Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  When a head coach gets fired, all or most of his staff gets fired with him. That puts coaches on the market. It also opens opportunities for other coaches. Jim Fassel would be extremely interested in any of the head coaching vacancies. So would Mike Nolan. If Nolan got a job, he would probably want to take some of his staff—certainly Mike Singletary—with him. The Ravens had to know where they wanted to look if they found themselves with staff openings. They would also have to deal with the issue of Matt Cavanaugh. Before Billick sat down on the Friday before the Bengals game to meet with Steve Bisciotti, Ozzie Newsome, and Dick Cass, he knew he was going to have a hard time making a case to keep Cavanaugh. This pained him for the simple reason that he liked Cavanaugh and, after six years of working together, considered him a friend. But the offense was still lagging even though Boller was clearly making progress.

  “The only good news about the Patriots game was that we came home and people around here were making excuses for Kyle having a poor game,” Billick said. “Three weeks ago they would have buried him—regardless of the conditions or the quality of the opponent.”

  What made the Cavanaugh situation easier for Billick was Cavanaugh himself. He wasn’t sitting around, feeling sorry for himself or feeling that being fired was going to be unfair. “If we don’t put it together these last few weeks, I know what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m a big boy. I know how this game works.”

  There was some talk in the Friday futures meeting about players, but not much. Those decisions would be made at the end of the season after each coach had submitted his end-of-season report on each of his players. That was the way the process worked. But there were certain players whose future with the team had already been decided. There was no need to discuss them. Newsome had already made some decisions in his own mind, not about specific players but about what needed to be done in the upcoming off-season.

  Dating back to the Monday night loss to Kansas City, he had started to wonder about how good the team really was. He and Billick had made a conscious decision during the off-season not to, as he put it, “upset the applecart.” They had re-signed all their free agents with the exception of wide receiver Marcus Robinson. They had pursued only one big-name or even semi-big-name free agent, Terrell Owens, and, for reasons beyond their control, they hadn’t gotten him. They had chosen, essentially, to stand pat with a team that had gone 10-6 and won a division title, but in doing so, they had probably not addressed some weaknesses. Already, Newsome was formulating an off-season plan for 2005 that would be far more aggressive.

  Billick was still more focused on 2004, because he had more control over the next five weeks than Newsome and his staff did. A general manager and his staff do their most important work between January and April: deciding whom to keep and not keep, whom to pursue and not pursue, and, of course, whom to draft and whom to try to sign after the draft. From May to August the general manager and the coach work in tandem, piecing together the team. From September to the end of the year, the general manager and his scouts might be able to help with a free-agent signing here, a recommendation there. But for the most part, they have to sit back and watch the coaches and players and hope that they have given the coach the right players to work with. Newsome had started to wonder in October if the Ravens had the right group. By the first week in December he was losing sleep, thinking quite possibly they did not.

  Billick loses sleep during the season only on Sundays after a loss. The rest of the time he sleeps fine. He slept well on the Saturday before the Bengals game because he felt confident that the team was coming into the time of year when it did its best work. In five seasons under Billick, the Ravens were 20-9 in December and January, including 5-2 in postseason. What’s more, this team, through all the ups and downs and injuries, hadn’t lost two games in a row all year.

  Billick was in an upbeat mood crossing the Hamburg Street bridge on Sunday morning. The weather was remarkable for early December: temperature at kickoff would be fifty-six degrees, with a comfortable breeze. It would have been a nice day for October; for December it was borderline miraculous. Billick’s walks had been fraught with adventure recently. On the night of the Cleveland game, one of the yellow-jacketed security guards had walked up to shake hands with him just as he walked into the stadium.

  “Good luck tonight, Coach,” he said.

  “Thank you, young man,” Billick said, his customary response.

  “Now I need you to make a promise,” the yellow jacket continued while Billick started down the ramp.

  “Name it,” Billick said, thinking he was going to be asked to promise a victory.

  “Boller messes up, you promise you’ll get him out of there, okay?”

  “Wouldn’t count on it,” Billick said, not breaking stride.

  Apparently one of the yellow jacket’s supervisors overheard the conversation. The guard was fired on the spot.

  Vernon Holley decided not to tell Billick about what had happened because he knew Billick would not have wanted the man fired, regardless of how out of line his comment might have been.

  “He’s not even supposed to shake hands with him [Billick] or say anything,” Holley said. “He might have survived that, but when he brought up Kyle and his boss heard it, he was done. He was probably out of the building before we got to the locker room.”

  Before the Dallas game, another fan approached Billick on the bridge and wanted to take a picture. Billick complied. “Coach, can I ask you one question?” he said, falling into stride.

  “Sure, why not?” Billick answered.

  “Who exactly is responsible for the offense?” the man said.

  Billick stopped. “I am,” he said, glaring down at the man.

  “But what about Cavanaugh?”

  “Matt takes his cue from me. You have a problem with the offense, you can talk to me about it.”

  The man opted not to continue the discussion.

  Soon after he arrived in his office, Billick called Heap in to make sure one last time that he was absolutely ready to play. Heap, who was already in uniform, insisted that he was. “When you get out there in warm-ups,” Billick said. “Limp around a little bit. Let’s play with Marvin’s [Lewis] mind a little.”

  Heap nodded and left, a huge smile on his face.

  Gary Zauner came in next. “Richey’s down,” Billick told him, anticipating a question about Wade Richey’s status.

  “Really?” Zauner said. “He’s been kicking better, and it saves Stover’s leg. . . .”

  “Okay,” Billick said. “It’s Richey or Todd Heap. You think I should go with Richey?”

  “No,” Zauner said. Then, in his never-say-die way, he added, “But what about Richey for Randy Hymes?”

  Billick shook his head. “Can’t do it. I need Hymes in case someone gets hurt.”

  Zauner shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “I lose.”

  When the linebackers walked onto the field to warm up, Peter Boulware followed them down the tunnel and up the steps leading to the playing surface. He was wearing a boot on his foot, similar to the ones that Lewis and Sanders were wearing. The difference was, they were hoping to play again in a week or two. Boulware knew the soonest he would play in a real football game was the following September.

  As soon as the fans behind the tunnel spotted Boulware, they began calling his name, hoping to get an autograph. Boulware signed a few, shook hands with several people near the bench, and sat down, a smile on his face that was anything but real.

  “This is killing me,” he said. “When I had the knee surgery, it was frustrating, but I kept telling myself I’d be back by midseason and the whole thing would be behind me. Then I’m back on the field for one day and I hurt my foot. I’ve had one day in a year where I was a healthy football player. To go back and face rehab again is very, very tough.”

  Two weeks short of thirty, Boulware had been a star football player for about as long as he could remember. He had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, the so
n of a doctor and a furniture-store owner who expected all four of their children to do well in school and be successful. Peter did just that, becoming one of the most highly recruited football players in the country by his senior year. Since Florida State was the program in the country at the time, having just won the national championship in 1993, Boulware chose to go there. He redshirted as a freshman, was a part-time starter as a redshirt freshman the next year, began to emerge as a star as a sophomore, and exploded in his junior year with nineteen quarterback sacks in twelve games. Since he was graduating in the spring anyway, Boulware declared for the 1997 NFL draft and the Ravens, with the fourth pick that spring, made him their number one choice. He was a starter from day one, recording 11.5 sacks as a rookie en route to being named the league’s defensive rookie of the year. By the time he lined up in Cleveland for the penultimate game of the 2004 season, he was on his way to a fourth Pro Bowl and had become the team’s all-time sack leader. That was the day he hurt his knee.

  “I’ve always known there was going to come a day when I couldn’t play football anymore and that it would be tough,” he said. “What this has brought home to me is that it’s going to be even harder than I imagined. There’s such a high running out of that tunnel and hearing seventy thousand people screaming. There’s nothing else you can do in life that’s going to give you the feeling you have when you’re playing a football game or when you’re part of a football team.

  “I’m in good shape financially. I’ve got a car dealership back home in Tallahassee and I’m learning the business. I know that will be there for me when I quit, but there’s no way it can replace this. I mean, when I sell a car, are there going to be seventy thousand people screaming my name like there are when I get a sack? I don’t think so.

  “Being in the locker room every day and going off to do rehab rather than going to practice is really hard. I’ve got enough ego to think that I can help these guys, that in a close game I can make a play or two that might be worth a few points and make a difference. Right now, though, I can’t do a thing to help them, and that kills me.”

  On the sidelines, Boulware was a full-throated cheerleader, screaming play calls to the defense, pulling Terrell Suggs and Adalius Thomas aside to offer advice, congratulating anyone who made a big play. “It’s better than being in the stands,” he said. “In a few years, I won’t even be on the sidelines anymore. Right after the foot injury, I was down, really down. But my faith and my wife have gotten me through it. I’m convinced I’m going to play again and play well. I’m also convinced that things do happen for a reason, that there’s a reason why I’m going through this. Some days it’s hard to figure out what it is, but I keep believing it’s out there. Maybe at this time next year, someone else will be going through this and I’ll be able to help him.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll come back a better player because I’m well rested.”

  Boulware admitted that the second injury had severely tested his faith. He still had mixed emotions about what happened two years earlier when he and Matt Stover clashed with Rod Hairston over the religious direction of the team. “Religion should help bring people together,” he said. “I know if you look at history, that hasn’t always been the case, and that’s the kind of thing you don’t want to have happen inside a team. One thing I hope I’ll never be is someone who says, ‘If you don’t believe the way I believe, then you’re wrong or there’s something wrong with you.’ I don’t feel that way. I felt badly about what happened. The last thing any team needs is for people to be fighting on the inside about religious beliefs.

  “Coach Billick did the right thing, stepping in when he did. Unfortunately, it needed to be done because all of us were not handling it very well.” Boulware hadn’t been attending Hairston’s Saturday night fellowship meetings because he didn’t participate in the team’s Saturday night meetings. “Next year, when I’m back playing, I’ll go,” he said, sounding almost as if he was hoping that would be the case.

  They were still screaming his name when he went back into the locker room with the team. The screams were because of what he had done in the past. Boulware wanted to believe there would be screams soon for what he was doing in the future. “The day is coming for all of us when we can’t play,” he said. “I see that now very clearly. I just don’t want it to be yet.”

  Those who would play on this day gathered in a circle in the Ravens’ locker room thirty minutes before kickoff. Corey Fuller had been chosen to lead the prayer. Before he prayed, Fuller preached. “We’ve got all we need in this room to win this game,” he said. “Let’s remember we are God’s chosen people, chosen to play this game. Think about how lucky we are to get to do this. We only get so many chances to do this, so let’s not let this one go by without giving every single thing we have out there.”

  Clearly, Fuller could see the end of football, too.

  Since it was December, Billick was ready to name his captains for the rest of the season. He alternated captains the first eleven weeks, sending different players out for the coin toss. (Orlando Brown had not been sent out again after Cleveland, much to Matt Stover’s relief.) The captains Billick named for the rest of the season were no surprise to anyone: Ray Lewis on defense, Jonathan Ogden on offense, and Adalius Thomas on special teams. Billick added a fourth captain: Ed Reed. Given his play during the season, it would be almost impossible not to name him.

  As had now become tradition, the first half was a defensive struggle. Reed, the newly minted captain, set up the Ravens’ first points of the game when he and Will Demps hit Bengals tight end Matt Schobel near midfield on the opening drive of the game and jarred the ball loose. Reed picked it up and returned it to the 25. Chester Taylor got 14 on first down to the 11. Then, on third-and-7, Boller found Heap at the 5, who, with the crowd screaming, “HEEEEEEP!” fought his way inside the 2. He appeared to be close to a first down. Billick was screaming at referee Walt Anderson to measure, but Anderson stood with his fist clenched over his head, the signal for fourth down. Billick yelled some more, got nowhere, and decided to take the sure three points, much to the disappointment of the crowd. Stover’s 22-yarder made it 3-0.

  The score stayed the same until late in the first half when Carson Palmer, who had moved his team most of the half without putting any points on the board, found Chad Johnson deep for a 51-yard catch over Chris McAlister. It was Johnson’s fourth catch of the game against McAlister. All day, he had been trash-talking McAlister, telling him he couldn’t possibly cover him. That surprised no one. What was surprising was that McAlister said nothing in response. Everyone knew his shoulder was still hurting, but he was quiet—too quiet—throughout the half.

  The Ravens shut the Bengals down after Johnson’s catch, and Shayne Graham kicked a 41-yard field goal to tie the game with 2:25 to go in the half. The offense responded with an almost-perfect two-minute-drill drive. In fourteen plays, mixing in time-outs along the way, Boller took his team from his own 18 to the Cincinnati 4. When he was sacked at the Cincinnati 38 to set up third-and-18, Boller found Travis Taylor over the middle at the 14 to pick up the first down. Boller scrambled up the middle two plays after that to pick up a first down at the 4. With the clock running out, he spiked the ball to stop it with ten seconds left. A jump pass to Clarence Moore didn’t work, and they had to settle for Stover and a field goal and a 6-3 halftime lead.

  There was tension in the locker room at halftime. As in Cincinnati, the Bengals were moving the ball but not scoring. They still didn’t have a touchdown against the Ravens in six quarters. That was good. What wasn’t good was the uneasy feeling everyone had that Palmer and his receivers were capable of exploding at any minute. Johnson and T. J. Houshmandzadeh already had four catches apiece and Palmer had completed 13 of 16 passes for 129 yards. He was clearly a more mature quarterback than he had been when he threw three interceptions back in September.

  Even more disturbing, particularly to Mike Nolan and the DB coaches, was McAlister. Something was wrong and they co
uldn’t figure out what it was. He insisted that his shoulder was okay, but he looked almost lifeless on the field. The coaches had changed the defensive plan from the first Cincinnati game to give McAlister more help on Johnson, taking their chances with Gary Baxter on Houshmandzadeh. But even with help, McAlister seemed unable to stop or even slow down Johnson. Instead of turning him toward the middle of the field, where Ed Reed was shading to give him help, McAlister was allowing him to run routes to the outside, where there was no help.

  Before he went to talk to his coaches, Nolan grabbed McAlister and took him into the hallway just around the corner from the lounge where the defense gathers at halftime. McAlister was surprised—and upset—when Nolan asked him to step outside.

  “Mac, what’s wrong?” Nolan said. “Are you okay? If something’s wrong, tell me.”

  “I’m fine, Coach.”

  “You’re not fine, Mac, you’re not yourself. You are a much better player than what I saw on that field the first half.”

  “Am I?”

  Nolan felt himself getting angry. He had his hand on McAlister’s arm. Now he shook it slightly. “Chris, when I’m talking to you, give me your eyes.”

  McAlister had his head down when Nolan said it. He picked his head up, took a small step forward to get closer to him, and got almost nose-to-nose with him, their eyes almost touching. They stood like that for a second, saying nothing.

  “Get in the room with the other guys,” Nolan said, turning to talk to his coaches.

  “I knew right then I’d lost him,” Nolan said.

  “I was angry,” McAlister said. “Chad had caught a couple of balls on me, I knew that, but it isn’t like he’s some fourth-rate receiver. He’s an All-Pro. We had given up three points in the half, that was it. I didn’t see any reason why he should call me out of the room that way. I did get in his face a little bit when he told me to give him my eyes. I was pissed-off at that moment.”