Like Sams, Demps had been discovered by Zauner, who had worked him out as a senior and then talked the team into giving him a shot as an undrafted free agent. He had gone from making the team as a special teamer to becoming the starter at safety. A year earlier he had appeared on several billboards around Baltimore as part of a promotional campaign for one of the Ravens’ clothing sponsors. “I’m the guy who they always think they can replace every year,” Demps liked to say. “They’re always going to think they can bring in someone better than me. All I know is, I’m still here.”
Sams was now hoping to join him.
While the coaches were searching for diamonds in the free-agent rough during the passing camps and the minicamps, the player being watched by the most people most of the time was Kyle Boller. There was still considerable debate in and around Baltimore about whether the trade that had allowed the Ravens to draft Boller had been a good idea. To some, Boller had won the quarterback job in 2003 by default and then had been protected during his nine-game stint as the starter by the running of Jamal Lewis and the play of the defense. Already some people were putting him on the list of quarterbacks who had come and gone in Baltimore since Billick’s arrival: Scott Mitchell, Tony Banks, Trent Dilfer (given an asterisk since he had won a Super Bowl), Elvis Grbac, Jeff Blake, and Chris Redman. To others he was a work in progress, but one with great potential.
Since Billick allows the media to watch practice from start to finish throughout the preseason, Boller’s progress in both the passing camps and the minicamps was monitored locally with an intensity similar to that of the returns from Ohio on election night. In his case, the voters weren’t leaning blue or red, they were leaning failure or future star. One day during a passing camp, Boller threw two interceptions late in practice. The local TV stations did everything but live cut-ins to report the disaster.
The subject of all this scrutiny was a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old (even in his second season he would be the youngest starting quarterback in the league) who had an easy smile and the kind of laid-back approach to things that seemed to fit his image as a surfer dude who had grown up in Southern California (in Boller-speak: So-Cali) and had gone to college in northern California (you guessed it, No-Cali) at Berkeley. Boller was handsome enough to draw sighs from young girls and had briefly dated actress Tara Reid during the off-season. This was big news in Baltimore, which wasn’t used to having sports stars making gossip headlines in Hollywood.
What was funny about Boller was that he was almost nothing like his image. Sure, he could sound like a hip kid, referring to his father as “being real cool for an old dude” (his dad was forty-seven) and could shrug his shoulders as if to say, “No biggie,” when asked about the pressures of being the quarterback of a team with Super Bowl ambitions in just his second season. But underneath the smile, Boller was both a lot tougher and a lot more vulnerable than he appeared.
For one thing, he was from a family of firefighters. His dad was a firefighter, his grandfather and great-grandfather had been firefighters, and three of his uncles were firefighters. For a long time, growing up in Valencia, Kyle had thought he would follow in their footsteps and become a firefighter, too. The first clue he got that maybe he wasn’t destined to go in that direction came when he spent a day with his father at the fire station doing a ride-along at the age of sixteen. “I loved it,” he said. “Although the reality of it was a lot different than what I had seen in the movies. I mean, you have no idea what you’re walking into. I remember we went into one home on a call and it was a really old man and he was just lying there, dead. They tried to bring him back, but it was too late. By the end of the day, I was wiped out. At about four o’clock in the morning they got a call to go on another run and I just slept through it. Alarms going off and everything, but I’m such a heavy sleeper I missed it and, of course, they didn’t wake me. If I’d been a real firefighter, it would have been different.”
The other thing that led Boller away from his dad’s career was football, which he decided at a young age was his sport, in large part because he enjoyed hitting. “I was a linebacker when I first started to play,” he said. “I was always big—like eleven pounds, twelve ounces when I was born—and then kind of a bulky kid. Then when I was in eighth grade, my height hadn’t caught up with the rest of my body. I had the hands and feet of someone who was six-three and I was about five-six. My nickname was Monkey Boy. My parents took me to the doctor, and he said my growth plates were wide open—it was just a matter of time until I grew. But it took a while.”
In fact, Boller didn’t become the starting quarterback at Hart High School until he was a senior. Hart was a powerhouse program that churned out quarterbacks and Division 1 players. Even so, he dreamed of going to UCLA and being the starting quarterback because the school was near his home and beautiful. “I went to camp there after my junior season and J. P. Losman was there, too,” he said. “At the end of the camp, they offered J.P. a scholarship. I hadn’t really done anything yet, so I understood, but I was disappointed. Then my senior year, I blew up.”
Playing on a dominant team, Boller had superb statistics and all of a sudden had colleges from all over the country chasing him. He ended up making visits to Florida State, Oregon, Southern California, and Cal. “If my SATs had been higher, I think Stanford might have recruited me harder and I might have ended up there,” he said. “But I had really good grades [3.89 GPA] and not-so-hot SATs [under 1,000], so they backed off. I wanted to go someplace I could play right away. I didn’t want to redshirt. USC had Carson [Palmer] and Oregon had [Joey] Harrington. Florida State was just too far.”
That left Cal. Not only was Boller expected to start right away, he was expected to save the program. Shortly after he arrived on campus he picked up the student newspaper and saw a headline that read, JESUS IN CLEATS. Underneath the headline was his picture. “I thought to myself, ‘Whoa, people, slow down. I’m a seventeen-year-old kid who started for one year in high school,’” he said, laughing.
Boller made his college debut in the second half of Cal’s second game, a one-sided loss at Nebraska. He still remembers one of the Nebraska linebackers pointing at him as he came to the line of scrimmage and snapping his fingers as if breaking a twig in half. “I started laughing,” he said. “I thought it was sweet, me, playing in Nebraska’s stadium, and this guy saying he’s gonna kill me. I loved it.”
A week later he got his first start and led the Golden Bears to a fourth-quarter comeback win over Arizona State. Maybe the headline had been right. “Not exactly,” he said. “We ended up 3-8. I think I got sacked about ninety times.” It didn’t get any better the next two years. Cal was 4-7 and 1-10 and, if that wasn’t enough, under NCAA investigation for grade fixing on the football team. By the time his junior year was over, Boller was ready to walk away from football.
“I was thinking, I’ll get my degree, go home, and get a job,” he said. “I was beaten up, mentally and physically. But then they hired Jeff Tedford and everything changed. I thought we had a chance again.”
Tedford had been the offensive coordinator at Oregon when Boller visited there and Boller had been impressed by him. He came to Cal with a mandate to clean up the program and point it in another direction. Cal was 6-5 in Boller’s senior year, finishing with a win over archrival Stanford for the first time in Boller’s career, and as in high school, he was suddenly drawing major attention from coaches and scouts at the next level. In this case, that meant the NFL. Boller was part of a highly touted quarterback class that included Carson Palmer, who had won the Heisman Trophy at USC; Marshall’s Byron Leftwich; and Florida’s Rex Grossman.
He went to the combine in Indianapolis and, like most players, was horrified by the whole thing. “It’s such a cattle call,” he said. “I mean, the idea that you walk out there on a stage wearing just your shorts and they all look you over like it’s a beauty pageant or something. Then you take the Wunderlik test. My agent actually had me study for it. Everybody
’s got sample copies of the test, so you go through it that way. Here I am, after four years at Cal, looking at questions like ‘If you can get a dozen lemon drops for forty cents, how many can you get for two dollars?’ Then there’s the Giants test. Must be three hundred questions. I still remember there was a question that said, ‘If you find a wallet lying in the gutter, what do you do with it?’ By that point I was so fed up, I wanted to write, ‘Pocket the money and run like hell.’”
The one part of the combine Boller didn’t mind was the personal interviews. He liked it when teams asked him to go to a board and explain Cal’s protection schemes and asked him questions about adjustments that could be made. Even more, he liked the give-and-take with the coaches and scouts—most notably, his meeting with the Ravens. Billick asked him why the Ravens should take him, given the chance, over Palmer or Leftwich. “I remember hesitating for a minute,” he said. “I didn’t want to put those guys down in any way and I didn’t want to sound cocky, either. But then I just pointed out that Carson had played on great teams at USC, had great offensive lines, great receivers. I felt I’d only had one year where we’d had our act together and I had done really well. I said, ‘I think Carson and Byron are great football players, but I honestly believe I can throw with them and play with them. I’ll go out there with them right now and show you.’
“Then they asked me how I would become the kind of leader a quarterback has to be when they had a leader like Ray on defense. I told them I thought leadership was earned, that I hoped I would learn how to lead [by] watching Ray, and at some point I’d become the leader of the offense because, if I’m the quarterback, it has to be my offense for the team to be successful.”
The Ravens were impressed with Boller. So were the Bears, Cardinals, and Steelers. The Bengals liked him, too, but everyone knew they were going to take Palmer with the number one pick. Boller went into the draft thinking he might get taken by the Ravens at ten or the Bears at twelve. “I was hoping for the Ravens, not so much because they were picking a little higher but because I liked them, I thought I clicked with Brian and Ozzie and Matt. I also thought I could play right away there.”
As with many players hoping to go high in the first round, draft day was torture. When the Ravens came up at number ten, Boller held his breath—and heard Terrell Suggs’s name called. “That was a bummer,” he said. “Then Chicago didn’t take me at number twelve. Now I’m thinking it might be Arizona, and I didn’t want to go there. They passed on me, too. Now I was thinking it was going to end up being Chicago at number twenty-two because they had another pick and still hadn’t taken a quarterback.”
Boller was still thinking Bears when he saw a trade flash on the screen while the Patriots were on the clock with the nineteenth pick: “New England trades its pick to Baltimore. . . .” He was still digesting that news when the phone rang. It was Newsome. “We wanted you and we got you,” Newsome told him.
Even though he held out for a few days when camp started—much to Billick’s annoyance—Boller won the starting job over Redman, the closest thing the Ravens had to an incumbent. He picked up the offense with remarkable speed. “I remember thinking, ‘This kid is learning amazingly fast,’” said Anthony Wright, who was scheduled to go into 2004 as Boller’s backup. “He almost never made the same mistake twice.”
Boller took his licks during the first eight games, but the Ravens reached the midway point of the season at 5-3. Late in the second quarter of the ninth game, against the Rams in St. Louis, Boller took a shot to his right thigh and crumpled in agony. When the doctors looked at him at halftime, they told him there was no way he could go back and play and they suspected he was going to be out for several weeks. They reported this to Billick.
“The next thing I know, Kyle’s there, telling me, ‘Coach, I’m okay, I can play, it isn’t that bad,’” Billick remembered. “I told him he was hurt and he wasn’t playing. He was really angry about it. I finally had to tell him in no uncertain terms I wasn’t risking him or the team by putting him back on the field. I told the trainers to keep him in the locker room for a while until he calmed down.”
Even though he had to talk sharply to Boller at that moment, Billick was impressed by the toughness his rookie quarterback had showed. His teammates noticed, too. Underneath the baby face, Boller had the heart of a firefighter’s son. He wasn’t afraid to run into a burning building or play on one leg.
Now, though, anointed as the starter again the day after the season had ended—even though Wright had stepped in and played well—Boller knew all eyes were going to be on him all day, every day.
“We have everything else in place here to be a championship team,” he said. “I know it’s on me now to get the job done. If I don’t, I’ll get the blame and that’s the way it should be. I’m not a rookie anymore, I’m in my second year. I know I’m gonna have ups and downs, I understand that. I remember talking to John Elway at a party last year and he said the most important thing about being a quarterback is keeping your equilibrium. Because when you play well, people are going to put you on a pedestal you don’t belong on. When you play badly, they’re going to bury you. You’re never that good or that bad. I have to try to remember that.”
When Boller arrived in Baltimore, Redman had been wearing num-
ber 7—Elway’s number. With Redman gone, Boller had asked to change his uniform from number 8 to number 7. Actually, it didn’t really matter much what number Boller wore. Whether it was 8 or 7 or anything else he might pick, whatever uniform he wore was going to have a large glowing target on it. On a team with eight returning Pro Bowlers and two cinch Hall of Famers, no one was going to be scrutinized more during the 2004 season in Baltimore than the firefighter’s kid from So-Cali.
The first really significant date on the Ravens’ calendar was June 7. That would be the first day the entire team—minus Chris McAlister—would be together. Ray Lewis would be back in town from Florida; Jonathan Ogden would fly in from Las Vegas. And Jamal Lewis would be in from Atlanta and would meet with the media to discuss the drug-dealing allegations made against him.
Even before the start of the first veterans’ minicamp, the Ravens had suffered their first crucial injury of the season. On May 24, during the second passing camp, they had learned that Anthony Wright had a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder that would require surgery. Wright had actually suffered the injury during the 2003 season, but the doctors initially thought the muscles were just worn down from the rigors of becoming a starter. When he continued to have soreness, they examined him again and the tear was discovered. The prognosis was a four-month recovery period, meaning Wright would probably miss the first six weeks of the season.
There is no position in football where the backup is as important to the team as at quarterback. Everything a team does begins with the quarterback, and quarterbacks are always vulnerable since they are frequently hit while throwing even on plays when they aren’t sacked. No team wants to be put in a position where an injury to its starting quarterback puts the entire season in jeopardy. The Ravens had been fortunate in 2003 that Wright had filled in as capably as he had when Boller was injured. Now they found themselves looking at a preseason roster that had three quarterbacks: a starter with nine games of NFL experience and two rookies—one a sixth-round draft pick (Josh Harris), the other a free-agent rookie (Brian Gaither). That was unacceptable.
Ozzie Newsome and Brian Billick called a meeting on the afternoon of May 24 to tell the coaches and scouts about Wright’s injury and to discuss a replacement. “Whoever it is, we’re going to pay the minimum [salary], and that’s it,” Newsome said. “So let’s keep that in mind.”
Names were thrown out from around the table: Jim Fassel was close to Kerry Collins, the Giants quarterback who had asked for (and received) his release after the team drafted Eli Manning. In fact, Collins had called Fassel the day after the draft, looking for a pep talk. Rumor had it that Collins was getting ready to sign with the Raiders for a lot m
ore than the minimum. There was a good chance he could start there since Rich Gannon was considered a question mark because of age and injuries.
Other names came up: Kordell Stewart, the onetime starter in Pittsburgh who had spent an unproductive season in Chicago. There was a rumor that Gannon might be cut in Oakland if Collins signed and might land back with John Gruden, his old coach, in Tampa Bay. In that case, Brad Johnson, who had played for Billick in Minnesota, might become available. Or what if Gannon ended up on the open market? It was Phil Savage who cut to the chase after everyone had thrown out different names. “The best guy out there is Collins,” he said. “The guy we’re probably going to end up with is Stewart.”
Newsome asked Fassel if he thought there was any chance Collins might come to Baltimore. “Don’t really know,” Fassel said. “I did tell him when he called me in April that he might be better going someplace on a one-year deal where he’d be a backup and then have the whole off-season next year to pick and choose a place where he could start. I wasn’t thinking about us at the time, but now we kind of fit that bill.”
The decision was made: Fassel would call Collins to gauge his interest. If Collins wasn’t interested, they would wait to see if there were any surprises on June 1, the day teams had to cut veteran players or be responsible for their full (salary) cap number for the season. If Collins wasn’t interested and no one else of note became available, they would probably sign Stewart. The question then would be how Stewart, who had been a starter most of his career, would deal with being a backup. “Let’s remember one thing,” Fassel said. “Kyle Boller is this team’s future. We don’t want to bring anyone in here who is going to cast any kind of shadow that leaves any doubt in anyone’s mind who the starter is.”
Next Man Up Page 14