Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “You see it in your own children when you grow up and realize everyone has a different personality,” he said. “I just loved it right from the beginning. Most of my boyhood memories center around football and football players. Back then, my brothers and I were it, we were the team’s ballboys. Now you’ve got so many kids running around a team, you don’t know where half of them came from. I was the one in the family who got upset when people said bad things about my dad. I was the one who wanted to start fights. And when he got fired, I was the one who said, ‘I’m gonna do this, too, and it won’ t happen to me.’ Of course, I did it and it has happened to me.”

  Nolan played like a typical coach’s son: he understood the game inside and out and made plays because he was usually a step ahead mentally. He wasn’t nearly as good a player as his father, who had been a star cornerback for the New York Giants in the 1950s. “I don’t think I understood it until I was older, but I grew up a celebrity’s son,” Nolan said. “My dad was so popular when he played in New York that they used him one year as the Marlboro Man in that giant ad in Times Square. But he was so devoted to my mom and to all of us that it never really felt like that. When he became a coach, it was perfect for me. It’s funny, though, even when I was little, I always liked being around the defensive players more. Can’t tell you why, I just liked the defensive mind-set more. Those were the guys I hung out with when I was little. And, except for one year when I coached offense [for the Ravens in 2001 before becoming defensive coordinator the next season], I’ve hung out with defensive guys as an adult.”

  Nolan was a cornerback himself, a solid high school player who might have been recruited by some Division 1 schools if he hadn’t suffered a serious eye injury just prior to the start of his senior season. An accidental poke through the helmet by a wide receiver landed him in the hospital for a week with a patch on his eye and some question about whether he’d see out of it again. This was in the fall of 1976, a year after his father had been fired by the 49ers. Even though his dad was no longer the coach, a number of 49ers came to the hospital to see him, something Nolan never forgot. “Remember, professionally, my dad didn’t matter to them anymore,” he said. “But they somehow got word and they came. It meant a lot.

  “It had been crushing to me when Dad got fired. We all knew it was possible and when he got called into a meeting the day after Christmas, he said to us, ‘Guys, I doubt this is good news. You give people good news before Christmas, not after.’ Seeing him after that happened was tough. He’d never known anything but success. It was not an easy time.”

  Neither was the period right after Nolan’s injury. His sight came back and he was able to play a little by the end of the season. Still, any chance that he might get recruited had gone by the boards. Which is where his father’s football contacts came into play—not for the last time. Rich Brooks, who had been on Nolan’s staff, had just gotten the job as head coach at the University of Oregon. Dick Nolan called him and asked if he would give his son a chance to make his team as a walk-on. Brooks was more than willing to do that. When Mike arrived in Eugene, Brooks told him: “If you’re ever a starter, I’ll put you on scholarship.”

  Mike thought that was a reasonable deal, though it seemed unlikely ever to occur. He got into one game, the last one of the season on kickoff coverage, as a freshman. At the start of spring practice, he was fourth on the depth chart at cornerback. Then, in forty-eight hours, it all changed. “Our number two cornerback was also our number three quarterback,” he said. “One day in practice, our number one cornerback collides with the number two quarterback. They both get hurt. Now the number two corner has to move to offense because we’re a quarterback short. All of a sudden, we’ve lost two corners in one day—one to injury, the other to a position switch. Then, the day after that, the number three corner is declared academically ineligible. In two days, I went from number four to taking every snap because there was absolutely no one behind me.”

  By summer practice, Brooks had brought in a couple of freshmen and a junior college corner, but none of them beat Nolan out of the job that was now his. He proudly called his father to tell him he didn’t need to pay tuition for him anymore, then went on to start for the next three years. He even made it to training camp with the Denver Broncos as a free agent before being let go on the second-to-last cut. In those days—1981—that meant he had outlasted a lot of players. “I wasn’t big enough or fast enough, it was that simple,” he said. “Dan Reeves brought me to camp as a favor to my dad, but I think I did better than they expected me to. I knew where the ball was going most of the time.”

  After he was cut, Reeves asked Nolan what he planned to do. “Coach,” he answered. Reeves shook his head. “I was hoping,” he said, “that you were going to be smarter than that.”

  Nolan knew firsthand what Reeves was talking about, but there was no question in his mind that coaching was what he wanted to do. He started as a graduate assistant at Oregon, then began making the rounds: Stanford, Rice, and LSU, where he coached linebackers. In January of 1987 he was updating his résumé and left a message for Reeves in his office, asking him if it would be okay to add his name, since he was thinking that perhaps his next move might be to the NFL. Reeves called him back the next night.

  “Listen, I’m in Cleveland right now, getting ready for the conference championship game, but before you do anything, I want to talk to you,” he said. “I’m going to make some changes on my staff after the season, so sit tight until we’re done.”

  Nolan was stunned by the call. He had completely forgotten that the Broncos were about to play in Cleveland, with a trip to the Super Bowl at stake, when he had called Reeves. The next day produced “the Drive,” John Elway’s 98-yard masterpiece that Ozzie Newsome and the city of Cleveland have yet to get over. The Broncos went on to lose the Super Bowl to the New York Giants, and Reeves asked Nolan to come to Denver to talk to him.

  “You know anything about coaching special teams?” he asked Nolan.

  “Not a thing,” Nolan answered.

  “Good, you’re hired.”

  Nolan spent the next ten seasons with Reeves, six in Denver and four in New York with the Giants. Reeves made him linebackers coach after two seasons in Denver and took him to New York as his defensive coordinator. Nolan was thirty-three, one of the youngest coordinators in the league his first year, when the Giants’ defense gave up fewer points than any team in the NFL. Reeves got fired after the 1996 season and Nolan landed in Washington, working for Norv Turner. That worked fine for two years, until the Redskins were bought by one Daniel M. Snyder, a thirty-four-year-old whiz kid entrepreneur who seemed to think that being successful in business and being a football fan made you a football expert.

  “I still remember my first meeting with him,” Nolan said, shaking his head. “He was sitting at his desk, smoking a big cigar. First, he did about fifteen minutes on how he got to be rich. Then he said to me, ‘If I guaranteed you a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus for getting our defense to be in the top three in the league, would that be an incentive to get you to work harder?’

  “I told him no, it wouldn’t, because with or without a bonus, I was going to give heart and soul to the job. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re probably another one of those guys who lets his wife tell him what to do, aren’t you?’

  “Now, that made me laugh. I tell young coaches that they better be sure when they take a new job that their wife can be happy. See, the coaches have it easy. We get someplace and we’re spending all our time doing what we love: coaching. We’re in meetings, we’re planning, we’re working with the guys. We’re not the ones who have to find new schools and new doctors and a new place to shop and send out change-of-address stuff and get phones hooked up. Your wife is doing all the work, so you better be sure she’s comfortable with wherever you’re going, because if she’s not, everyone is going to be miserable.

  “I didn’t say anything like that to Snyder, because I knew it was pointless. He was so
busy spewing profanities all around, I just wanted to get out of there.”

  For a football coach to notice someone else’s profanities is remarkable, since profanity is the official language of the NFL and most professional sports leagues. That meeting with Snyder proved to be the beginning of a less-than-beautiful friendship. Early that season, after a Redskins loss, Snyder told Nolan that his defensive calls were “too vanilla.” Like the other coaches, Nolan had figured out by then that trying to explain football to Snyder was pointless, since he already had the game figured out. A few days later a gallon of 31 Flavors ice cream showed up on Nolan’s desk with a note that said, “This is what I like. Not vanilla.”

  Nolan laughed and sent Snyder a note: “Thanks for the ice cream. My kids enjoyed it.”

  “The first time it was actually kind of funny,” Nolan said. “I didn’t mind it at all.”

  The next time wasn’t as funny. The Redskins lost on the road to Dallas, and Nolan went into his office late Sunday night to start looking at game tape. When he arrived, there were three giant canisters of melting 31 Flavors ice cream on his desk with another note: “I wasn’t joking. I do not like vanilla.”

  This time Nolan was less than amused.

  As it turned out, the Redskins defense, after an awful start, righted itself the second half of the season and the team made the playoffs and even won a first-round game before losing in the divisional round to Tampa Bay. That was the off-season when Snyder went crazy spending money, signing (among others) aging free agents Bruce Smith, Jeff George, and Deion Sanders—completely undermining the work Turner and fired general manager Charlie Casserly had done to rebuild the team. Nolan left to become defensive coordinator with the Jets. Even though the Jets’ defense improved from twenty-first to tenth statistically during the 2000 season, Nolan was looking for work again when the season ended after Coach Al Groh bolted the Jets to become the coach at the University of Virginia. Billick then hired him as tight ends coach, and a year later, when Marvin Lewis was lured to Washington by Snyder—becoming the first million-dollar-a-year coordinator—Nolan became the Ravens’ coordinator. After the Ravens’ still-young defense finished the 2003 season ranked fourth in the league (with Ray Lewis voted Player of the Year), Nolan was named to USA Today’s “All Joe” team. The “All Joe” consists of players and coaches who are “hard-working, successful, but overlooked.”

  This season was Nolan’s chance to no longer be overlooked. He knew it, Billick knew it, everyone in the organization knew it. Nolan had some concerns about his defense: Chris McAlister had missed most of camp, and so had Sanders. The defensive line was full of great people who were eager but undersize. And there had been the early penchant for giving up big plays. Now Nolan was concerned that cutting Cornell Brown was going to leave him essentially one deep at the linebacker spot. It would mean that backup defensive end Jarret Johnson would have to take snaps in practice at linebacker in case of an injury. Sapp was more expendable to the defense, if not to special teams.

  Billick told Nolan he would give it some thought. Then he went and talked to Newsome. This was their way: hash things out, reach a consensus between the two of them of some kind. In the end, this was Billick’s decision, but he always sought Newsome’s input. The two of them decided Nolan was right about Brown. They also decided it was time for Billick to talk to Corey Fuller. The players were off on Tuesday. Billick would talk to Fuller on Wednesday after practice.

  The next day could not have been more miserable. To begin with, it rained. Although the team’s new facility would not be ready to move into until mid-October, the indoor practice facility was ready and had already been used on several occasions in poor weather. Billick wanted to move practice indoors, but Dick Cass told him there was a problem: the carpenters union was embroiled in a dispute with the construction firm over the number of union carpenters being used on the job. As a result, the carpenters were picketing in the driveway leading into the facility. The Ravens didn’t want to get into the middle of a political battle, so driving team buses across the picket line—a TV photo-op if there had ever been one—was out of the question. They would have to practice in the rain.

  Billick was already dreading making a decision on Fuller or Sapp. Then, practice was predictably wet and sloppy, players slipping and falling, no one completely focused. “Completely understandable under the circumstances,” Billick said. “Wednesday is usually a bit sloppy anyway. It’s the first day back; you’re starting to put in the game plan. Thursday is the day you expect and need to see guys get after it. But with everything else going on, I snapped a little bit.”

  He got angry with the players, questioning their effort and concentration, wondering if they had what it took to be the team they had been planning on being. “If this is the best you’ve got come Sunday, let me know,” he said. “I won’t even waste my time showing up. I’ll go spend the day on my boat.” He then told the receivers he wanted them to each catch fifty balls from the ball-throwing machine before they went inside. He said please, but he wasn’t making a request.

  Then he asked Fuller to stay behind and talk to him. They walked over by the rolled-up tarpaulin on the side of the practice field. Billick explained to Fuller what was going on. If they cut him now, he would still receive full pay for 2004 regardless of whether he came back, because he had been on the opening-day roster. What’s more, because of his veteran status, he wouldn’t have to clear waivers. He could be back as early as next week. Fuller and Billick had known each other a long time. They liked and respected each other. As soon as he mentioned the word cut to Fuller, Billick knew what his response was going to be.

  “The thing you occasionally forget as a coach is that a personal relationship with a player doesn’t exempt you from hurting his feelings,” Billick said. “The game is full of hurt feelings, I know that’s part of it. But I could see this was one Corey couldn’t handle.”

  Fuller is a proud, sensitive man. He had grown up in Tallahassee, Florida, and, like a lot of inner-city kids, had figured out early in life that playing ball was his route out. He had never been a partyer. “I never smoked, never drank, never did weed, nothing,” he said. “For me it was all about getting a scholarship to college.”

  He was good enough to be widely recruited as a senior, but when Florida State showed interest, there was no doubt where he was going to end up. “To begin with, Deion Sanders was my hero,” he said. “I wanted to play corner at Florida State just like he had. Plus, when Coach [Bobby] Bowden came to my house to visit, the entire neighborhood lined up outside to watch him walk in and walk out. It was like Elvis had come to town or something.”

  Fuller went through ups and downs at FSU: injuries, not playing as much as he wanted early. But the real trauma came during his sophomore year when his little brother, Fred Bates (his mother’s maiden name was Fuller, which Corey took after she and his father split), was shot and killed during a dispute on the street. Corey was on a road trip in St. Petersburg with some teammates when his mother called with the news.

  “Fred was a better athlete than I was,” Fuller said softly. “But he hurt his back before his senior year and couldn’t play. He had always leaned toward trouble at times and he went back to it. He got into some kind of a fight with this guy, went home, and then came back. They both had guns. The guy shot him in the back.”

  His brother’s death caused Fuller to change his major to youth counseling, an area he has been active in throughout his football career. He was drafted in the second round by the Minnesota Vikings, which was where he met and befriended Billick, even though Billick coached the offense. “He was a players’ coach, even then,” he said. “He and Cris Carter fought like cats when he first got there, but they ended up being close friends. He was someone everyone on the team liked being around.”

  Fuller left Minnesota to sign with Cleveland in 1999, the same year Billick left for Baltimore. He was cut in 2003 as part of a Butch Davis purge of just about anyone over thirty and
signed with the Ravens. He had gone through a strange and troubling off-season in 2004: first the incident in which he had been attacked by armed gunmen outside his house and then his arrest for allegedly running a gambling ring inside his house.

  “They kicked the door down and came in with dogs,” he said. “What’s that tell you? They thought they were going to find drugs. They had a warrant to search anywhere for anything. They didn’t find anything. My lawyer tells me they’ve got no case at all, that we’re up 21-0 in the fourth quarter and we’ve got the Ravens defense on the field. [That analysis would prove accurate; the charges were dropped after the season.] But it still hurts me to see my name in the paper as if I’m some kind of criminal. I’m not. Ask the police what they found in the house: nothing. I wouldn’t even let other people drink or smoke in my house. That’s the way I’ve always been.”

  Fuller had been thrilled to be back playing for Billick. “Veteran players in the league know he’s a good guy to play for because he treats you like an adult and he’s completely honest,” Fuller said. “If Brian Billick asked me to run through a wall, I’d do it.”

  But allowing Billick to cut him was another story. Fuller told Billick that he thought he belonged on the active roster, that he still had plenty to contribute to the team. He was healthy, he was ready, he wanted back on the field. Billick knew that if he cut Fuller, he would not only lose him, but it could damage morale in the locker room because Fuller’s pain would no doubt be passed in some form to Lewis and Sanders. When they were finished talking, he went back upstairs and told Newsome there was no choice: Sapp would have to be cut. Then he stalked back down the hall and did something he almost never does when he is alone in his office: he shut the door.

  “I felt a little bit like I was in the scene in Young Frankenstein where Marty Feldman and Gene Wilder are digging the grave,” he said. “It’s awful, dirty work, gross and disgusting. They’re exhausted and filthy. Feldman finally looks at Wilder and says, ‘Well, it could be worse. It could be raining.’ As soon as he says it, the sky opens up. That’s the way I felt at that moment.