Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  The players liked playing on Monday night because it was a chance to be seen by all their peers. The same wasn’t quite true of the ESPN Sunday night games because a lot of teams were still en route home from the road when those games were played and a lot of players didn’t want to watch another football game a few hours after playing one of their own. On Monday night, most of the league watched. Billick had made that point to the team during the week: “This week and next [the Redskins game was a Sunday night ESPN game] are a chance for you guys to show the whole country what kind of team you are.” One might wonder if professionals really care about showing off for the country. In truth, they do.

  Billick has been accused on occasion of having a chip on his shoulder when it comes to the networks and the league office. In 2003 he had publicly suggested that the Ravens wild-card game against the Tennessee Titans had been scheduled as the weekend’s kickoff game at 4:30 on Saturday afternoon because the league didn’t think either team was a TV draw. “I don’t think anyone sits up there in New York and says, ‘Let’s screw the Ravens,’” he said. “In fact, I’m inclined to think the opposite: I don’t think anyone up there in New York gives us much thought at all. We’re in a midsize market and we’ve been a defensive-oriented team most of the time I’ve been here. They just don’t really care about us one way or the other.”

  Now, with MNF coming to town, the phones around the facility began to jump. The league always sends extra people to Monday night games, especially if the game is close to New York. Paul Tagliabue would be at the game. Bruce Laird, the Ravens uniform Nazi, would have to deal with having an extra “observer” sent by the league at his side. If Laird missed a hanging shirttail or socks pulled up too high, there would be hell to pay.

  There was also the Michael Powell issue. Powell was the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a job he had clearly been given on pure merit, having nothing to do with the fact that his father was secretary of state. He had worked very had to turn the FCC into an Orwellian type of organization, making sure the networks knew that Big Brother was watching for any sign that they might be straying from Powell’s definition of pure American virtue. CBS was about to pay a heavy price (a $550,000 fine to twenty-one affiliates) for the infamous Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl. ABC, in full suck-up mode, had invited Powell to the game, not only to watch it but as a halftime guest. No doubt America was on the edge of its seat waiting to hear that interview.

  Powell’s presence would prove to be a headache throughout the week. On Monday, ABC’s MNF producer, someone named Fred Gaudelli, had called Kevin Byrne to ask if the Ravens could supply Powell and his people with a luxury box to watch the game from. All of the Ravens’ luxury boxes were sold out. Byrne said the Ravens couldn’t supply a box but would certainly have tickets for Powell and company. Not satisfied with that answer, Gaudelli called Dick Cass, apparently believing the team president has the power to create a box out of thin air. Cass gave him the same answer. Powell did not want to sit among the great unwashed in the stands. Byrne made a suggestion: the team would provide Powell with two press passes so he and a second person could sit in the press box. No, that wasn’t good enough because Powell had Secret Service protection and at least one agent had to be with him. Finally, Byrne and Cass came up with an idea: Art Modell had a double box that was rarely full. They asked Modell if he would mind entertaining Powell and posse, and Modell said he would do it.

  Hallelujah. The Ravens would not be subjected to an FCC fine for failing to make Michael Powell feel like royalty.

  That left the issue of actually playing the football game. Because of the extra day to prepare, Billick gave the players Tuesday and Wednesday off, not wanting them to wear themselves out before game time finally rolled around thirty-two hours later than it would for a normal 1 P.M. kickoff on Sunday. The coaches used their extra day to do a walk-through at the new facility. The team would be moving in right after the Redskins game, which would be played six days after the Chiefs game. Workmen were everywhere in the building. It was hard to believe it was going to be up and running in less than two weeks. “Every time I look at it, I think there’s no way we can get in there when we’re supposed to,” Dick Cass said. “But whenever I ask, they tell me we’ll absolutely be in there, no question about it.”

  Everyone in the organization was a little bit on edge about literally moving the entire franchise into a new building in midseason. The decision to move in October had been made months earlier, when it became clear there was no way to finish the project before the season began. Bisciotti didn’t want to wait until the season was over, so the compromise of moving during the bye week had been struck. It was still risky. If anything went wrong during the move, the team could find itself without a home—or at least, a finished home—while trying to prepare for the post-bye-week game against the Buffalo Bills.

  The calm in the moving storm was Cass, whose presence represented the only major change Bisciotti had made in the organization once he officially became the team owner. As part of Bisciotti’s deal with Art Modell, David Modell was being paid $1 million for the season to be a “consultant.” Both Modells were still an occasional presence at the facility—Art Modell still came to practice once or twice a week and sat, as always, in his golf cart, watching the proceedings. He had a big office in the new facility, and Bisciotti was planning to unveil a painting of him that would hang in the reception area of the new building.

  It was evident, though, to those who knew them, that both men were going through withdrawal. The Ravens—and before them, the Browns—had been the centerpiece of their lives, and now, while they were welcome visitors, that’s what they were: visitors. Nothing Bisciotti or Cass or Newsome or Billick did would change that. Many in the organization worried about Art Modell’s health. “He’s seventy-nine,” Kevin Byrne, who may have been closer to Modell than anyone other than Newsome, said one day. “A lot of men his age struggle when they lose their wives. Art hasn’t lost this wife, but he’s lost his mistress—the football team.”

  Bisciotti and Cass did all that they could to make Modell feel comfortable. Neither had an office in the old facility, and neither asked for one. They used Modell’s office to conduct meetings but never sat at his desk. Instead, they used a round table that sat behind the desk as a gesture of respect to the former owner.

  Cass was fifty-eight, a lawyer who had spent thirty-two very successful years with one law firm, Wilmer Cutler Pickering, a prestigious Washington firm that he joined soon after graduating from Yale Law School. A glance at Cass’s résumé would tell you that he had always been an achiever: the son of a career Coast Guard officer, he had lived on both coasts as a kid, moving about every two years, but had spent a lot of his time in the Washington area, growing up a fan of the Senators and the Redskins. He had gone to Mercersburg Academy because his parents wanted some stability for him and his brother, Bill, who was four years older. From there it had been Princeton and then Yale Law—Yale because Harvard, where he was also accepted, didn’t offer him as much financial aid. He met Heather, his wife, while he was in law school and became an acquaintance of a very smart female student who was a year behind him.

  Years later, when Bill Clinton ran for president, the Casses were stunned when they saw his wife. She didn’t look anything like the Hillary Rodham they had known at Yale. “She was thinner and blonder and the thick glasses she had worn were long gone,” Cass said, laughing. “We had trouble believing it was the same person.”

  Bill Clinton was two years behind Cass at Yale, but Cass can’t remember seeing very much of him. “Part of it was I was third-year and he was first,” he said. “The other part was that he was always out politicking—even then.”

  As good a student as he was, Cass’s true passion was sports. He played everything in high school and went to Princeton hoping to play football and baseball. A knee injury his freshman year ended that dream—he spent most of the second semester on crutche
s—but Cass never stopped loving sports. When Wilmer Cutler was approached in the late 1980s by someone named Jerry Jones who was looking to buy the Dallas Cowboys, Cass was thrilled to get involved. He helped Jones buy the Cowboys and remained an adviser and confidant to him while he rebuilt the franchise. That experience led to the NFL’s recommending him to the Jack Kent Cooke estate when the Redskins were being sold and eventually to the league’s recommending him to Steve Bisciotti. The two men became friends while working together on Bisciotti’s purchase of the Ravens, and Bisciotti asked Cass during the 2002 season if he would be interested in becoming team president once he became the majority owner.

  “I jumped at it,” Cass said. “I had a very successful practice, but the chance to be involved in running an NFL team? I wasn’t going to pass that up. This isn’t just work, it’s fun.”

  Cass quickly became popular with the team’s hierarchy. He is one of those very smart people who never talks down to anyone. His only request came early, when he heard Billick and the coaches referring to less-than-stellar players as “slapdicks.”

  “Is there any way,” he asked, “I can convince you guys to call them, ‘slaptoms?’”

  When he wasn’t fending off ABC’s demands for luxury boxes, Cass was having a hectic week. The Jamal Lewis drug case was reaching a climax. A trial date had been set for November 1, but Lewis’s attorneys had entered into a plea-bargain negotiation with the prosecutors in Atlanta.

  Almost from the beginning, Cass had been the team’s point man on the Lewis case, which made sense since he was the resident lawyer. Early on, Ed Garland had told Jamal Lewis and the team that chances of a conviction in the case were “90-10 in our favor.” Like everyone else in the organization, Cass believed that Jamal had been set up and that the prosecutors had chosen to indict him far more because of his name than because of what he had done. But the lawyer in him saw danger in going to trial. One day during training camp as everyone watched afternoon practice, the subject of a potential trial came up. Bisciotti began talking in his animated way about how unfair the whole thing was and concluded by saying, “There’s absolutely no way they’ll ever get a conviction. They’ve got no case at all.”

  Very quietly, Cass said, “Steve, they’ve got a case.”

  Cass’s concern was simple: technically speaking, Lewis had broken the law by using his cell phone to set up the meeting that eventually led to a drug deal. While it was certainly possible, perhaps even probable, that a jury would understand that Lewis had played a minor role in the drug transaction (he hadn’t even been present when the meeting took place) and was hardly the felon they would have to think him to be in order to convict, there were no guarantees. Depending on the makeup of the jury, they might see him as someone who had made a mistake at the age of twenty or they might see him as a star athlete trying to beat the system, claiming innocence when everyone knew that star athletes were never really innocent.

  By September, Garland had revised his 90-10 estimate to 70-30. Basically, that meant he saw the odds as two to one in Lewis’s favor. Not exactly overwhelming, especially considering that if found guilty, Lewis faced a minimum sentence of ten years in prison. Even with parole, that would, for all intents and purposes, be the end of his football career. The consensus became that a trial might be too risky. The prosecutor had discussed a possible plea bargain. Lewis, backed by the team, instructed Garland to see what the prosecution was offering.

  When word came back initially that there had to be jail time, Lewis was angry and inclined to say no. “I’m not a criminal,” he said later. “I don’t like the idea of going to jail and I don’t like the idea that people are going to look at me and think of me as some kind of druggie or drug dealer. I’m not either one of those things.”

  The prosecutor wasn’t really concerned with any of that. He wasn’t going to let Lewis off without jail time if there was going to be a deal. What’s more, Lewis would have to admit in court that he had made the phone call that had led to the meeting. Lewis didn’t have a problem with that. He had made the call and he knew he had made a mistake in doing so. The bargaining went back and forth. A deal began to take shape: Lewis would go to jail for four months, but his sentence would not start until the off-season. He would then spend two months under house arrest but would probably be able to participate in any preseason workouts that were going on at that point. The advantages for Lewis were obvious: he would not miss any games and he would not have to run the risk of putting himself at the mercy of the jury. The disadvantages were just as obvious: he would go to jail, and some people would just assume he was all the things he did not want to be thought of as: a criminal, a druggie, a drug dealer. Lewis was fully aware that there were many people who still thought of Ray Lewis as a murderer and he hadn’t plea-bargained.

  Still, this took serious risk out of the equation. The other issue was the NFL. Once Lewis pleaded guilty, the league would have to decide on a penalty for the conviction, and the likelihood was that he would be suspended almost immediately. Four games was possible under the league’s rules. Cass flew to New York to get a sense from Paul Tagliabue of how the league would likely react if Lewis accepted the deal that was now on the table. Tagliabue wasn’t going to make any official pronouncements, but the message Cass got was clear: Lewis had not technically been a Raven yet when the incident had occurred. He had been drafted by the team in April but had not yet signed a contract when the incident took place in July. The players union might be able to make the case that the league didn’t have jurisdiction to penalize him. Tagliabue didn’t want them making that case. If the union and Lewis didn’t appeal, he was inclined to limit Lewis’s suspension to two games.

  That put all the pieces of the puzzle in place. Once Cass had the unofficial word that the suspension would be two games, Garland was instructed to make the deal. Lewis would have to fly to Atlanta the following week to appear before a judge and submit his plea. The league would announce the suspension immediately, but it would not go into effect until after the game in Washington, meaning he would miss the first two games after the bye week, against Buffalo and Philadelphia.

  “If it had gone to trial, he probably would have missed two games while the trial was going on and he would have been at risk,” Cass said. “This way he misses two games, he deals with the jail time in the off-season, and we go into next season knowing it is behind him and behind us.”

  Except, of course, for the fact that, as Lewis well knew, some people would put the druggie label on him for the rest of his career. “If I told you that doesn’t bother me,” he said, “I would be lying to you. I did smoke some marijuana when I was younger. But I’ve been clean for a while now and I’ve never done hard drugs and never once sold drugs. But I know there will always be people who will think I did all those things.”

  He sighed. “I made a mistake. No one can say I’m not paying the price for it.”

  Billick’s concern about playing an 0-3 team that should not be 0-3 was apparent when the team met on Sunday night. He talked about watching three games that day, all of them involving winless teams: Tampa Bay, Miami, and Buffalo. “They were all close games,” he said. “All of them played very, very hard, almost desperately. You could see the burden they were carrying around, but in the end that burden got to them. You have to expect this team to come in here and do the same thing. Be prepared to play a desperate team, because that’s what they are.”

  He talked about the “noise” around the game. The sideline would be packed pregame. ABC was sending 175 people. With the kickoff so late—nine o’clock—there would be a lot of pent-up emotion on both sides when the game started. “Don’t put us at risk by losing control of your emotions,” Billick said. “Don’t turn the control card over to the officials.”

  Billick knew Jamal Lewis was upset about the plea bargain, which had been announced on Friday. He spent some time with him on Monday, telling him not to worry about how it might affect the team. Billick was still angry at
the prosecutor for insisting on jail time. “You’re telling me he needs to go to jail at taxpayer expense? Why, so he can be rehabilitated? Come on.”

  Rehabilitation had nothing to do with the deal that had been cut. The jail time was there so the prosecution could say that it had a legitimate case when it indicted Lewis. That notion didn’t make Billick any happier.

  The weather that night was close to perfect. Billick and Vernon Holley walked across the Hamburg Street bridge shortly before seven o’clock, with the sun beginning to set while the fans in the parking lots screamed Billick’s name. He smiled and waved like a political candidate working a room. This was a very big room.

  Inside the stadium, even with kickoff two hours away, the atmosphere was amped up. One of the first players on the field was Deion Sanders. He had practiced twice during the week but still felt a little bit sore. Part of him wanted to play in the game, especially in the spotlight of Monday night. But he knew it would probably be a mistake. He had talked to Billick on Saturday, and Billick had urged him to be cautious, saying that missing one more game was better than running the risk of missing eight.

  “They use two tight ends a lot,” Sanders said, standing in the locker room while the other players put their uniforms on. “I probably wouldn’t be needed for that many snaps anyway. I think Coach Billick’s right. I have to look at this long-term.”

  The pregame locker room was the loudest it had been all year. Ray Lewis was in full voice, screaming repeatedly, “This only comes around once! Everybody understand? This only comes around once!”

  Terrell Suggs walked over and said to Lewis, shouting because no one speaks in a normal tone of voice pre-game, “Ray, what does pressure do?” The question was a setup. “All I know is that it breaks a pipe,” Lewis answered. “So imagine what it does to a human being!”