Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  The decision to return to football had more to do with unfinished business than anything else. Sanders consulted three people before making up his mind: Michael Jordan; Nancy Lieberman, the Hall of Fame basketball player; and his pastor, T. D. Jakes. Jordan told him the only thing he had to be prepared for if he came back were those who criticized him for not moving on with his life or for coming back for the money. “Neither of those things bothered me,” Sanders said. Lieberman, who Sanders had coached with in a women’s basketball league in Dallas, told him she was convinced that he had left the game before he really wanted to, that he needed to go back if only to have closure, that her sense was that he had never been at peace with his decision to quit.

  Jakes expressed no opinion when Sanders approached him one Sunday morning after services. Instead, he asked a question: “If you walk away and don’t play, will you have any regrets?”

  Sanders thought about that for a moment. “I would wonder if I missed out not trying it again,” he said.

  “Then you should play,” Jakes told him. “But only do it if you believe you can be passionate about it again. If you aren’t passionate, there’s no reason to bother with it.”

  Sanders soon found that the passion was there. “I was getting angry during my workouts at home when one of the receivers I was working with would beat me deep,” he said. “Really angry. I said, ‘Okay, you feel this way about it, let’s go play.’”

  Sanders was genuinely happy being back playing football again. That was clear from watching him in practice, in the locker room, in meetings. He made a point of sitting near Chris McAlister during defensive meetings because he thought he could make points that would help McAlister, not just technically but in terms of attitude and approach. “The kid has so much potential,” he said. “I see some of myself when I was young in him. I think I can help him.”

  Now, though, Sanders would be reduced to helping as a cheerleader and unofficial assistant coach. It didn’t make him happy at all. But as the bus rolled past the spot where he had failed in his suicide attempt, he smiled to himself in the darkness of the bus and thought, “I’ve come a long way since that night.”

  The weather in Cincinnati was close to perfect. The morning was cool and breezy, with the temperature climbing toward eighty degrees by game time. Brian Billick’s main pregame concern was his team’s frame of mind. Getting the players in the right mood before Cleveland and Pittsburgh had not been difficult. There was bad blood between the franchises and the players.

  With the Bengals it wasn’t that easy. Perhaps it was because they had been mediocre—or worse—for a long time. The team had reached two Super Bowls—after the 1981 season and after the 1988 season—and had lost in each case to the San Francisco 49ers, the second time when Joe Montana had produced one of his classic late-game drives to pull out the victory in the final seconds. But there had been very little to cheer about and plenty to either laugh or cry about in Cincinnati since then. Under Mike Brown, who had succeeded his father, the legendary Paul Brown, as the team’s owner, the Bengals had become known as one of the NFL’s cheapest and worst-run franchises. The team had even tried to impose a gag order on players several years earlier in order to keep them from criticizing management.

  But there had been hints of improvement the past two years, most of them attributable to the hiring of Marvin Lewis, the former Ravens defensive coordinator, as the head coach. Lewis had been praised universally for turning around the attitude of the franchise before he had coached a single game in Cincinnati. The team’s newfound confidence had produced an 8-8 record in 2003, including a win against the Ravens in Cincinnati. Normally, that loss would have provided Billick with a place to begin the job of getting an angry game face on his team. But it wasn’t that simple. Many of the players, especially on the defense, had fond memories of Lewis. They all wanted to see him do well. There was no way that the GoodFellas “crossing the street” tape was going to be played for this game.

  “The people in this town are too damn nice,” Billick said, standing on the field in the empty stadium two hours before kickoff on Sunday morning. “They don’t even really boo you or get on you coming out of the tunnel. I remember the first time we played in Cleveland, we come out of the tunnel and we just get pelted with stuff. I turned to the security guard walking with us and said, ‘You need to do something about that before halftime.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Fuck you!’ I can deal with that. It helps get everyone ready to play. But here, they’re almost polite. I prefer coming into a place where they really hate our guts and want to get in our faces.”

  Because he knew he couldn’t make the game personal, Billick tried making it professional: “This is the team we’re going to have to beat to win the division, guys,” he said, not sure if that was true but willing to take a swipe at convincing his players it was. “They beat us here last year; there is no reason for them to believe they can’t beat us here again. We need to go out and show them why they’re wrong.”

  This was not the same Bengals team that had beaten the Ravens a year earlier for one key reason: Lewis had made the decision in the off-season to make Carson Palmer his starting quarterback even though veteran Jon Kitna had produced the best season of his eight-year career in 2003. Palmer had won the Heisman Trophy at USC in 2002 and had been the first player taken in the 2003 draft, the same draft in which the Ravens had taken Kyle Boller with the nineteenth pick. He had held a clipboard throughout his rookie season, watching Kitna run the team. Lewis had decided during the off-season that Palmer was the future of the franchise and was going to take his lumps learning to play at some point, so why not do it now? The Bengals were 1-1, having lost to the Jets in New York before coming home to beat the already woeful Dolphins. The Ravens were convinced they could force Palmer to make the kind of mistakes one could expect from a quarterback making his third NFL start.

  Like many NFL teams, the Bengals were playing in a new stadium. Paul Brown Stadium was one of two stadiums the city of Cincinnati had built to replace Riverfront Stadium, one of the multipurpose stadiums built in the early 1970s that managed to be bad places to watch both baseball and football. The new trend was to build baseball-only and football-only stadiums. The new baseball stadium, Great American Ball Park, sat directly across the parking lot from the football stadium. Walking onto the field for his pregame walkabout, Billick looked at the stands and said, “Mike Brown must have gotten a great deal on green seats.” Every seat in the stadium was green. The Bengals’ colors are brown and orange.

  As he crossed the field, Billick encountered Lewis, still dressed in sweats. They hugged and spent some time chatting about the quality of the turf in the stadium, the prospect of the Bengals’ moving their training camp to downtown Cincinnati, and Lewis’s son, Marcus, who was a high school freshman. “It’s scary, Brian,” Lewis said. “He reminds me of [Bill] Belichick. His whole life is wrapped up in football already.” That led to a conversation about the mellowing of Belichick in recent years. Lewis went so far as to report that he had played in an off-season golf tournament with Belichick and found him to be “absolutely loose and having fun.”

  Billick, who had heard innumerable stories about the Cleveland version of Belichick from Newsome and others on the Baltimore staff, found this information slightly short of astounding. What may have been more astounding was the sight of Buddy Ryan, the former Eagles and Cardinals coach, standing on the sideline before the game, taking pictures like a tourist. Ryan had flown in to see his son Rex and watch the game. Once, Ryan had defined toughness and meanness as a coach; his 1985 Chicago Bears’ defense was one of the most feared and famous in NFL history. Now, at seventy-five, he stood with Rex, smiling proudly as the other coaches came up to shake hands and say hello.

  “Dad, I’ve got a greaseboard set up in the locker room for you if you want to come in and help us make some adjustments,” Rex Ryan said.

  “How fast can your guys learn the four-six defense?” his father replied, re
ferring to the defense he had made famous in Chicago.

  Most of the Ravens were convinced the Bengals couldn’t muster enough offense to seriously threaten them, even though there were five starters—if you included Sanders as a starter—on the inactive list: Mike Flynn was still several weeks away from returning; Kelly Gregg was missing his second game after knee surgery; Travis Taylor’s groin still wasn’t 100 percent; and Heap was out for several more weeks. Additionally, Ethan Brooks was also out with a leg injury, meaning the offensive line was very thin if anyone went down. “The only good thing about being inactive,” Brooks had said at breakfast, “is I can eat all I want and not worry about it.”

  Early on, it appeared the Ravens would have a relatively worry-free day. After the Bengals failed to move on their opening drive, the Baltimore offense took the ball and moved quickly down the field. Billick’s jitters about the game were apparent early. After Jamal Lewis broke an 18-yard run to put the ball on the Bengals’ 4-yard line, Billick’s only comment when Lewis came out for a breather was “How about putting that ball in the end zone?” Two plays later, when Boller was forced to throw the ball away on third-and-2, he was barking as the offense came off the field: “Run the plays the way we practice them!” They all understood. He didn’t want field goals, he wanted touchdowns. They settled for a Stover field goal to make it 3-0. It was 10-0 soon after that: ducking and weaving between tacklers, B. J. Sams returned a punt 63 yards, setting them up at the Bengals 8 late in the first quarter. Boller scrambled into the end zone on third-and-7 and spiked the ball so hard that it bounced through the end zone and into the tunnel leading to the locker room.

  Midway through the second quarter, Boller fumbled going into the end zone on a scramble that would have made the score 17-0. The defense quickly made up for that mistake when Ed Reed intercepted Palmer at midfield. Four plays later, Boller threw his first touchdown pass of the season, finding Randy Hymes on a crossing pattern. Hymes sprinted to the left sideline and scored from 38 yards out. It was 17-0 and there was complete jubilation on the sideline. They were dominating a good team. The fumble aside, Boller was looking precise and confident. Hymes had been a quarterback in college, playing at Grambling, and was developing into a solid receiver who had a knack for getting open. Because Grambling was in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (aka the SWAC) his nickname was—surprise—SWAC. The entire team was screaming his nickname as he came to the sideline, beaming after his catch and run.

  Still, the Bengals drove late and kicked a field goal as time expired to make it 17-3 at halftime. The Ravens’ offense stalled in the third quarter and the Bengals crept to within 17-6. Then another Boller fumble early in the fourth quarter brought the Bengals closer. As the defense dug in on third-and-goal to try to keep the Bengals out of the end zone, Boller sat on the bench, muttering, “Come on, defense, bail my ass out.”

  They did, forcing the third Shayne Graham field goal of the day with 9:03 left, making the score 17-9. Then, on the Ravens’ first play after the kickoff, Jamal Lewis and the offensive line bailed everyone out when Lewis broke through the left side and sprinted 75 yards for a clinching touchdown. The score made it 23-9 and even provided a few laughs at Billick’s expense. Wound up and excited after the touchdown, Billick failed basic arithmetic, somehow thinking that a two-point conversion would put his team up 17—meaning Cincinnati would have to score three times to catch up—when in fact it would have put them up only 16—meaning two touchdowns and a pair of two-point conversions could still tie. He went for two, the conversion failed, and the lead was 14. When he was asked in his postgame press conference what had happened, Billick just shrugged and said, “I flunked math in school.”

  The Bengals’ last gasp ended with 5:08 to go when Marques Douglas sacked Palmer on a fourth-down play from the Ravens’ 25. As most in the crowd of 65,575 left their green seats to head for the parking lot, Deion Sanders turned around, a big smile on his face, and said, “Where’s everybody going? This is just starting to be fun.”

  It was fun, although there were some warning signs that everyone chose not to be too concerned about. Palmer had thrown three interceptions and had lost a fumble, but he had also passed for 316 yards, more than 200 yards of that total to wide receivers Chad Johnson and T. J. Houshmandzadeh, who had combined to catch 15 balls. The defense had given up more than 400 yards in total offense but had been able to make plays when the Bengals got close.

  The victory left everyone in a buoyant mood. “Winning on the road in this league is one of the hardest things to do in sports,” Billick told them as they knelt around him in their postgame circle. “We made some mistakes that we’ll talk about, but the important thing is we made plays. There isn’t any doubt in their minds or in anyone’s minds about who the best team is in the division. We’re 2-1 and the goal now is to be 4-1 when we get to the bye week. Enjoy this one. You earned it.”

  16

  Warning Signals

  THE SENSE NOW was that the debacle in Cleveland had been an aberration. The Ravens were tied with Pittsburgh for first place in the division at 2-1 but felt they had already proven their superiority to the Steelers in week two. Playing the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday night, they all knew, was a potential trap game. The Chiefs had been 13-3 a year ago after starting 9-0. They had started the new season 0-3, losing to Denver, to Carolina, and, shockingly, at home to the Houston Texans. Everyone knew they were better than they had shown. They still had a huge offensive line, a solid quarterback in Trent Green, an excellent running back in former Raven Priest Holmes, and a superb tight end in Tony Gonzales. The defense was suspect, but any team with an offense as good as Kansas City’s had to be considered dangerous.

  “I don’t see any way we look past them,” Steve Bisciotti said as he watched practice on Thursday afternoon. “To begin with, we know they aren’t really an 0-3 team, they’re better than that. What’s more, even if we think that a little bit, we’re playing on Monday night. I don’t see us having a letdown playing on Monday night.”

  Monday Night Football isn’t even close to being the phenomenon it was once upon a time when Howard Cosell, Don Meredith, and Frank Gifford became icons in American culture during the 1970s. Even the production staff, men such as Don Ohlmeyer and Chuck Howard and Chet Forte, the latter two having passed away several years ago, became stars. ABC Sports had no budgets; people just spent whatever money they wanted to spend. The arrival of the Monday Night Football crew in a town was greeted with only slightly less enthusiasm than the Beatles’ arrival in New York in 1964.

  Now, MNF is like an aging beauty queen. Everyone knows there was once something great there and the queen has to be treated with a certain amount of reverence. But it isn’t the same. MNF is the longest-running prime-time show in the history of network TV—2004 was its thirty-fifth year—but the ratings aren’t close to what they once were (11.0, the lowest in history, in 2004), about half of what they once were, and the arrival of the MNF crew in town is greeted with more of a whimper than a bang. The network’s decision to abandon MNF after the 2005 season hardly came as a surprise to anyone. The magic had disappeared long ago.

  ABC had hired John Madden three years earlier to boost ratings after its disastrous experiment with alleged comedian Dennis Miller. Miller had two weaknesses as a color commentator: he knew nothing about football and he wasn’t funny. Other than that, he was an excellent choice. Madden hadn’t boosted ratings, in large part because announcers rarely affect ratings. Good games boost them; bad games hurt them. Simple as that. Beyond that, he has become at times almost a parody of himself at this stage of his career, almost as much a video game—Boom! Hey! Look at the fat guys up front!—as an analyst. His partner, Al Michaels, remains one of the smoothest play-by-play men going, but his massive ego frequently tramples on Madden and the broadcast. Michaels didn’t even show up for ABC’s pregame production meeting. Generally speaking, the networks treat the weekly production meetings as if they are negotiations for nuclear arms r
eductions. There is some justification for this. After all, the networks pay the league billions for their TV rights, and the production meetings are considered an important perk. Because nothing said in the production meetings will be used before the game begins, players and coaches tend to be a little more candid than they are when speaking to the media during the week. Madden considered the production meetings sacred ground, somewhere between attorney-client privilege and the Catholic confessional. Michaels apparently didn’t feel quite as strongly. When Billick and the requested players met with the ABC crew, Michaels was present only on the other end of a speakerphone.

  Still, MNF coming to town was at least a semi-big deal in Baltimore. The Ravens hadn’t played on Monday night terribly often in their nine-year history. During their first four seasons in Baltimore they had played once on a Thursday night but never on Monday night. In 2000, the year they won the Super Bowl, they made zero Monday night appearances. The next year, as Super Bowl champions, they were on twice. In 2002, the “salary cap” year, they were on once, and in 2003 they weren’t on at all. That made a total of three Monday night appearances in eight years. “I guess you are whatever it is the networks perceive you to be,” Billick said. “Except in ’01, we were not perceived to be an important enough team to play on Monday night. I was actually surprised when they gave us the Denver game in ’02. I think they did it because they thought we’d get killed and some people would enjoy seeing that.”