Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Billick became a quarterback his sophomore year, although he continued to play both ways throughout his high school career. By the time he was a senior he was six foot five and was the California state record holder for interceptions and an all-state quarterback. It was while he was in high school that Mike went to Vietnam. By then, his sisters, Barbara and Donna, were in college and had taken part in antiwar marches and were very much against the war. When they were home for dinner, Brian would watch in amazement while they shouted at his father about the war and he shouted back.

  “It was very intense and very emotional,” he said. “They were saying that the war was morally wrong, that their brother was a baby-killer like everyone else over there, and that we should be ashamed that he was involved in this thing. To my father, doing what Mike was doing was an automatic, a given, something you should be very proud of. This was about God and country. As far as he was concerned, there was no debate.”

  Only there was debate, most of it at extremely high decibel levels. Brian was torn: the two people he admired most in the world were his father and his brother. And yet what his sisters were saying seemed to make sense because the war didn’t make much sense to him. “I kept wanting to know why we were over there,” he said. “I’m not sure I ever got an answer that really worked for me.”

  Vietnam was winding down when it came time for Brian to make a decision on where to go to college. His father wanted him to go to the Air Force Academy. He considered UCLA but dropped that idea after a less-than-ideal meeting with Coach Pepper Rodgers. “Pepper spent the whole time we were in there swinging at imaginary tennis balls with his tennis racquet,” Billick said. “I know now that was just Pepper being Pepper, but my father was really upset. He said, ‘Brian, I’m not telling you where to go, but you are not going to play for that man.’”

  Navy recruited Billick. He even got a call from Roger Staubach. “That was thrilling,” he said. “But when I said the word ‘Navy’ to my dad, he looked as if he was going to get sick. I really ended up going to Air Force by default. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

  Right from the start, Billick struggled at Air Force. On the first day he was there he had to fill out a form asking—among other things—what his religious affiliation was. “Back then, you were going to church someplace on Sunday, no ifs, ands, or buts,” he said. Billick’s mother and father had raised their children in the Episcopal Church. There was just one problem: “I didn’t know how to spell Episcopalian,” he said. “I had to write down Catholic, which meant I had to go to Catholic services every Sunday the entire time I was there.”

  He never felt comfortable at the school. “Very early on, they sent all the plebes out on one of those field missions, out in the middle of nowhere with a compass and a backpack and just about nothing else,” he said. “We were in a place called Jack’s Valley. I remember it was pouring down rain and I was sitting with my back against a tree, wet, cold, hungry, exhausted, and I looked up at the sky and saw a few stars and had an epiphany: this place ain’t for me. I knew right at that moment that I’d never graduate.”

  If there was anything that might have rescued him, it would have been football. But that was a disappointment, too: he never saw the field the entire season, relegated to playing on the junior varsity as a linebacker. When the semester was over he went home and told his parents he had tried, but the academy just wasn’t for him. “They were disappointed,” he said. “But they understood.”

  He decided to transfer to Brigham Young, even though he knew he would be very much in the minority as a Catholic or even if he learned to spell Episcopalian. He had figured his best position as a college player was going to be tight end, and LaVell Edwards had a reputation as a coach who liked to throw the ball. So he transferred to Brigham Young, where religion again brought him to grief quickly.

  “I went in the weight room to work out,” he said. “Now, I knew it was a Mormon school but I noticed some of the guys were wearing shirts that had a cross on them and said, LDS. I figured there must be two branches of their church—the Mormons and the LDS.”

  Armed with his new understanding of the religion, Billick found himself in the cafeteria one day when he spotted a very attractive young woman eating by herself. “Red-blooded American boy, I walked over, sat down, and looking for an opening, I said, ‘So, tell me, are you Mormon or LDS?’

  “She gave me this disgusted look and said, ‘Let me guess, you’re a football player, right?’”

  He was, in fact, a football player and he became a good one. He even learned that the Mormon Church was also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and managed to avoid marriage while an undergraduate—no small feat. “As a sophomore, they want to take you to meet Mom and Dad on the third date,” he said. “As a junior, it’s the second date. By the time you’re a senior, they’re getting desperate. They want to go straight to Mom and Dad and get the ball rolling.”

  Billick was one of only a handful of senior football players who weren’t married in the fall of 1975. He had a good year as a tight end, earning Honorable Mention All-American status. The team went to the Tangerine Bowl and he was drafted in the eleventh round by the San Francisco 49ers. He went to camp thinking he might have a chance to make the team. Those thoughts disappeared after the third exhibition game.

  “I started,” Billick said, “because they wanted to take a good look at me. We were playing the Houston Oilers. They had a linebacker named Robert Brazile, who was an All-Pro. First play of the game he lined up across from me. It was hot, so he had no sleeves on his shirt and his arms were bigger than most offensive linemen’s legs. He was making these strange sounds. I remember thinking, ‘Maybe if I don’t move at all, he won’t eat me.’”

  Brazile didn’t eat him, just flattened him. Billick was cut soon after that.

  He went back home to Redlands and spent the fall helping out his old high school coach while also coaching at the University of Redlands. “It was like doing an internship in coaching,” he said. “I loved it.”

  He wanted one more shot to play, though, so he accepted a free-agent contract after the season was over with the Dallas Cowboys. As it turned out, he had no chance to make the team —“I wasn’t much more than a camp slapdick,” he said—but the time he spent with Dallas turned out to be important. Soon after he was cut, he was hired in San Francisco as a public relations assistant. His boss was George Heddleston, who had worked previously for the Cowboys. That summer Heddleston had a pool party at his house. Billick was invited. So was Kim Gooch, a young Texan visiting town who had also worked for the Cowboys, as team president Tex Schramm’s assistant. “First time I saw her I decided I was going to marry her,” he said. “Don’t ask me why or how I figured I’d have any chance with her, but I just knew.”

  Perhaps because he didn’t ask her if she was Mormon or LDS, Billick was able to persuade Kim to date him. Less than a year later they were married. Billick spent two years in San Francisco, focusing a lot more on what Bill Walsh was teaching him about coaching than on requests for interviews with Walsh or any of the 49er players. Walsh became a mentor and, to this day, remains someone Billick talks to and relies on for advice and guidance. His career in San Francisco did not, however, get off to a roaring start.

  As low man on the totem pole, he was charged with preparing everything for the coaches on the morning of the 1979 draft. This was before the draft was on TV and it began at 9 A.M. in New York—6 A.M. in San Francisco. That meant the staff had to be in at 4:30 A.M. to start getting ready. Billick was more than ready when they arrived. “My dad was great at breakfasts,” he said. “He knew what the best bagels were, pastries, breads, juices—you name it. I had one of the all-time great spreads waiting for those guys when they came in.”

  There was one small problem. Billick had never been a coffee drinker as a kid. Then he had gone to a Mormon school, where caffeine was banned. It had never occurred to him that a group of bleary-eyed coache
s arriving for work at 4:30 in the morning might want coffee.

  “No one noticed the bagels or the pastries or anything else,” he said. “They were just screaming, ‘Where the hell is the coffee!’”

  Billick had earned his first NFL nickname: Coffee Boy.

  After two years in San Francisco, Billick jumped on the coaching merry-go-round. San Diego State led to Utah State, which led to Stanford, which led to Minnesota. He had first met Denny Green when Green had worked for Walsh in San Francisco, and it was Green who brought him to the NFL, first as his tight ends coach and then, a little more than a year later, as his offensive coordinator. It was there that Billick emerged as a coaching star, leading to his hiring in Baltimore. He had always been considered a media-friendly guy, articulate and accessible, two huge assets in the eyes of any reporter.

  A lot of that changed soon after he stepped off the plane in Tampa on that Monday afternoon in January.

  Where Billick had, in Kevin Byrne’s words, “stepped off the cliff,” was with the comment about ambulance chasing. He was thinking of the Schaap piece, but he was generalizing, lumping everyone together. His tone didn’t help either: “You aren’t qualified.” Not qualified to do what? Even so, Billick had clearly accomplished his mission to make himself the media’s target. While Lewis had to deal with the questions the next morning—which he dodged by saying repeatedly that the incident was in the past, that he felt bad that it had happened, and did anyone have a football question?—it was Billick who was pilloried all week. To this day there are a number of national football columnists who have not forgiven him for his lecture, including one—Len Pasquarelli of ESPN.com—who not only refuses to speak to Billick but won’t set foot inside the Ravens’ training camp—even though he annually writes a training camp report on all thirty-two teams.

  Those in the media who know Billick like him. He is probably as accessible, if not more so, than any coach in the NFL. Beat writers know that if they walk down the hall to Billick’s office, the door is likely to be open and they will be waved in if they need a few minutes of his time. Billick is smart and quotable—and occasionally arrogant, which he now considers part of his persona—but most reporters would much rather deal with Billick than with most of the secretive, paranoid, make-sure-to-say-nothing coaches who populate the NFL. But to many national media members, Billick’s reputation as a pompous, self-righteous know-it-all was sealed forever that day in Tampa.

  Billick is, essentially, unrepentant. “Okay, I probably went a little overboard,” he said. “Ambulance chaser is a very strong term, but I was reacting to ESPN and Schaap. I was angry. But what about all the guys who wrote that I had it wrong when I said there was no plea bargain. Did they do their homework? No. There was no plea bargain.”

  To this day, there are writers who insist that what occurred was a modified version of a plea bargain. It comes up often enough that Byrne carries with him a newspaper clipping in which Garland explains in detail the sequence of events, pointing out that in many ways, the prosecutor coming to him to drop the charges was even more of an exoneration than a not guilty verdict or even a directed verdict would have been.

  The rest of that Super Bowl week went about as well for the Ravens as was possible. David Modell had given instructions to the staff to bring no problems of any kind to Billick. “He told them if the building across the street burned down, just to tell me there was a barbecue going on there,” Billick remembered. “I was able to focus completely and totally on getting ready for the game.”

  The Ravens turned the game into a rout in the second half and won, 34-7. The Giants’ only touchdown came on a kickoff return. In two short years, the Ravens had gone from laughingstock to Super Bowl champions. They had gone from being regarded by some in Baltimore with suspicion to being a part of the town’s fabric. For Billick, the suddenness of the rise was almost overwhelming. To him, becoming an NFL head coach had been a seminal moment in his life. At the press conference on the day he was introduced, he had thought about his father, who had died suddenly on Brian’s fortieth birthday, and had almost been too choked up to speak. “I knew my dad would have looked at that day as an indication that I was okay, that I was, for lack of a better term, taken care of. He didn’t need to worry anymore about what Brian would do or what Brian would become. The thought that I would coach a Super Bowl champion wasn’t really tangible at that moment even though it was clearly the goal and what I’d been hired to do.”

  Billick went through the postgame rituals, accepting the trophy, the lengthy press conference, and the celebrations—first at the stadium, then at the team hotel afterward. At some point in the wee hours of the morning it occurred to him that he had to attend an 8 A.M. post-Super Bowl press conference that the NFL requires the winning coach to be present for. He went up to his room and sank into a shower to try to give himself an energy burst before meeting the media. It was there that he was seized by a brief moment of panic.

  “It was something of a Peggy Lee moment,” he said, referring to the famous song, “Is That All There Is?”—a thought that crosses almost every successful person’s mind at some point after a momentous ultimate triumph. “But it was more than that. I’d known a lot of great coaches who never won a Super Bowl: Denny Green, Bud Grant, Marv Levy, Bill Cowher—just to name a few. Now, here I am, forty-six years old, in my second year as a head coach, and I’ve won one. The question was, what now? Can I stay motivated the way you need to, having done that? I thought about it for a few minutes and the answer was, yes, I could. I loved doing what I did, I didn’t just do it to win a Super Bowl, I did it because I loved it. And now I was in a position where I could, essentially, make my own legacy. If we never won again, there would be people who’d say I was a one-shot wonder. Fine. I could handle that. But it was in my hands now, because I figured I was going to have a chance to do this for a while.”

  They had a chance to repeat the next year—or so they thought—after the decision was made to pay the money it would require to keep the team together for another season. Elvis Grbac was brought in to play quarterback in what was supposed to be an upgrade from Trent Dilfer. But the team never jelled the way it had the year before. Jamal Lewis, who had been superb at running back in his rookie season, tore up his knee in training camp. Grbac never seemed to get comfortable quarterbacking a team with lofty expectations. The defense was still very good, but not as dominant. The team made the playoffs again and won a first-round game against the Miami Dolphins before being beaten handily in Pittsburgh. That loss was painful, in part because everyone had believed the game winnable but also because the opponent was Pittsburgh. Mostly, though, it was painful because everyone knew it was an ending. As in 1996, when the team first arrived from Cleveland, salaries had to be purged to get under the cap. Siragusa was gone; Adams was gone; Grbac retired rather than restructure his contract; Rod Woodson, the Hall of Fame safety, was gone. The team went from experienced to inexperienced in the blink of an eye.

  “Most years when we go to camp, I can tell you anywhere from forty to fifty of the guys who will be on the fifty-three [man roster] when we start the season,” Billick said. “In ’02, there weren’t twenty. That’s how young we were.” Which was why the next two seasons were so encouraging. First the 7-9 and then the 10-6 that included a division title and a trip to the playoffs. After the Tennessee loss came that hectic first week in which Bisciotti and Billick had to hash out the Cavanaugh situation and establish ground rules for their relationship that each man would feel comfortable with. Once that was done, the Ravens turned to the question every NFL team begins to address each February: how do we get better?

  While Newsome and his scouts prepared for the 2004 draft as they always did—although without a first-round pick because of the Boller trade—there was one name that was on the lips of almost everyone working in the old building on Owings Mills Boulevard: Terrell Owens.

  Everyone in football knew that Terrell Owens wasn’t going to be a San Francisco 49e
r again in 2004. Brilliant as he was, he had more or less worn out his welcome in San Francisco with his showboating and his battles with teammates and coaches. He was about to become a free agent and there was no question that a number of teams would be willing to pay him a lot of money—baggage and all—to wear their uniform.

  The Ravens were right at the top of the list of potential suitors. With good reason. If the team needed one thing more than anything, it was a receiver who could, in the vernacular, “go vertical,” or “stretch the field.” In English, they needed someone with the speed to get open. The Ravens’ best receiver was their tight end, third-year Pro Bowler Todd Heap, a wonderful talent with soft hands and excellent speed for someone who was six foot five and 250 pounds. None of their wide receivers—Marcus Robinson, Frank Sanders, or Travis Taylor—had shown a consistent ability to “create separation,” which is football-speak for getting open. Taylor and Robinson were not without ability. Taylor, who had been a Ravens first-round pick in 2000 (the tenth pick overall) showed flashes of great talent. But he was as apt to drop an easy pass as he was to catch one spectacularly. Robinson had moments, too, and was, in fact, a solid receiver. But he wasn’t the game breaker Owens was. Few people in the game were.

  The question for the Ravens was whether they could come up with the money to pay Owens. There was no salary cap issue, just the matter of how much Owens was worth and how his signing would affect the cap in the long term. “Traditionally T.O. is the kind of free agent we don’t sign,” Billick said. “We don’t usually make big splashes in March [which is when most free agents sign]. It hasn’t been the Ravens’ way.”

  But this was different. The need was obvious. The other question was Owens’s personality. He was right at the top of the selfish self-absorption list in a league filled with self-absorbed people. Under the wrong circumstances he could become a serious problem in what was, for the most part, a problem-free locker room. The Ravens knew all of this. They were not about to make a move that would change the nature of their team and their locker room without a lot of discussion, a lot of homework, and a lot of thought.