Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “I never said throw him out the door,” Thurman said.

  That changed the tone of the conversation. Billick told Nolan he should sit Fuller down on Wednesday and tell him exactly what his role would be going forward. If Fuller objected, Nolan should send him to Billick. Everyone in the room was fairly convinced that Fuller wouldn’t object. To begin with, he would have two full days to calm down. During the second half of the season, Billick gives the team both Monday and Tuesday off after wins (and occasionally after a well-played loss), so few players would be in the building until Wednesday. Beyond that, Fuller was smart enough to know he was on thin ice. It was also quite likely that Deion Sanders and Ray Lewis would make it clear to him that fighting the coaching staff wasn’t a good idea.

  The Fuller situation was upsetting to Billick, because he genuinely liked him, but was really a minor issue, given the week to come. Like the Ravens, the Patriots were a banged-up team. Both their starting cornerbacks were out for the season and they had the usual assortment of injuries that afflict NFL teams in late November. The Ravens would again be without two key offensive components: Jamal Lewis’s foot would keep him out for at least a week, and Todd Heap, although finally starting to make progress, was still at least a week away. So was Deion Sanders. Chris McAlister thought he would be able to play, but he wasn’t certain.

  Dave Zastudil had been in so much pain after the team arrived home from New York that he pulled into Mike Flynn’s driveway and slept on his couch. “I just couldn’t go any further,” he said. “The pain was unbearable.” He was feeling considerably better and talking about perhaps punting in another week against the Cincinnati Bengals. Nick Murphy wished him no ill will but was fervently hoping he would delay his return at least another week. “I play in three games, I get a vested year,” he said.

  A vested year was a big deal to a player like Murphy. It meant that if he made a team in 2005, he would be paid $305,000, as opposed to the rookie minimum of $235,000. It would also mean he was only three years away from being a fully vested four-year player. Murphy had kicked well enough on Sunday that any thoughts about holding another round of kicking tryouts—always a possibility when a new kicker is brought in—had vanished. “He did exactly what I told him to do,” Zauner said. “He caught it, he kicked it, and he didn’t have a real bad kick in the bunch. He did fine.”

  The bigger news was the emergence of Darnell Dinkins as a legitimate target for Boller. Considering that he had never lined up at tight end in the NFL until the Eagles game, Dinkins had been a revelation. He was a good blocker, played hard on special teams, and could catch the ball. Plus, even though he was very quiet and deeply religious off the field, he had a little bit of a mean streak—the kind coaches like—on the field. Rex Ryan had been impressed the very first day Dinkins had practiced with the team, when he got into a scuffle with Jarret Johnson, something of a tough guy himself. “There’s no back down in that kid,” Ryan said. Coming from Ryan, that was the ultimate compliment.

  Playing the Patriots was important to the Ravens on a number of levels. The first—and most obvious—was that they had won two of the last three Super Bowls, including the most recent one. They were 9-1, tied with the Steelers for the best record in the AFC. There was also the Belichick factor. Most of the Ravens’ key front office people had worked with (or for) Belichick in Cleveland. Ozzie Newsome often talked about how much he had learned from Belichick about coaching and personnel. Everyone had nothing but respect for his football knowledge. But most of those same people had all sorts of stories about what a difficult boss he had been. Almost to a man, those who had worked with him were stunned by the emergence of the “new Belichick” in New England. He had gone from being a football geek who seemed to have all the qualities needed in a coordinator but few of those needed in a head coach to an absolute slam-dunk Hall of Fame coach.

  He still seemed to make a point of not filling up notebooks during press conferences, but he had developed a good relationship with a number of key media people around the league. Clearly, he was the leader of this remarkable Patriots team and his players all looked up to him—not just for his football knowledge but for his leadership. The general consensus in the NFL—and the results bore this out—was that Belichick and his right-hand man, Scott Pioli, ran the best franchise in football. The Ravens, who had a very healthy self-respect for their way of doing things, wanted to believe they were every bit as good. The only way to prove it was to beat the Patriots—now and, more important, in postseason. The Patriots were king. No one could inherit the throne without knocking them from it.

  “What they do is they wait for you to break,” Billick said. “They don’t give you anything quick or easy. If you want to score, you probably have to go ten or twelve plays and they just bide their time and wait for you to make a mistake. They almost know you’ll screw up eventually. Kyle has to be ready to throw the ball fifty times in this game. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If we’re going to beat these guys and Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, we’re probably going to have to do it late, which means he’s going to have to make plays.”

  Boller had ended up 23-of-34 for 232 yards, his best day of the season, on Sunday. He had been voted player of the game, and when he had appeared on the video boards at the end of the game, many of the fans who had booed him lustily in the Buffalo and Cleveland games had cheered. That was the way of the NFL world. When Billick had looked at the tape of the Dallas game, he had said it easily could have been a “rat-killer”— an embarrassing rout—if his team had been healthy. But at this time of year, few teams were healthy. “It isn’t so much how many injuries you have this time of year, because everybody’s got ’em,” Billick said. “It’s who you have injured. We lost two running backs in one series on Sunday.”

  Jamal Lewis was actually flying to North Carolina on Monday to have his foot examined by a specialist. He was hoping someone—anyone—would tell him that the diagnosis of the Ravens’ doctors, who believed he would be out at least two weeks, was wrong. In the meantime, the Ravens needed a backup running back, so they signed Jamel White, who had been waived earlier in the year by Cleveland and more recently by Tampa Bay. He would spend most of the week trying to learn the offense. Chester Taylor would have to take almost all the snaps on Sunday.

  For the first time all year, the weather was likely to be a major factor. On the last weekend in November in Massachusetts, no one could even begin to predict what it would be like. One thing was almost certain: it would be cold. Kickoff had been moved back from 1 P.M. to 4:15 because CBS wanted it as the back end of its doubleheader. That meant the sun would just about be down by the end of the first quarter. Cold they could handle. Snow or sleet or rain would be another story. The playing surface in the new (third-year) Gillette Stadium was real grass, one of the few NFL stadiums—especially in a cold-weather city—that had not installed some kind of turf. When the stadium opened, the idea had seemed like a good one: players generally prefer grass because it is easier on their legs. But any kind of precipitation turned the field into an absolute swamp. The Patriots loved it because they were used to it. Quarterback Tom Brady’s first comment after the Patriots had clinched home field throughout the playoffs the previous year had been “What this means is that someone’s got to come in here and figure out a way to beat us on this terrible field.”

  The Patriots loved their terrible field. The worse the weather, the more they loved it.

  Billick always changed the practice schedule on Thanksgiving, moving practice up to the morning so players and coaches could get home to spend the afternoon and evening with their families. Practice was earlier in the day this time of year anyway because Billick wanted to be outside as much as possible, and by late afternoon the sun was starting to disappear. The team always had a Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday, which was just a walk-through day. Families came to the facility to spend some time before the team left to fly to Providence, where it would stay on Saturday night, as Gillette
Stadium was exactly midway between Providence and Boston.

  Billick was pleased with practice on Thanksgiving morning. “I really think yesterday and today are as good as we’ve been all season,” he said. “They understand where we are right now and the opportunity that’s there for them this week.”

  Terrell Suggs probably summed up what everyone was thinking, saying over and over again, “They’ve got something we want.”

  Indeed they did.

  The weather report for Sunday wasn’t very good: wind and rain, the rain increasing as the afternoon went on. If the game had kicked off at one o’clock as originally scheduled, there might have been a chance to avoid the rain. Now it seemed unlikely.

  It is truly a shame that the Patriots play their games in Foxboro. The franchise was launched in Boston in 1960, part of the then-fledgling American Football League. There may not be a better sports town in the country than Boston. Everyone talks about the Red Sox and their legendary fans, but the Celtics and Bruins have also had a fanatic following for years. The case can be made that the city is home to three teams that are among the signature franchises in their sport. The Celtics were the dominant dynasty in the NBA and still own far more titles (sixteen) than any other NBA team. The Bruins haven’t won nearly as many championships (five), but the two they won in 1970 and 1972 were won with the great Bobby Orr as their backbone and Phil Esposito shattering NHL scoring records. Until October of 2004, the Red Sox were as famous for not winning championships as other teams are for winning them.

  The Patriots never quite fit into that lore. Maybe it was because they began as part of an upstart league and never really found a true home in Boston. Maybe it was because they didn’t make a Super Bowl until 1986 and then got blown out, 46-10, by the Chicago Bears when they did. Or maybe it was because they left Boston and moved to Foxboro—which consists of about six fast-food stops and four gas stations—in the late 1970s and built a stadium that looked like it came out of a kid’s construction set in a spot with exactly one road—Route 1—leading in and out of the place.

  Gillette Stadium is a typical, modern NFL stadium, complete with all the amenities required by today’s owners. It has a mock lighthouse that sits at one end of the field that distinguishes it from other stadiums, but it still is in the middle of nowhere since it is built on the same spot as the old Foxboro Stadium. These days, though, that doesn’t matter. Nor, apparently, do the lack of access roads. Foxboro has become the pro football capital of the world.

  The turnaround began when Bill Parcells took the Patriots to their second Super Bowl in January of 1997. They lost again, to the Green Bay Packers, but by a far more respectable score, 35-21. That appearance was sullied by the internal battle going on between Parcells and team owner Robert Kraft. Parcells left right after the Super Bowl to coach the New York Jets, and Bill Belichick, who had become his defensive coordinator for a second time (they had first been together with the New York Giants) after being fired by the Modells en route from Cleveland to Baltimore, went with him. In fact, Belichick was technically the head coach for a brief period while the Jets and Patriots negotiated compensation to the Patriots for the loss of Parcells.

  When Parcells retired (again) after three seasons, Belichick was again supposed to be head coach. But he did to the Jets what Parcells had done to the Patriots—negotiating with New England to have complete control of the team rather than coach in New York, where Parcells was still hanging around as general manager. Technically, Belichick was the Jets’ coach twice and never coached a game or ran a practice.

  In New England he had built the league’s model franchise, helped by Scott Pioli, an old Cleveland ally. The Patriots went 5-11 in his first season as coach (2000), then went 11-5 the next season after Tom Brady, who had been the 199th pick (sixth round) in the 2000 NFL draft, replaced an injured Drew Bledsoe at quarterback. The Patriots stunned the heavily favored St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl at the end of that season, then, after missing the playoffs during the 2002 season (with a 9-7 record), they came back to go 14-2 and win another Super Bowl after the 2003 season. They had finished that season with a fifteen-game winning streak, and their only loss in 2004 had been at Pittsburgh. That meant they were on a 24-1 streak when the Ravens came to town.

  It started to rain at about two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, which was fine with Mike Nolan. “The windier and rainier, the better,” he said. “They do so many things in their passing game. If the weather takes a few of them away, that helps us.”

  Once again Billick was scrambling to decide who was going to be on his inactive list. Orlando Brown’s arthritic knee had been sore during the week, but not sore enough for him to miss any practice on Wednesday or Thursday. Billick had told him to rest for most of the day on Friday. But by the time Brown got off the team bus Sunday afternoon, the knee was bothering him. No one wanted to play in this game more than Brown. He was convinced that he would never have played in the NFL if not for Belichick and he wanted to show his old coach that, at thirty-three, he still had it as a player. Now, about two hours before kickoff, he and Andy Tucker went out to test the knee. Tucker stood and watched while Brown got in his stance and tried to push off the already slippery turf in the end zone near the Ravens’ tunnel. Each time Brown tried to come out of his stance, Tucker could see him wince. He went back and told Billick that Brown couldn’t play. Ethan Brooks would have to start at right tackle. Brown was devastated as he climbed back into his street clothes.

  The other big question mark was Chris McAlister. He had practiced lightly during the week, protecting the shoulder he had reinjured during the Jets game. Shortly after the team arrived in the locker room, McAlister told Nolan he didn’t think he could play. He was concerned that the first time he took a hit, the shoulder would go again. Nolan suggested that the two of them talk to Billick about it. Nolan knew that going into this game without McAlister was potentially disastrous, given the quality of the Patriots’ quarterback and their deep receiving corps. He wasn’t about to push an injured player to play, but he also knew that playing two weeks after a stinger, even a bad one, was not risky even though a good hit could be painful.

  Billick had not started the day well, taking a wrong turn when he arrived at the stadium and had turned away from the locker room rather than toward it. He had walked in to find Tucker waiting for him with the news that Brown was down. Now Nolan and McAlister walked in and shut the door.

  “Poor Mike,” Billick said later. “One week he’s got one cornerback screaming he’s not playing enough, the next week he’s got another one saying he can’t play at all.”

  Billick asked McAlister if he was concerned about risking further injury. McAlister said the doctors had told him that wasn’t likely, he was just worried about his ability to tackle if the shoulder was still weak. That was a legitimate concern. Billick suggested that if he played on only the left side of the defense, the shoulder would probably not take a hard hit since he would be using his right shoulder most of the time to tackle running backs coming out of the backfield. Reluctantly, McAlister agreed. Billick told him to let the doctors know if it got too tough, and they would get him out right away. McAlister had had his shoulder injected in 2003 after a stinger but had vowed never to do it again, because he was still in pain “months” after the season ended. He did take a weekly shot—like many players—of a painkiller, but not one that numbed a specific body part.

  Billick took a deep breath and walked out of the locker room and down the tunnel to take his pregame walk around the field. He got one step out of the tunnel, felt the rain coming down in sheets, and turned back. “Ritual isn’t really that important,” he said.

  Nolan walked out of the tunnel and shook his head in disappointment. It was windy, but not windy enough. “If this was golf, the wind would matter,” he said. “But it’s not. A football’s a lot heavier. Brady will be able to do what he wants to do. This wind won’t affect him.”

  The skies were black by the time the te
ams took the field for the kickoff. “The lighthouse is very appropriate today,” Dick Cass had said before taking refuge in the dry owner’s box.

  The first half went about as well as the Ravens might have hoped. Not surprisingly, both offenses struggled with the conditions and the fact that they were facing an excellent defense. Boller had never played in weather quite like this in his life. “I remember in high school I played one game in the rain,” he said. “But it was nothing like this.”

  Boller began the game without a glove on his throwing hand but had so much trouble keeping his hand dry between snaps that he tried a glove in the second quarter. That felt awkward and the glove quickly got wet, so he went back to his bare hand. Brady, who was far more accustomed to this sort of weather, wasn’t having much more luck. He did come up with a critical completion early, finding David Patten for a 37-yard gain when the Ravens had the Patriots backed up with a third-and-12 on their own 3 in the first quarter. The Patriots didn’t get any points out of the drive, but they did reestablish field position thanks to that play. Fortunately for the Ravens, Nick Murphy was doing an excellent job of keeping them in good shape in the field-position battle. The conditions didn’t seem to bother him at all. He kept booming one good kick after another. For most of the first half, he was the closest thing the Ravens had to an offense.

  The Patriots scored first, Brady piecing together a drive that bogged down at the Ravens’ 10 when Marques Douglas sacked Brady on third down. Adam Vinatieri, likely to someday be the second placekicker (Jan Stenerud is currently the only one) voted into the Hall of Fame, came on to kick a 28-yard field goal that made it 3-0. It looked like that would be the halftime score until Corey Dillon decided to help out the Ravens. With the Patriots trying to run the clock out in the final minute deep in their own territory, Dillon took a handoff from Brady with fifty-six seconds left and, for some reason, ran out of bounds—stopping the clock. The Ravens had already used two time-outs. If Dillon had stayed inbounds, the Ravens would have had to use their last time-out. One more running play would have taken the clock to forty-five seconds—or less—and by the time the officials set the ball and started the play clock, the half would have been just about over by the time the Patriots punted.