Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  “There’s not that much you can do at halftime,” Nolan said. “You try to make some corrections if you see some things that are being done wrong or if the other team has surprised you with something. That doesn’t happen too often in the NFL, though, they usually know what you’re doing and you know what they’re doing.”

  For the players, halftime is, for the most part, about relaxing. Some head straight for the training room for treatment for an injury that wasn’t serious enough to cause them to leave the game but hurts nonetheless. The doctors and trainers probably work the hardest during the break because there are always players who need something taped or looked at or sometimes given a painkiller for. On occasion, Bill Tessendorf, who has been with the Browns/Ravens for thirty-two years and is trusted implicitly by every person in the organization, will walk out of the trainers’ room, find Billick, and quietly tell him that someone is “down for the day”— out for the rest of the game.

  No one felt any need to change anything on defense. For the most part, they had shut the Browns down. Gary Baxter had cut his thumb on someone’s helmet during a punt return but had come back to play. Deion Sanders had walked onto the field in nickel situations, with Corey Fuller screaming the play calls at him from the sideline. The Browns had made no attempt to throw at him.

  The problem—again—was the offense. There just weren’t very many holes for Jamal Lewis, whether he ran left or right. Brooks was holding up okay, but he simply wasn’t Ogden. They had known that going in. Boller had been under pressure often when he had tried to throw and had spent a good deal of time sprinting out of the pocket and throwing the ball away. Todd Heap had made a couple of catches to pick up first downs, but that had been just about all the passing offense they had been able to muster. All the preseason talk about how different the passing game was going to look had not been borne out so far.

  Six minutes into the third quarter, the Ravens finally got on the board. Heap made a spectacular one-handed catch that was good for 24 yards and a first down on the Browns’ 28. Three running plays picked up only 4 yards and they had to settle for a Matt Stover 42-yard field goal. Still virtually automatic at the age of thirty-six, Stover drilled the kick for the team’s first points of the season and the game was tied, 3-3. The sense on the sideline was that the Browns were about to go away. The defense wasn’t going to give them anything and the offense was slowly getting its act together.

  Then right guard Bennie Anderson was called for holding, shutting down a Ravens drive and, after a Zastudil punt, the Browns started from their own 42. There was no reason to believe at that moment that there was any chance they were going to move the ball. Their offense had produced less than 100 yards in just under three quarters. Jeff Garcia, the Browns’ new quarterback, threw two incomplete passes and the punt teams on both sidelines gathered, expecting yet another punt. It never came. Garcia found Kellen Winslow down the sideline for 21 yards. Winslow, the rookie tight end from Miami, had been called for an illegal block in the back on the previous punt but made amends by leaping high over Ed Reed to pull the ball in at the Ravens’ 47. It was the Browns’ fifth first down of the game, and they were still a long way from scoring territory.

  Two plays later, they weren’t. Garcia made a play-action fake to William Green on second-and-9 and, for some reason, the entire secondary froze. Quincy Morgan raced behind Baxter and Reed, caught the ball in stride, and scored, untouched. With twenty-four seconds left in the third quarter, the Browns led, 10-3.

  The Baltimore bench was in shock. If Billick and Nolan had a concern during the preseason, it had been a disturbing tendency to give up what Billick called “explosion” plays—a big play in which the defense gets blown up. There hadn’t been many of them, but there had been enough that Billick had mentioned it to the team during the week. “Eliminate those plays and we’re virtually unscored on in preseason,” he had said. “We can’t let them happen now, because now it’s real.”

  Now it was very real. The 10-3 deficit at the end of the third quarter looked a little bit like a mountain, given the struggles of the offense. Boller tried. He found Dan Wilcox open for what would have been a 20-yard gain—except that Wilcox fumbled the ball and, even though Kevin Johnson managed to recover it, the gain ended up being 13 yards to the Ravens’ 49 instead of 20 to the Cleveland 44. Two plays later, Boller tried to go deep again on a first down from the Browns’ 40. Browns cornerback Anthony Henry ran stride for stride with Johnson and intercepted the ball at the 7. That wasn’t a complete disaster because of the field position. If the defense could get a three-and-out, the Ravens would probably get the ball back around midfield. Soon enough, the Browns faced third-and-10 from the 7.

  Then, once again, the defense got blown up. This time Garcia found Andre’ Davis behind Will Demps for a 51-yard pickup to the Baltimore 42. Seven plays later, Dawson kicked a 25-yard field goal, and the margin was 13-3. The Ravens now needed two scores. What’s more, the Browns had taken more than six minutes off the clock. Time was short, the situation desperate. It got no better. Knowing the Ravens had to pass, the Browns ignored the run completely and began teeing off with their pass rush. Kenard Lang, who had been held in check fairly well all day by Brooks, blew by him and sacked Boller on the 14-yard line. The next play was like an instant replay: Lang going around Brooks, Boller going down. The difference was that Boller fumbled this time and Michael Myers recovered on the 6. Billick futilely challenged the play, hoping that the replay might show that Boller was in the motion of throwing when he was hit. He wasn’t. It took three plays for the Browns to score, Garcia sprinting untouched around the right side on third down. He ran right through the end zone and made a leap into Cleveland’s infamous Dog Pound to celebrate what was now clearly an opening-day victory with the jubilant fans.

  The final was 20-3. The stadium was shaking with joy by the time Heap caught Boller’s last pass of the day and was tackled at midfield as time ran out. There was little postgame lingering on the field. This was not what they had in mind to start the season. Gary Zauner walked around the locker room, reminding people it was just one game, but it felt worse than that.

  Steve Bisciotti, 0-1 as an owner, stood in the back of the room as Billick talked, twisting the cap of a bottle of water on and off, his stomach tied in a knot. “I almost never make predictions,” Bisciotti said. “But when we went on our family vacation in June, I told everyone I thought we’d be 5-0 at the bye. I really thought we’d do that. Now, we’re 0-1 and the offense doesn’t look even a little bit better than it had been the year before. I felt awful.”

  His sentiment was shared by almost everyone in the room. They hadn’t come close to crossing the street.

  14

  Must Win

  THERE ARE FEW PLACES ON EARTH more tense than the headquarters of an NFL team on the morning after a loss. The misery ratchets up about 100 percent when the loss is in the opening game against a team that you expected to beat. Walking the halls on the morning after the Ravens’ loss in Cleveland brought the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sounds of Silence” immediately to mind.

  The Monday routine in Baltimore is the same during the first half of the season, win or lose. The coaches and personnel staff meet at noon, first to go over any roster changes that need to be made and discuss the status of injured players, then to go through what they saw of each player on tape that morning. The mood on the morning of September 13 in the Ravens’ draft room was grim. Not only had the team lost the game badly, but the trainers and doctors now agreed there could be no further delay for the knee surgery needed for Kelly Gregg, the defensive tackle who was considered the mainstay of the defensive line. Gregg was one of those free-agent stories the Ravens reveled in. He had spent a year on the Cincinnati Bengals’ practice squad and then been signed and released by the Eagles before Rex Ryan recommended that the Ravens sign him as a free agent in the spring of 2000.

  When Gregg walked onto the practice field, Billick took one look at his squat ph
ysique—6 foot, 300 pounds—and said to Ryan, “What’s the deal on this guy, Rex, did you owe someone a favor?”

  He changed his tune quickly when he saw Gregg play. He was quicker than he looked and a fierce competitor on every single play. Now losing him to an injury made the loss in Cleveland feel even worse. Gregg had hoped the knee would hold up until the bye week so he could perhaps miss no more than one game, since the surgery was expected to keep him out three weeks. He had stood on the sideline through most of the second half in Cleveland, hoping the knee would stretch out enough for him to play, but it had been to no avail.

  There was also the issue of bringing back Harold Morrow. The plan all along had been to re-sign him after the Cleveland game, and the play of the special teams—at one point there had been penalties on three straight kicks—had made his return even more of a necessity. That meant the first order of business at the Monday meeting was deciding whom to cut to make space for Morrow. This wasn’t at all like a training-camp cut, because it involved someone who had proven himself good enough to play in the NFL—probably a veteran since there were so few rookies on the team.

  “I need a name,” Billick said quietly.

  There wasn’t a sound in the room. Billick repeated himself, acting as if perhaps no one had heard him the first time. “I need a name.”

  It was Phil Savage who finally spoke up. “What kind of production,” he asked in his quiet way, “are we getting out of Cornell Brown?”

  The question was directed at two people: Mike Nolan and Gary Zauner. Brown was an eighth-year player who had been drafted by the Ravens and had spent his entire career, except for a one-year sojourn in Oakland, with the Ravens. He was one of the best-liked players on the team, a special teams leader who had always been considered a solid backup at linebacker.

  “If you want the truth, he’s not getting many snaps for me,” Nolan said. “But his value is having someone experienced to take some of the weight off of AD.” Adalius Thomas had emerged as a starter at outside linebacker in Peter Boulware’s absence but was also a critical special teams player.

  Zauner, arms folded, understanding that one of his guys was in jeopardy, nodded. “He’s not what he used to be for me,” he said. “But he’s still one of my leaders.”

  They tossed Brown’s name around for a while. Clearly they would be cutting a fading player if Brown was let go. There was also a chance he might not be signed by another team and would be available to come back later in the season if something opened up.

  Finally, George Kokinis, the pro personnel director, in a voice that might have been even softer than Savage’s, said simply: “Are there issues here that make it impossible for us to consider Corey Fuller?”

  Billick had been waiting for someone to bring up Fuller’s name. He knew that, for a lot of reasons, cutting Fuller was the clear-cut move to make. Fuller was thirty-three years old, in his tenth season, and near the end of his career. He was at the bottom of the depth chart for the defensive backs and had been inactive for the Browns game—the first time in his career he had been inactive when healthy for a game. He had missed most of the last three exhibition games after hurting his leg in the Eagles game.

  Everyone knew the issues Kokinis was talking about. Fuller was best friends with Ray Lewis and Deion Sanders. While both men would intellectually understand Fuller’s release, they would be hurt by it, especially Sanders, who had first been tempted to come back by Fuller’s phone call in July.

  “There are good reasons why it should be Corey Fuller,” Billick said, surprising most of the people in the room. He and Fuller had become close when Fuller was playing in Minnesota and Billick was coaching there, and Billick had played a major role in bringing him to the Ravens in 2003. “But I think we’re going to need him before this is over. I’ve never coached a year in my career where the team didn’t get into November and need a veteran presence in the defensive backfield. We may not need him right now, but down the road we’re going to need him.”

  That eliminated Fuller. Or so it seemed.

  Savage, who believed that there was no doubt Fuller should be the cut, threw out another name. “We did talk about Gerome Sapp during preseason, didn’t we?”

  Zauner was shaking his head immediately. “You’re gonna give me back Morrow and take away Sapp? He’s my second- or third-best guy.”

  “Gary, we can only have so many specialists on this team,” Savage said. His tone was even, but there wasn’t any doubt about the tension that existed between him—and the other scouts—and Zauner. They all thought Zauner had undue influence over Billick, something Billick readily admitted.

  “Gary makes them crazy,” he said. “Because when it comes to special teams, he’s almost never wrong. Look at Will Demps. He found him on the street. Look at B. J. Sams.”

  In fact, as if Sunday hadn’t been bad enough, Ozzie Newsome had been forced to pay Zauner the $2,000 he had promised back in April when Zauner had pestered him to get Sams into minicamp. That was Life with Zauner: he might make you nuts sometimes, but his judgments were almost always sound.

  “George, how do you rate Sapp as a special teams player?” Zauner asked, knowing that Kokinis spent hours and hours looking at tapes of players around the league.

  “He’s very good,” Kokinis said. “Probably number two on our team. Would help just about anyone in the league.”

  Billick jumped in. “Mike, how do you feel about his progress as a DB?”

  Nolan hesitated. “To be honest, Brian, not great,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the kid. He’s great in the classroom, he’s got a great attitude. But on the field, there’s something missing. He doesn’t have great football instincts.”

  Football instincts are something that can’t be taught. You either have them or you don’t. Sapp, one of the brighter people on the team, simply wasn’t gifted with the ability to make the right decision on the field without having to think about it.

  Billick turned to Newsome. Because Fuller and Brown had been in the league for more than four years and because the season was less than six games old, they could be terminated without clearing waivers—meaning the chances of getting them back, either in a week or in a month if needed, were better than with Sapp, because as a second-year player, he would have to clear waivers. “Ozzie, if we waived him, what are the chances he gets picked up?” Billick asked.

  “I would say very good,” Newsome said. “In fact, I’m almost certain Indy would pick him up. They need a guy just like him for special teams and as a backup safety.”

  Billick sighed. They had been going at it for close to an hour. A decision had to be made. “I hate doing this,” he said finally. “But I think it has to be Cornell. If we love him up like we did with Harold, maybe he won’t jump right to another team.”

  “Or there might not be another team,” Savage put in.

  The decision was made. Cornell Brown, a man they all liked and respected, would be cut.

  That decision lasted less than twenty-four hours.

  The next morning, while the coaches were beginning to prepare their game plan for Pittsburgh, Nolan went to see Billick. The rest of Monday hadn’t been much better than the personnel meeting. The film sessions (film hasn’t been used in the NFL for years, but everyone still calls looking at game tape a film session) had been full of tension. David Shaw, the normally mild-mannered wide receivers/quarterbacks coach, had gotten on the wideouts about their lax run blocking. He had shown them no fewer than half a dozen plays where the lack of a block by a wide receiver had been the difference between a short pickup for Jamal Lewis and the kind of breakout run that might have changed the game. He had met one-on-one with Travis Taylor, who was going on the injured list for four weeks, to tell him in no uncertain terms that there was a difference between being tough and being foolish—and playing with a groin injury that didn’t allow him to run at full speed was foolish.

  Nolan had tossed and turned on Monday night for several reasons. He was s
till unhappy with the performance of the defense and was very nervous about cutting Brown. Part of it was personal: he liked Brown. More of it was the notion of leaving his defense without any experience behind the two starting outside linebackers, Adalius Thomas and Terrell Suggs. “I think we’re making a mistake if we cut Cornell,” he told Billick. “We’re leaving ourselves too thin at linebacker. Corey Fuller probably ought to go, but under the circumstances, I think it has to be Sapp.”

  Billick listened. He and Nolan had worked together for four years. Their personalities could not have been more different: Billick was loud and direct; Nolan more subtle, with a dry sense of humor. Billick didn’t keep much inside; Nolan internalized constantly. Billick knew this was an important year in Nolan’s life. He had reached that level as a coordinator where his name was being mentioned for head coaching jobs. He had worked his entire adult life to get to this point, and the consensus was that a good year for the Ravens’ defense would probably make Nolan a hot name when the season was over. Nolan had thought he was going to get interviewed after the ’03 season for the Bears job, but it hadn’t worked out. He was prepared—he had his résumé in his computer and a folder marked “Head Coaching Material,” which included a list of the things he would say if interviewed and coaches he would try to hire for his staff. Even so, Billick had no doubts about Nolan’s focus. He knew Nolan had only one speed when it came to his job: all-out.

  Nolan is a coach’s son. His father, Dick Nolan, had been the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers for eight years and the New Orleans Saints for three. As a result, Nolan and his five siblings had grown up around the game. He and two of his brothers had spent years working as ballboys for the 49ers. The game had stuck to Nolan, not his brothers.