Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  He went to Europe the following winter and played in Barcelona, where he had trouble getting used to the lifestyle. “Dinner at ten? Go out at midnight, stay up all night? Wasn’t me,” he said, laughing.

  He was back in the Vikings’ camp that summer but knew he didn’t have much chance of making the team when the team drafted a punter in the sixth round. “They gave him a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus; they’d given me four thousand. I didn’t even count against their roster since I’d been in Europe [meaning the team had a roster exemption for him during training camp], so what were my chances?”

  Zero. He was cut again. This time he decided to get his insurance license—his dad had gotten into insurance late in life and done well. He went back to Europe, playing in Scotland (which he loved) and again leading the league. This time the Philadelphia Eagles signed him. “John Harbaugh [the Eagles special teams coach] was great to work with,” he said. “He was completely honest with me from the start. He said it was Dirk Johnson’s job to lose. But he worked hard with me. He told me he thought I’d had three really good kicks in Europe. Three! Imagine if I hadn’t led the league, what he might have thought. But I learned quite a bit from him. I kicked well, probably as well as Johnson. John was straight-up with me. He said, ‘Nick, you kicked well enough to win the job. But Dirk didn’t kick poorly enough to lose it.’”

  Murphy went home thinking he might be finished, but he kept working out, hoping for a phone call. And then one came from Zauner. He felt he had kicked well and went into the cafeteria to eat lunch. All the kickers were in there, eyeing one another nervously. There’s a camaraderie among kickers, especially those who have been in and out of work. But now they all knew only one of them was going to be happy. Murphy went back to the hotel where he had spent the night, hoping if he wasn’t going to get the call, he would at least get the bad news in time to fly home that night. The phone rang. It was Zauner.

  “Can you get back over here?” he asked. “We want to get a contract done for you by the end of the day.”

  Murphy said he thought he could do that.

  Murphy was introduced to his new teammates on Wednesday morning. Billick had spent a lot of the season reminding the team how good he thought it was, rebuilding confidence. He didn’t think that was going to be a problem this week. “I’m going to be watching you guys closely this week,” he said. “I’m going to be looking for little things. Are you sloppy in practice? Are you late getting in and out of lunch? Are you late for meetings, even by a little bit? Is the locker room a mess when you leave at the end of the day?

  “There’s nothing more dangerous than a desperate team, and this is a desperate team,” he said. “They’re wounded and they’re angry. We can’t afford to walk out there with an attitude that we expect to win the game just by showing up. We do that, we’ll get beat. Guaranteed.”

  The Cowboys were a desperate team. They had surprised the NFL by making the playoffs a year earlier during the first season in Bill Parcells’s latest return to coaching. But this year they were 3-6, and most of Dallas was screaming for Parcells to bench forty-one-year-old quarterback Vinny Testaverde in favor of Drew Henson, the much-hyped quarterback of the future. Parcells was, if nothing else, stubborn. Testaverde would start against the Ravens. “The only danger,” Billick said, “is if Vinny gets hot—which he can still do. He could go out there and throw five interceptions. He could also burn us.”

  Billick and Ozzie Newsome had thought this would be the week they had to make two major roster decisions because Peter Boulware and Anthony Wright were going to return to the active roster. But neither man was ready. Wright’s shoulder still wasn’t 100 percent, so even though he was restored to the fifty-three-man roster—meaning that third-year backup offensive lineman Damion Cook found himself looking for work—the plan was for him to be listed as the third quarterback on Sunday. That meant he wouldn’t count against the forty-five-man roster and would play only if both Boller and Stewart were injured. The Ravens had gone the entire season without a third quarterback because Josh Harris, who would have been it, had been relegated to the practice squad. Randy Hymes, the college quarterback turned wide receiver, had been the third quarterback until now.

  Boulware had returned to practice a week earlier, excited that his knee finally felt healthy. He had practiced Wednesday and felt no pain at all. He was convinced he would be back on the field for the Dallas game. The next day he tried to make a cut during a drill and felt a searing pain in his right foot. He had torn a ligament on the bottom of his foot—a painful version of turf toe. Twenty-four hours after his comeback had started, it was over. The doctors told Boulware it was back to rehab. He wouldn’t play again for the rest of the season.

  “I know things happen for a reason,” said Boulware, one of the most religious players on the team. “But right now I’m having trouble figuring out what the reason for this might be.”

  Even though they were struggling, the presence of the Cowboys in town was still a big deal. They were still America’s Team, the guys with the stars on their helmets, and they were coached by Parcells, who would already be in the Hall of Fame if he didn’t keep coming back after vowing never to coach again. This was his third comeback from retirement. He had quit the New York Giants in 1991 after winning two Super Bowls. He had come back to coach in New England, then left the Patriots days after taking them to Super Bowl XXXI in January of 1997 to take over the New York Jets. He had stayed in New York for three seasons, taking a woebegone 1-15 team to the AFC Championship Game in two years, then quitting a year later. He had cowritten a book titled The Final Season describing his exit, once and for all, from coaching. A little more than two years after the book was published, he was introduced as the new coach of the Cowboys.

  Because the Cowboys, an NFC team, were the opponent, the game would be televised on Fox. The only time the Ravens, an AFC team, appeared on Fox each year was when they hosted an NFC team. AFC games were on CBS, NFC games were on Fox, and interconference games were televised by the visiting team’s network. When the Ravens played at Philadelphia, the game was on CBS. (The Redskins game had been an ESPN Sunday night game.) When the Cowboys and New York Giants came to Baltimore, the games were on Fox.

  That meant the Ravens would be dealing with a very familiar announcing team, since Dick Stockton, Daryl Johnston, and Tony Siragusa had worked two of the Ravens’ preseason games, not as part of their Fox deals but for the Ravens’ TV network. This is common practice in the NFL, network announcers working for specific teams in preseason. Along with Sam Adams, Siragusa had been half of the Ravens’ twin-powers defensive tackle tandem during the Super Bowl run. He had retired after the 2001 season, and he was a natural to get TV work because he was outgoing and loquacious. He could also be obnoxious at times. No one enjoyed torturing rookies more than Siragusa, to the point where other veterans sometimes thought he went too far. He wasn’t malicious, just a gigantic kid (six-three, 340 pounds) who often crossed the line when it came to outrageous behavior. One year he had brought a paintball kit to training camp and had gotten great joy out of sneaking up on people and spraying them. When the hotel complained to the Ravens about it, Siragusa was told to cease and desist. Soon after, he was caught trying to spray-paint a hotel employee who was working right outside the hotel entrance. “One for the road” was his explanation.

  Siragusa was still a hero in Baltimore because of his role on the Super Bowl team and because he always seemed to have time for the extra autograph. In typical Siragusa fashion, he walked into the Friday production meeting late—he had been in the locker room chatting with some of his ex-teammates—sat down at the conference table (next to his walk-around guy/driver), and started asking Rex Ryan (who Siragusa had suggested be asked to the production meeting instead of either coordinator because of Ryan’s tendency to be blunt) about what techniques “our” D line would use against the Cowboys.

  Siragusa had also suggested that instead of asking for Ray Lewis, Fox should ask
for Adalius Thomas. Another smart move. Thomas’s nickname in the defensive room was “the coordinator” because he understood every assignment for every player at every position on every play of the game. Thomas told the Fox people that he had actually taken some snaps at cornerback during the week because with McAlister and Sanders both down for this game, he was the next alternative if someone should get hurt.

  The Fox production meeting was different from CBS, ESPN, and ABC. For one thing, Siragusa was a wild card, apt to ask anything or say anything at any moment. He offered a prediction—unsolicited—that the Ravens would shut down Cowboys running back Eddie George. “Except for the playoff game last year, he’s never done anything against our defense,” he said. Daryl Johnston asked the kind of questions most color analysts ask. Stockton, one of the true staples of network play-by-play (he’s been doing it since the mid-’60s), stuck to nuts-and-bolts questions about who might be in the game in certain situations and what sorts of things they should be alert for. It was in response to a Stockton question that Kyle Boller told the group that there was an option pass in the offense for Sunday, a pitchback play where Randy Hymes threw the ball across the field back to Boller. Stockton knew his style was different than a lot of play-by-play men, but he was completely comfortable with his approach. And why not? It had worked well for many years.

  “I don’t want anecdotes,” he said. “I worry that if I get wrapped up telling a story, I may lose track of what I’m supposed to be there for: keeping the viewer apprised of down, distance, subs, time, injuries—the basics of the game. Daryl’s there to break the game down, and Goose can come up with color or analysis from the sideline. There’s only so much time between plays, and I don’t want to have the viewer confused—thinking about a story about the quarterback’s high school days when it’s third-and-ten at a key moment.”

  If the Fox people should have gleaned two things from their time with the Ravens, they were that Jamal Lewis believed he had a chance to finally break out and have a big game against the Dallas defense, and that Kyle Boller was a very different player from two weeks ago. The Jets game might very well have given his teammates new confidence in Boller, which made Billick happy. Beyond that, it had clearly given Boller new confidence in Boller. His body language had changed 180 degrees in one short week. On Monday night, just seven days after he had felt the need to remind Boller he was still going to be a good NFL quarterback someday, Jim Fassel found himself talking his pupil down: “Don’t get too excited,” he told him. “What you did yesterday was terrific, but you have to keep moving forward. There are always ways to improve on and off the field.”

  Fassel’s off-field suggestion for the week was that Boller invite members of the offense to his house on Thursday (which tended to be the night players socialized together) the same way Ray Lewis had members of the defense come over to his house. Boller followed through, and a few of the linemen did come over. The receivers were all busy. “Walk before you run, I guess,” Boller said.

  While Boulware and Wright were still struggling with injuries, one injured “Raven” was back at practice looking and feeling much better: Steve Bisciotti. The neck surgery he had undergone on October 12 had been every bit as painful and difficult as the doctors had told him it was likely to be. He had made it to the Buffalo game, although he admitted it wasn’t easy sitting absolutely still in his box, knowing that any sudden movement—even in a neck brace—would cause him great pain. He hadn’t been able to go to Philadelphia or New York, but now he was out of the neck brace and off antibiotics. “I’m finally starting to feel like myself again,” he said, sitting in what would always be considered Art Modell’s golf cart, watching Friday’s practice.

  His first season as majority owner had not been an easy one, even putting aside the surgery. He had always been an involved fan—anyone watching him at a Maryland basketball game could tell you that—but now, with his name at the top of the team’s masthead, the games had become more personal, tougher to watch, especially if the team wasn’t playing well.

  “You can see it when you sit in the box with him,” said Gary Wiliams, the Maryland basketball coach, who is a close friend. “He’s always been into the games, but now it’s different. When things aren’t going well, he gets very quiet. Steve is usually the last guy in the world you sit with and think, ‘I better not talk to him right now,’ but in some of those close games, it’s pretty apparent that he’s not in the mood for small talk.”

  Dick Cass had also noticed the difference. “I think it has something to do with the fact that when something happens to the team, good or bad, he was involved in the decision making that may have led to what was happening and, maybe more important, he’s sitting there thinking, ‘Okay, what do we need to do next?’ Steve’s brain is always working, and now it’s spending a lot of time working on the Ravens.”

  Bisciotti made no bones about the fact that being the majority owner was a lot different for him than being the minority owner. He was very comfortable with the way Ozzie Newsome and Billick ran the team, but the weekly ups and downs were now more difficult for him to take. “I remember thinking the day we played in the Super Bowl, when I was still minority owner, that I would never be more nervous than I felt right then. The way I felt going into the Pittsburgh game, facing the possibility of 0-2, went way beyond that—way beyond it. I was almost sick to my stomach before kickoff. I thought I might throw up. Then when we drove the ball and scored right away, I felt much, much better.”

  Now Bisciotti was decidedly upbeat. His body felt better and his team was playing better. “Typical Billick team, if you think about it,” he said. “It’s November and we’re starting to build toward December. I really think if we can get through this Dallas game without getting anybody hurt, maybe get a couple guys back next week, we can go into New England and win. They’re very, very good but they don’t dominate teams. They’re beatable. I think we’re building to that.”

  First there was the matter of getting through the Dallas game. On Saturday night Billick again warned the players about not getting sucked into any confrontations with the Cowboys. Like everyone else in the room, he had seen the endless replays of the horrific NBA brawl in Detroit the previous night involving the Indiana Pacers, the Detroit Pistons, and a number of fans. He had also watched complete mayhem break out that afternoon during the Clemson-South Carolina football game. “Fellas, you simply cannot retaliate, no matter what happens in this game,” he said. “This is a wounded, frustrated team. Who knows what they will do or what they will try, especially if they get behind. You retaliate, you’re the one who will be gone. The league is very hyper right now. They’re very image-conscious and what happened last night [in Detroit] will make them even more hyper. They’re going to be watching what the NBA does and they’re going to be watching for any misbehavior at all during a game. You guys have got to be disciplined and you’ve got to behave, because if you don’t, the league’s going to come down on you and on us. I guarantee it.”

  Sunday morning got off to a less-than-auspicious start. Shortly after arriving at the stadium, David Shaw went looking for Clarence Moore to go over a couple of routes with him before the team went on the field to warm up. He couldn’t find him at his locker, so he went into the training room to see if he was getting taped. He was in the training room. He was not getting taped.

  “He was lying under a white sheet, shivering uncontrollably, looking as pale as death,” Shaw said. “He looked so bad, I was tempted to see if he had a toe tag on him. He looked awful.”

  Moore had contracted some kind of stomach flu, and the trainers were trying to get fluids into him, hoping he would feel good enough to play in the game. He didn’t go out for warm-ups, leaving Billick with a decision to make since he had to submit his list of inactive players by 11:30. Before he went out on the field for pregame, Billick got another piece of bad news: Terry Jones, the number one tight end in Heap’s absence, had a bad shoulder. The doctors had hoped he would be
able to play, but it felt weak when he tried to warm up early and they were recommending he sit out as a precaution. Billick added Jones to the inactive list and told Zauner to let Wade Richey know he would be dressing for the game. The doctors told him they thought Moore would be able to play, so he left him up.

  “The injury list is starting to get critical,” Billick said. “Injuries are part of the deal in football, but so is luck. Right now, we aren’t having a lot of luck in terms of who we’ve got injured.”

  Kevin Byrne put it another way: “We’ve got a lot of very highly paid football players watching football right now rather than playing it.”

  When Billick walked onto the field, he sought out Bill Parcells, the way he always made a point of saying hello to any visiting coach. The two men shook hands and Billick tried to make small talk.

  “You know I met my wife when she was working for the Cowboys after I was a free agent in Dallas,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Parcells said, turning away, clearly uninterested in any further conversation.

  Billick shrugged and walked away, baffled and a little bit more fired up to, as he put it, “kick the guy’s ass.” He had been equally baffled in Washington when Joe Gibbs had made no attempt to walk over and say hello during pregame warm-ups even though the two men were standing no more than twenty yards away from each other. “Maybe it’s a Hall of Fame thing,” he had joked at the time. Gibbs, he had decided, was just so caught up in pregame preparations that he had forgotten to walk over for a courtesy handshake and hello. Parcells was different. He was just rude.

  “Some guys have success and don’t take themselves that seriously,” Billick said. “I remember last year after we beat Denver, Mike Shanahan shook hands with me and said, ‘Don’t you ever get tired of kicking my ass?’” I just laughed and said, ‘Nope.’ Last I looked, Shanahan’s won as many Super Bowls as Parcells has.”