Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Everyone involved in the draft has a story about something good or bad that happened on draft day. Jim Fassel, the former New York Giants coach who had just been hired by Billick as an “offensive consultant,” remembered the year the Giants wanted to draft Miami tight end Jeremy Shockey. “Tennessee was just ahead of us on the board, Cleveland just behind,” Fassel said. “[Tennessee coach] Jeff Fisher calls and says Cleveland wants to trade with them so they can jump ahead of us to get Shockey. He says, ‘Give me a third,’ and I won’t do it. I told him I’d give him a fourth and if they made the trade with Cleveland, I’d take the defensive lineman I knew he wanted. He took the fourth. Of course I have no idea if he was really ready to deal with Cleveland and I wasn’t about to take that lineman, but this is one time when you can tell a lie and it’s accepted as part of the business.”

  The draft began a few minutes late after an awkward ceremony in which Tagliabue attempted to honor Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals defensive back who had been killed that week (by friendly fire as it turned out) in Afghanistan. The league had gone out and found several marines to stand behind Tagliabue for the moment of silence he was asking everyone to join in. The only problem was that Tillman had been in the army. Perhaps no one from the army could be rounded up on short notice. Or perhaps Tagliabue just liked the idea of a marine honor guard. Tagliabue mouthed the usual platitudes about Tillman’s death, giving everyone a different perspective on sports. Then the San Diego Chargers announced that they had taken Eli Manning with the number one pick, and all the New York Giants fans in the audience, thinking they were now not getting Manning, booed him heartily when he came onstage.

  So much for perspective.

  The afternoon crept along very slowly in Baltimore. “It’s going to take an awful lot to convince me to ever trade a number one again,” Newsome said at one point as ESPN showed a Coors Light commercial for perhaps the thousandth time of the day. Calls came in to Newsome occasionally. James Harris called so often that Bisciotti suggested at one point that Newsome put him on speaker so everyone in the room could yell, “SHACK!” like the shout-out to Norm on the sitcom Cheers.

  The hot news of the day turned out to be that the Giants did finally trade with the Chargers to get Manning, giving up their first pick (fourth in the draft), Philip Rivers, and next year’s number one, three, and five picks. Most in the Ravens’ draft room were surprised they would give up that much to swap two quarterbacks rated by most people as just about equal. Soon after the trade, Manning was taken across the river to Giants Stadium for a press conference. ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio asked him, “When you got out of the car and you saw Giants Stadium and [Coach] Tom Coughlin, what did you think?”

  Before Manning could answer, George Kokinis answered for him: “I thought, ‘Oh shit!’” Everyone in the room, aware of Coughlin’s dour manner and autocratic ways, cracked up.

  Newsome, Savage, and DeCosta had known it was a long shot for any of the three receivers they sought to fall into the second round. They were right: Evans was the fourth wide receiver taken, going at thirteen to Buffalo. Clayton went to Tampa Bay three picks later, and Woods went to San Francisco at thirty-one. That hope gone, they began to focus on two defensive players: Travis LaBoy, an outside linebacker from Hawaii, and Bob Sanders, a defensive back from Iowa. Some might be surprised that a team so strong on defense would draft a defensive player first. But the Ravens’ philosophy in the early rounds has always been “stay true to the board,” meaning you draft whoever is your highest-ranked player on the board when your turn comes, regardless of position. That was why linebacker Terrell Suggs had been taken with the tenth pick overall a year earlier even though the team desperately needed a quarterback. He was ranked fifth on the Ravens’ board; Kyle Boller, the highest-ranked quarterback available at that moment, was ranked tenth. In the later rounds, the Ravens would sometimes draft for a specific need. They were planning to take a kick returner and a backup quarterback in the sixth and seventh rounds already.

  The other reason to take LaBoy was that there was serious concern in the organization about the status of Peter Boulware’s knee. The All-Pro linebacker had been injured in the second-to-last game of the season and had undergone surgery. It was almost a certainty that he would miss the start of the season and there was some thought he might not play all year long. LaBoy went to Tennessee early in the second round, nine picks before the Ravens had a chance to get him. The room groaned when Jeremiah announced the pick. Billick snapped his fingers in frustration. “They needed a pass rusher,” Newsome said, shaking his head. Newsome was already working the phones, seeing if it was possible to move up to get Sanders. San Francisco, which was at forty-six, was interested in swapping if the Ravens would give up a fourth-round pick in return. Newsome wanted to give up a fifth, but Moriarty, keeper of the “trade chart,” which tells teams what makes an equitable swap of picks, said that San Francisco was entitled to a fourth.

  “That’s too much,” DeCosta said. “I wouldn’t do it.”

  The phone rang again. It was New Orleans, which had the forty-eighth pick. The Saints would take a fifth to move down three spots. Before Newsome could respond to the offer, he heard Jeremiah’s voice: “Indy [at forty-four] is taking Sanders.”

  “They just took my guy,” Newsome said, hanging up the phone with a sigh.

  It was 7:25 in the evening, more than seven hours into the draft, before the Ravens finally went “on the clock,” meaning it was their turn to make a pick. In the first round, teams are allotted fifteen minutes (which is why the first round drags on for more than five hours). In the second and third, they get five minutes. By the time the Ravens were on the clock there was no question about whom they were going to take. In fact, as soon as New Orleans—which had traded down with Minnesota—had taken Devery Henderson, a wide receiver from LSU, with the fiftieth pick, a distinctive “Whooee!” could be heard from the room across the hall because defensive line coach Rex Ryan knew he was getting his man.

  That man was Dwan Edwards, a six foot three, 315-pound defensive tackle from Oregon State, who was number thirty on the Ravens’ list and the next man up once LaBoy and Sanders were gone. Edwards was a player Ryan was convinced could help the D line right away. The act of finally drafting a player energized the room. Instead of wondering and hoping they might get a player, they actually had a player, one they believed could make the team better.

  Just before the Ravens’ pick was announced, ESPN tossed the telecast to a set hosted by Andrea Kremer, where four young NFL players, including Kyle Boller, had been gathered to talk through the weekend about various aspects of the draft.

  “No one needs a wide receiver more than the Ravens,” Kremer said, turning to Boller for insight on whom his team might be taking.

  “You’re right,” Boller said. “The only established receiver we’ve got right now is Travis Taylor. We could use some help there.”

  The room groaned. “That’s a great lead into announcing we’re drafting a defensive lineman, huh?” Billick said.

  While everyone was wondering if Boller could be reached by cell phone before he made any more pronouncements on his team’s needs, Newsome was dialing Dwan Edwards’s cell phone number. Whenever the Ravens select a player, they go through a preset ritual: Newsome calls the player and opens the conversation by saying, “It’s Ozzie Newsome, are you ready to become a Baltimore Raven?” (To this day no one has ever said no.) Newsome chats briefly with the player, then hands the phone to Billick, who welcomes him, tells him there is a minicamp for rookies the next week, and asks what his academic status is at that moment. In 2004 there was one major change to the ritual. Instead of Modell taking the phone, Bisciotti did. “You’re my first pick as a full owner,” Bisciotti said to Edwards. Then he quickly added, “Are you ready to play on the same defense with Ray Lewis?”

  As Bisciotti chatted with Edwards, Newsome used his other phone to call New York and say, “Put the card in.” Within two minutes, Dwan
Edwards was a Raven.

  With the pick made, the room took a break. Newsome, Billick, Savage, and DeCosta went downstairs to the meeting room that the team used as an interview room to talk to the media about the pick and what might happen the rest of the weekend. Bisciotti did not go downstairs. Unlike some owners who want their picture taken every time a player is acquired, Bisciotti had no interest in putting his face in front of a camera or a microphone. He had reluctantly agreed to Kevin Byrne’s request to do a round of interviews with local media once he had become the majority owner, but he did not want to be quoted regularly or follow the lead of Dan Snyder, his counterpart in Washington, who made a point of claiming he didn’t speak to the media in-season and then called favored members of the media to whisper his side of every story to them on an off-the-record or background basis. Anyone who read the Washington Post knew exactly who the paper’s reporters were talking about when they quoted “sources close to Redskins owner Daniel M. Snyder.” Bisciotti would not go that route.

  The Ravens did take a wide receiver on the third round, Devard Darling, from Washington State. Darling might have gone higher, but there were some medical concerns about him because his twin brother, Devaughn, had died suddenly of a heart attack during off-season drills while the brothers were at Florida State. Devard Darling had been through thorough testing and had been cleared to play football by every doctor he had seen, but any risk factor—no matter how small it might appear—got the attention of NFL scouts.

  That was it for day one. The Ravens had added two players. There was still a lot more work to do before the long weekend was over.

  On Sunday morning Newsome and the scouts gathered before the draft began again—with the start of the fourth round—at 10 A.M. They went through their lists of who was left on the board and decided the two players they would really like to get in the fourth round—they were picking twenty-fourth in the round, which was the 120th pick in the draft—were defensive players. One was linebacker Reggie Torbor of Auburn, since they were still looking for help there because of Boulware’s cloudy status. The other was cornerback Nathan Vasher of Texas. “If we can’t get either of those guys,” Newsome said, “I’ll trade the pick to Shack [Jacksonville] for Kevin Johnson.”

  If Torbor or Vasher were available, Newsome would offer Jacksonville the Ravens’ third-round pick in the 2005 draft. “I think that’s what Shack wants anyway,” he said.

  One person who was hoping that scenario would not play out was Phil Savage. He was far less sold on Johnson than was Newsome. “Ozz, I think he’s an ordinary player,” Savage said. “I think we can do better.”

  “He’s caught more than sixty balls a year since he’s been in the league,” Newsome said. “He’s a pro. And he’s not yet thirty. The other guys we’ve been talking about are all in their thirties.”

  Savage was unconvinced. But he knew arguing further was pointless. Newsome had made up his mind, and his mind was changed only on rare occasions. Which was one of his strengths. During Billick’s first draft with the Ravens (1999) Newsome had gotten a call from the Atlanta Falcons just before the Ravens were going to draft in the second round. The Falcons had a player targeted that they wanted to take in the second round. The Ravens had the fifth pick of the round, and Atlanta called to offer its first pick the next season in return for that pick.

  Billick was against the deal. “We were talking about a pick in the mid-thirties, against what I figured would be a pick the next year in the mid-twenties, since they had just been to the Super Bowl and figured to be good the next year and drafting late in the first round. I thought we needed players now. There were a couple guys we had targeted.”

  Billick told Newsome he was against the deal and why. Newsome listened and then made the deal. Billick stalked off angrily to his office. Only later did he understand that Newsome knew exactly what he was doing. The players the Ravens wanted—Edwin Mulitalo and receiver Brandon Stokley—were still there when they drafted in the fourth round. The Falcons proceeded to fall flat the next season and the pick became the fifth pick overall in the 2000 draft. The Ravens used it to pick Jamal Lewis. Billick never seriously challenged Newsome’s wisdom in the draft room again. “I’ll still raise things and I might point out something about a player or a need,” he said. “But that deal taught me that Ozzie knew exactly what he was doing—both long-term and short-term.”

  About thirty seconds after the draft had reopened, the New York Giants began the fourth round by drafting Reggie Torbor.

  “Nice start,” DeCosta murmured.

  One of their targets was already off the board.

  As the round proceeded, Newsome became convinced that Vasher would not last until the Ravens picked. He began calling teams to see if anyone was willing to move down, offering either a fifth-round pick or both his sixth and seventh picks to move up. No one was interested. Everyone had someone they wanted to pick. Newsome finally got Bruce Allen from Tampa Bay on the phone. Allen had the fifteenth pick in the round, nine spots ahead of the Ravens. Savage was trying to reach the Bears, who were on the clock at that moment with the fourteenth pick, to see if they would make a last-second switch.

  While Newsome was talking and Savage was holding, word came from New York: Chicago was picking Vasher. Savage hung up his phone; Newsome sighed and told Allen, “Chicago just took our guy.”

  Turning to Savage and DeCosta, he said, “I had a feeling we were going to get wiped out in this round.”

  There was some discussion about trying to pick up an extra pick in a later round by now trading back from where they stood in the fourth round. “There still may be someone we like at one-twenty,” DeCosta said.

  “Yeah,” Newsome said, “except they’re all guys we just decided we like in the last fifteen minutes.”

  Thoughts then turned to going back to the original plan to trade the pick for Kevin Johnson. But Harris was balking. A fourth this year or a third next year wasn’t enough. Newsome shrugged and began looking at who was next on his list. The next name was Roderick Green, another pass-rushing linebacker from Central Missouri State. Green was considered a raw talent with, in scoutese, “great upside”—as in potential. The Ravens would have had him higher on their board except that he had done very poorly on the Wunderlik. That grade was mitigated by his having a learning disability that caused him to test poorly. He came across well in person, which was why he was worth taking a chance on in the fourth round.

  Two picks before the Ravens’ turn, Jacksonville took Anthony Maddox, a defensive tackle from Delta State. He was the first player taken off the leper board.

  “Jessie wins the hundred,” DeCosta said, referring to Newsome’s assistant Jessica Markison.

  Moments later, as soon as Minnesota had taken Mewelde Moore, a running back from Tulane, Newsome placed the phone call to Green since the Ravens were on the clock. He gave him the “Are you ready to be a Raven?” speech and handed the phone to Billick, who did his normal song and dance. Then it was Bisciotti’s turn. The owner had gone past the Ray Lewis segment of his monologue and was asking Green if he had any brothers and sisters, when Newsome’s second phone rang. It was James Harris. He now wanted to accept the deal Newsome thought dead: Kevin Johnson for the Ravens’ fourth-round pick. The Ravens had two minutes left to make their pick.

  “I’ll do it,” Newsome said, hanging up the phone. He immediately instructed Jeremiah to tell T. J. McCreight in New York not to turn in the card with Green’s name on it, which would have gone in as soon as Bisciotti finished speaking to Green. Turning to Bisciotti, who was telling Green what a great role model he was going to be for his younger siblings, Newsome said, “Tell him you have to go, we just traded the pick.”

  Bisciotti turned white. “Roderick, um, we’ll call you back,” he said, and handed the phone to Savage.

  “Something has come up,” Savage explained to Green.

  “What just happened?” Bisciotti asked.

  “Tell you in a minute,” Newsome s
aid. He was dialing New York to inform the league about the trade, which had to be done in the now less than sixty seconds before the Ravens were off the clock. When “latest pick—Jacksonville from Baltimore . . . Ernest Wilford, WR, Virginia Tech” flashed across the screen, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  Except Bisciotti. “I just cut that poor kid off in mid-sentence,” he said. “I feel awful.”

  Newsome, who was now trying to track down Kevin Johnson because he had to take a physical as soon as possible to make the deal official, had Savage call Green back. Savage asked Green if he had heard from any other teams. He hadn’t. He apologized for what had happened and told him the team would take him in the fifth round if he hadn’t been picked already.

  “If we pick him again, let Art talk to him,” Bisciotti said, recovering his sense of humor.

  The Ravens had the twenty-eighth pick—the 160th overall—in the fifth round. This was the pick they had gotten from Philadelphia in the wake of the T.O. debacle. Newsome now really wanted Green, in part because he, too, felt bad about what had happened but also because he thought he had a lot of potential as a fifth-rounder. He began calling teams ahead of him to make a swap to move up so he could take Green. He started with Cleveland—seventeen picks before the Ravens—and, as he got turned down, kept working his way down. At one point, talking to Jerry Jones in Dallas, Newsome said, “we’re at one-sixty-one, seventeen spots below you. No wait, we’re at one-sixty. I was looking at Cleveland at one-sixty-one.” He smiled. “I reverted back there for a minute.”

  Jones said no to either Baltimore’s or Cleveland’s pick. Finally, Newsome found a taker, Washington at 151. Vinny Cerrato was willing to take the Ravens’ seventh-round pick to move back nine spots. “We’ll call you when we’re on the clock,” Cerrato said. A few minutes later, Cerrato called back. “Sorry,” he said. “We decided to go ahead and pick.” Newsome said nothing. Clearly someone in the Redskins’ draft room had overruled Cerrato. Finally, Miami, picking at 153, agreed to the deal—the Ravens first seventh-round pick (number 222) for pick 153. An hour after not becoming a Raven, Roderick Green became a Raven.