.

  There were also more practical concerns. The offensive line, which had dominated the two Browns games the previous season, was hurting. Ogden was not going to play. Mike Flynn was also out. And Orlando Brown was commuting back and forth to the hospital during the week. The doctors had told him his mother had only days to live. There was no telling what his mental state would be on Sunday.

  The Ravens had a lot of confidence in Casey Rabach, Flynn’s replacement at center. Rabach was in his fourth NFL season, and the sense on the coaching staff had been that he was ready to be a starter. The plan had been to give him a chance to beat Bennie Anderson out for the right guard spot, but that had changed with Flynn’s injury. Rabach was better suited to playing center anyway because of his relatively “small” size for an offensive lineman: six foot four, 300 pounds.

  Replacing Ogden was an entirely different situation. No one was going to be Ogden, everyone knew that. Ethan Brooks was one of the most well liked players on the team, and his presence on an NFL team was testimony to his determination. In fact, in a league filled with unlikely stories, his was one of the most unlikely. He had grown up in Simsbury, Connecticut, where his father was a teacher and later the developmental director at a small prep school. His mother had grown up in France and knew very little about football. Ethan was the second son, big like his dad, quiet like his mom. Painfully quiet.

  “I actually had a pretty bad lisp when I was young,” he said. “I can remember when I was little, whenever I would say something my grandmother would make a comment about my lisp. After a while I just said, ‘Heck with it, I’m not going to say anything.’” The lisp was corrected when he was eight after a painful procedure that involved maneuvering his tongue into a different position so that he could move it in a certain way so as not to lisp. “By then, I was in the habit of not talking much, so I just stayed quiet,” he said. “I think it was my nature to b
egin with; that exacerbated it.”

  He was a good high school football player, but not so good that Division 1 schools were lining up to offer him scholarships. “I went to a small prep school and we had awful teams,” he said, laughing. “My sophomore year we were 4-4, and that was the best record the school had ever had. I’m not sure I ever came on the radar screen for any of the big schools.” There were several 1-AA opportunities, including Lehigh and Bucknell, both good academic schools that played good 1-AA football—especially Lehigh. Ralph Brooks had gone to Wesleyan, which was part of the famed “Little Three” (Wesleyan, Williams, and Amherst) and had been a good enough player to get invited to the Baltimore Colts’ training camp in 1959. But back problems had ended his career. Wesleyan wasn’t very good in football when Ethan graduated from high school, but Williams was a Division 3 power. Ralph Brooks pushed his son to go there: great education, very good small-time football.

  Ethan didn’t want to go. “Believe it or not, I had NFL aspirations even in high school,” he said. “I can’t tell you why. Ego, I guess. I thought I could do it. I didn’t think Williams was the best route to the NFL. But I didn’t think it would be a problem because I never thought I’d get in.”

  He didn’t think he’d get in because even though he had very good grades, his SAT score was 1,170—sky-high for a football player at most schools but low at Williams. Then, much to his surprise and dismay, he got in. “I was all set to go to Bucknell,” he said. “I liked it when I visited and the football was at a higher level in terms of competition. When I was at Williams for my visit, I noticed that I was already bigger than almost anybody there. I just didn’t think it was the best road for me.”

  His father thought different. On the day he had to make his college decision, he told his father he had decided to go to Bucknell. “Before you make a commitment,” his father said, “Give it some more thought. Take your time.”