Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Both teams were overheated at the start. After B. J. Sams returned the opening kickoff to the Ravens’ 32, several players came up pushing and shoving. Billick wasn’t the least bit happy when he saw that. He had warned the players again in the locker room about controlling their tem-

  per, especially since the referee in the game was Jeff Triplette—Orlando Brown’s nemesis from both the beanbag-in-the-eye incident and the late personal foul in the playoff game. Triplette and crew kept their flags in their pockets on the kickoff, and the offense quickly pieced together a drive. Jamal Lewis picked up 18 yards on the first play, and Boller converted a third-and-8 with an 11-yard pass to Randy Hymes. They stalled just outside the Kansas City 32, and Billick looked at Gary Zauner.

  Prior to each game, Matt Stover walks the field, checking the wind and the condition of the turf. Once he gets a sense of both, he tells Billick and Zauner what yard line the offense needs to reach at both ends of the field for him to attempt a field goal. Stover had started giving Billick a yard line early in Billick’s first season as coach after Billick had sent him in to attempt a 53-yard field goal and he had missed it. “He jumped me in front of the whole team for missing,” Stover said. “I know now that’s just the way he is during a game and it’s no big deal. But at the time, it upset me because he had asked me to make a kick I couldn’t make under the conditions and then jumped me for not making it.”

  Stover was in his tenth NFL season at the time, his ninth as the regular placekicker for the Browns/Ravens. The next day he walked into Billick’s office and told him he didn’t appreciate being called out in front of the entire team for a kick he probably should not have been asked to attempt. “I said to him, ‘Look, you need to trust me, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ll give you a yard line before the game and if you ask me to make a kick from there or inside, I’ll make it. If I can’t kick far enough for you or if I start missing from the yard lines I give you, cut me. But this isn’t going to work unless you trust me.’”

  Billick agreed to trust Stover, and their relationship has been rock-solid ever since. Stover’s only moment of insecurity came when Billick hired Zauner, whom he had worked with in Minnesota, prior to the 2002 season. One day in training camp, Zauner ordered six straight time-running-out field goal drills from different distances. Racing on and off the field in the heat, Stover missed a couple of kicks. Later he confronted Zauner, telling him he thought the drill had been unfair to him. Zauner said he was just trying to see how the entire field goal unit performed under adverse conditions.

  “And the scouts aren’t standing over there, noticing every kick I miss?” Stover answered. “You know how this game works, Gary: a kicker’s only as good as his last kick. You’re trying to make me look bad.”

  Zauner insisted that wasn’t the case, and the two of them ended up in Billick’s office hashing the whole thing out. “Which is exactly what we did,” Stover said. “I wanted to make it clear to Gary that he was the boss and I’d do whatever he told me to do. But I also wanted us to have the same kind of understanding I have with Brian about reasonable expectations.”

  At thirty-six, Stover was the last of the old Cleveland Browns still in a Baltimore uniform—not counting Orlando Brown, who had left the team and come back. If you were to bump into him on the street, with his neatly cropped black hair and glasses, your first guess would be that Stover was either a schoolteacher or an aspiring Republican politician. But he is one of the most respected players on the team because of his work ethic—he works out year-round, believing that the key to keeping up his leg strength is to keep his body in perfect condition—and because he almost never misses a kick. “It takes six years in this league for a kicker to be thought of by the other guys as a football player,” he said. “Even then, you better keep making kicks.” He laughed. “I like to remind guys that I’ve made twenty-two tackles in the NFL.”

  Stover knows how many tackles he’s made, how many kicks he’s made, and where he made them from. He has an encyclopedic memory of both his successes and failures and can usually tell you not only where he missed a kick from but why.

  He grew up in Dallas and dreamed of being an NFL placekicker when he was in high school. A friend of his had pointed out to him that there weren’t very many NFL kickers who weighed 155 pounds, so he began weight training and built himself up to 170 pounds by the time he went to college at Louisiana Tech. He was selected in the twelfth round of the 1990 draft by the New York Giants, coached at the time by Bill Parcells.

  “I think I was one of two kickers drafted that year,” he said. “First day I was in camp, Parcells said to me, ‘Don’t make me look bad, kid.’ Welcome to the big leagues.”

  His first season in the big leagues was spent on injured reserve after he injured a quadriceps muscle late in training camp. If he had stayed healthy, he might have ended up kicking on a Super Bowl team because Raul Allegre, the regular placekicker, got hurt early in the season. The Giants ended up signing Matt Bahr, who kicked five field goals in the NFC Championship Game, including the game winner as time expired, to beat the San Francisco 49ers, 15-13. “It was probably a good break for everyone that they ended up signing Matt,” Stover said. “I’m not sure Parcells wanted a rookie kicker in that situation. I’m not sure I wanted a rookie kicker in that situation, either.”

  Stover was on the sidelines during Super Bowl XXV against the Buffalo Bills, which ended with Scott Norwood’s infamous miss from 48 yards out that gave the Giants a 20-19 victory. To this day, Stover admits he had mixed emotions as Norwood lined up the kick. “There is a part of me that can never root against another kicker,” he said. “I can identify with anyone who is put in that situation. I have never, to this day, talked to Scott Norwood about that kick, but I think I have an idea how he feels. It was not an easy kick. People act now as if he missed a chip shot. It was forty-eight yards on a grass field with a swirling wind. He just jumped on it a little too much, and that carried it wide. I was thrilled we won the game, but I felt for Norwood. I still feel for Norwood.”

  Stover signed with the Browns after his rookie season and has been with the franchise as the primary kicker ever since. He had just signed a new five-year contract with the Ravens after flirting with the Jacksonville Jaguars during the off-season. In the end, the Ravens gave him the money he wanted—a $1 million bonus and an annual salary averaging about $1 million—even though they knew he wasn’t likely to change teams at this stage of his career. The Ravens had brought Wade Richey in to handle kickoffs two years earlier, and while Stover was close to Richey and readily conceded that Richey had a stronger leg, there was a part of him that still wanted to kick off.

  “Intellectually, I know why they did it,” he said. “Can I kick off as deep as Wade consistently? No. Does it help me save my leg to not kick off? Yes. Do I still want to kick off? You bet. And I train to be ready to do it.”

  There are two very clearly defined sides to Stover’s personality. One is the almost manic competitor who lies flat on his back on the locker-room floor before games, legs on a stool, eyes closed, shutting out the world until it is time to brush his teeth (yes, brush his teeth) and go out on the field. The other is the deeply religious, born-again Christian who can recite lengthy verses from the Bible and can work scripture or biblical sayings into almost any conversation. The two sides of Stover often come together on the field, according to Dave Zastudil, who is the team’s punter and Stover’s holder.

  “There are times when we’re lining up for a kick and I have to keep from laughing at some of the things coming out of Matt’s mouth,” Zastudil said. “He’ll be screaming to himself, ‘You have to make this, Matt, you have to concentrate. Oh, Lord Jesus, please let me make this kick, give me strength right now. Come on, Matt, right through those goalposts. Lord stay with me now!’”

  And that might just be on an extra point.

  Stover points to the sky in thanks after every kick—make or miss—although teammates occasionally note tha
t he tends to point with a bit more enthusiasm after a make. “That’s just because I’m pumped,” he said, laughing.

  Now, with the ball just outside the yard line that Stover had designated before the game, Billick looked toward Zauner, who turned to Stover, standing, as always, a couple of feet away in a potential field goal situation. “Let’s go,” Stover said, indicating he wanted to try the kick.

  Stover, Zastudil, and long snapper Joe Maese trotted into the huddle and Zastudil knelt on the 40-yard line, meaning the kick would be a 50-yarder. Stover hadn’t attempted a kick that long since 2002, but with plenty of adrenaline pumping, he nailed the kick perfectly and it cleared the uprights with a couple of yards to spare. Billick shook a fist and the Ravens led, 3-0, with less than four minutes gone in the game.

  The lead didn’t last very long. Richey’s kickoff went out of bounds, setting the Chiefs up at their own 40. They quickly sliced through the defense, needing ten plays to get into the end zone on a 3-yard Trent Green-to-Jason Dunn pass. It was 7-3. The Ravens went three-and-out and the Chiefs promptly drove into field goal range to make it 10-3. Early in the second quarter, the Ravens answered with a play they had been practicing since camp, a trick play that had worked in the Pittsburgh game only to be called back by a penalty. Boller handed off to Lewis, who flipped it back to Boller, who then found Randy Hymes open for 57 yards and a touchdown. Matt Cavanaugh liked to call it a “Jamal-flicker” rather than a flea-flicker. By any name, it worked and the game was tied at 10. To the amazement of everyone in the building, the Chiefs’ offense continued to dominate the Ravens’ defense, going on another lengthy drive—79 yards—to take back the lead, 17-10. This time the Ravens replied with a punt return: B. J. Sams, who was rapidly becoming a star, fielded a punt at his own 42, cut back against the swarming Chiefs, and was gone—58 yards for a touchdown. It was his second huge return in two weeks. This one tied the game, 17-17, at halftime.

  Even though the game was tied, Billick sensed trouble. It had taken a trick play and a punt return for the Ravens to stay even. The Chiefs already had 212 yards in offense, including 105 yards rushing. The Ravens rarely gave up 100 yards rushing in an entire game, much less a half. Though Billick doesn’t usually speak to the team as a unit at halftime, he made an exception in this case.

  While Mike Nolan was still huddling with his coaches, Billick walked into the defensive meeting room. “Hey, fellas, we have to get off the field on third down,” he said, noting that the Chiefs had converted five of their nine third downs. “We told you this was a big, physical football team. Now you can see that. But that’s not what’s hurting us. Mental errors are hurting us. That’s not us.” He left Nolan to talk about the technical changes that needed to be made and walked out to listen to Cavanaugh talk to the offense. When Cavanaugh was finished, he decided to talk to the team as a whole.

  “Everybody up here,” he said as the defense made its way out of its meeting room toward the front of the locker room, where the offense was grouped. When some of the defensive players, perhaps not hearing him because they weren’t accustomed to being called together at halftime, lingered a bit, Billick barked at them: “Everybody get up here now!”

  They picked up their pace. When they were gathered in front of him, he said, “We all know we’re better than we showed that half. The good news is we got out of it tied. Defense is up now, so let’s set the tone right away and let these guys know who the better football team is. They’ll wear out mentally as long as we don’t keep giving them opportunities.”

  The Chiefs’ opening possession of the third quarter was a microcosm of the game. Facing third-and-10, Trent Green dropped to pass and was under pressure from Maake Kemoeatu, the huge third-year defensive lineman who was getting extra snaps in the absence of Kelly Gregg. No one on the team ever even attempted to call Kemoeatu by his first name. He was “Kemo” to everyone. Like starting right guard Edwin Mulitalo, he was Polynesian —“Polynesian men tend to be very big,” Mulitalo, six foot three and 345 pounds, explained. Kemo was six-five and 340. He and Mulitalo were one of the highlights annually of the rookie show. Once the rookies were finished, the two of them would get up and perform a Polynesian war dance (in 2004 they had been backed by two rookies of Polynesian descent), which left the whole room whooping and hollering. “Legend has it that when our men would go down to the beaches and perform the dance, the invaders would look at them and see how big they were and turn around and leave,” Mulitalo said. He had performed the dance as his part of the rookie show in 1999, and Billick had liked it so much that he asked Mulitalo to reprise it each summer.

  Now, Kemo danced past the Chiefs’ offensive line and seemed to have Green in his grasp for a critical sack. Green pulled free and scrambled to his right. Kemo stayed with it, coming up from behind to grab him again. Somehow, Green wriggled free a second time and found one of his receivers, Chris Horn, in an open seam 16 yards downfield. Instead of forcing the Chiefs to punt from inside their own 15 with the crowd roaring, the defense stayed on the field while the Kansas City offense started a new set of downs from the 36. Seven plays later, the defense finally got a third-down stop when Chris McAlister nailed Gonzalez for no gain on a third-and-3. By then, though, the Chiefs were at the Ravens’ 20 and kicker Larry Tynes drilled a 38-yard field goal for a 20-17 lead. The defense had been on the field for more than six minutes.

  After the offense picked up one first down and stalled, the defense surrendered another touchdown on a thirteen-play, 80-yard drive that took the game into the fourth quarter. Priest Holmes, the ex-Raven, scored the touchdown from the 1-yard line to make it 27-17. The once-festive crowd had become almost silent. The offense did manage to put together a touchdown drive to close the gap to 27-24 but failed to threaten again, getting the ball twice more before game’s end without ever crossing midfield. The stands were rapidly emptying when Trent Green took a knee at nine minutes after midnight to run the final seconds off the clock.

  The trap game that they hadn’t believed could trap them had done just that. “I can’t believe it,” Sanders said as they trudged up the tunnel. “This is crazy.”

  Disbelief was the feeling in the locker room. It was one thing for the defense to give up yardage the way it had in Cincinnati. In that game, they had been able to dig in and stop the Bengals whenever they got near the goal line. That had not been the case this time. The Chiefs had rushed for an astonishing 178 yards—125 of them by Holmes—and Green had passed for another 223. They had been burned consistently on third down. Beyond that, the Chiefs had done something no one in Baltimore believed possible: they had made Ray Lewis a non-factor. Lewis had been miked by ABC during the game (networks loved to mike Lewis because he was always talking) and at one point the mike had picked up a conversation between Lewis and Mike Nolan in which Lewis told Nolan that he had to find a way to keep him from being double-teamed on every play.

  “He’s not being double-teamed,” John Madden screamed. “He’s just being kept away from the football.”

  Billick and Nolan knew that the Chiefs had one of the best offensive lines in the league. Very few teams would be able to get someone as big and as fast on Lewis as consistently as the Chiefs had. They decided it was just one game. What they had to be concerned about was a defense that had given up close to 400 yards for a second straight week. What’s more, they now had a short week to prepare to make the trip down I-95 to play the Redskins. At least that would not be a trap game. After what had just happened, no one was concerned about overconfidence.

  17

  Make Mine Vanilla

  EVEN BEFORE THE SEASON BEGAN, the fifth week had been circled on everyone’s calendar as one filled with potential pitfalls.

  To begin with, it was the week before the Move. Everyone was under orders to have everything packed in boxes so the movers could transport the entire franchise five miles down the road to 1 Winning Drive on the morning after the Redskins game. As a result, the building was chaotic with boxes everywhere, table
s sitting in hallways, some computers still working, others not.

  There was also the issue of the opponent. Because the Redskins were in the NFC and the Ravens were in the AFC, they played each other only once every four years. That meant there wasn’t the kind of ongoing rivalry or bitterness that there might have been had they been in the same division. Even so, there was no love lost between the two franchises. The last time the Ravens had played in Washington had been during their Super Bowl season. It had come in the midst of their five-week no-touchdown drought, and the result had been a frustrating 10-3 loss. That wasn’t all. There had been problems getting the Ravens’ buses into the parking lot and there had also been the charming specter of the public address announcer urging the fans to chant, “The Ravens suck!” during pregame warmups. That little bit of class was courtesy of Dan Snyder, then in his second year as the team’s owner. Snyder had ridden into town and started firing people almost the day he arrived, including a public relations secretary who had been with the team for twenty-six years. One of those caught in the purge was longtime public address announcer Phil Hochberg. Apparently the problem with Hochberg was that he was far too professional. He was an old-time PA guy who didn’t believe in screaming hysterically when the home team picked up a first down or in whispering so he could barely be heard if the visiting team happened to do something good. He certainly would not have been willing to scream, “The Ravens suck!” So he was gone, replaced by a rock ’n’ roll deejay who was willing to say or do anything that Mr. Snyder ordered.

  The Snyder regime may have been best explained by something that had happened to Phil Hoffmann, the Ravens’ team photographer. Getting on the elevator after the game in 2000, Hoffmann found the woman who operated it in tears. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him that she had made the mistake of letting someone get on the elevator with Mr. Snyder. “I’m sure I’m fired,” she said. “Mr. Snyder doesn’t let anyone ride the elevator with him.”