Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Jeanne Hall got him to school every day, and a man named Ned Paquet, who frequented the local schoolyards, kept pushing him to work harder in school. “He was just a local guy who liked to mentor kids he thought had potential,” Reed said. “He picked me out early. He would show up after I got done playing and give me a little shove and say, ‘You been getting your schoolwork done? You want a scholarship, you need to get your work done.’”

  By his junior year Reed was thinking about a scholarship. He had been contacted by Miami, where the receivers coach, Curtis Johnson Jr., was from St. Rose. His father, who still lived in St. Rose, had told him about Reed and he went to see Reed while back home, visiting. “His message was pretty direct,” Reed remembered. “He said, ‘You’ve got the talent, you haven’t got the grades or the ACTs. If you want to come to Miami, that’s what you have to work on.’ So I did.”

  He pushed his grade point average to 2.7 and got a 17 on the ACT—two points higher than the 15 that he needed. By his senior year, other schools, seeing his talent—and now, his grades and ACTs—were onto him, but he was committed in his mind to Miami. He went there and immediately got hurt, breaking an ankle early in his freshman season. “I was upset at the time,” he said. “I wanted to play—I mean, play right away—and now I couldn’t. But it was probably the best thing that happened to me. It gave me a chance to get used to college, to learn how to fit in, to watch the older players and learn from them. By the time I started to play my [redshirt] freshman year, I was ready.”

  His career was a steady progression. By his junior season he was the Big East co-player of the year and was being told by scouts that he might be a first-round pick. But he was concerned that if he went to all the predraft camps and the combine and did all the workouts for teams, he wouldn’t graduate in the spring. Plus, he thought Miami had a chance to be very good the next year even though Coach Butch Davis was leaving to coach the Cleveland Browns. He stayed, and the decision turned out to be exactly right. He graduated in the spring. The Hurricanes went undefeated and won the national championship in the fall. And the following April, after some nervous moments, he got the call from Ozzie Newsome telling him the Ravens were taking him with the twenty-fourth pick in the draft.

  “To be honest, I didn’t care where I went,” he said. “I just wanted the chance to test myself at the next level.”

  He was tested right away, starting all sixteen games. He and Ray Lewis—both Miami guys—became best friends. A year later he made the Pro Bowl. Now, in his third season, people were starting to say he might be the best defensive player in the league. That was fine with Reed. He was confident that Lewis could handle hearing that kind of talk without his ego being bruised.

  “I’m no different now at twenty-six than I was when I was six playing peewee,” he said. “I just want to play football and keep getting better.”

  When the players came back from their four-day break, they reported to the new facility and were given a tour of the posh new locker rooms, meeting rooms, and, perhaps most important to them, the new weight room. Everything in the new building—which was, in all, 200,000 square feet, complete with stone and brick fronting and a castle turret—was at least twice as large as in the old one. For the first time in team history, there was an indoor field to practice on, certainly a luxury during the season for bad weather days, but a huge advantage in the off-season, when players would be able to work out no matter how cold or snowy the weather might be. The weight room was a huge improvement, too: for one thing, it was part of the main building, not a separate bubble the way it was in the old building.

  “I’m not sure I’m worthy of working out in this place,” punter Dave Zastudil said when he saw the new weight room.

  “The best thing about it is we don’t have to walk outside to go to the bathroom,” strength coach Jeff Friday said, a key upgrade for everyone.

  The locker room was big enough to comfortably fit the fifty-three roster players and the eight practice squad players with room to spare—room that would be used during minicamps, when the roster swelled. There would be no need, as there had been in the old locker room, to put temporary lockers in the middle of the room for the rookies and free agents. The coaches’ offices were palatial. Every assistant now had his own office—as opposed to the old place, where many of them had to double up. Bisciotti and Cass went from no office space to having huge offices right next to each other. There were drawbacks. Unlike in the old building, where Newsome and Billick were at opposite ends of the hallway, now they were right next to each other, separated only by the space occupied by their assistants. In the old days, when something was going on, everyone knew it because the two men would take turns marching down the hallway to each other’s offices. Now they could go back and forth unnoticed, a disappointment to all. Even the media, which had worked out of a trailer in the old place, had comfortable new quarters, complete with its own entrance and a freezer stocked with ice cream. The latter was a mixed blessing for most.

  There were, predictably, some glitches. The washing machines and dryers that were needed to clean all the players’ gear weren’t working. Local firefighters work for the team to get the Ravens’ laundry done in their spare time. Ed Carroll, the team’s longtime equipment manager, had to send the firefighters to a Laundromat. “The hard part,” he said, “was rounding up eight hundred quarters.”

  “It’s amazing what you can buy these days with thirty-one million dollars, isn’t it?” Billick joked.

  Billick gave the players three days to get the hang of the new digs. On Wednesday morning, when the team gathered to begin a normal work-week in preparation for Buffalo, he announced that being late for a meeting because one got lost in the building was no longer a viable excuse. It was time to get serious and get back to work.

  The Bills would come into Baltimore with a 1-4 record. Billick didn’t want to sound like one of those coaches who makes every opponent sound like the 1967 Green Bay Packers, but he knew they were considerably better than their record. Two of their four losses had come on the final play; another had come in the last minute. They had a huge defense, which included Sam Adams, who had been a key part of the defensive line for the Ravens when they won the Super Bowl, and dangerous wide receivers who would make plays if quarterback Drew Bledsoe was given time.

  The key to the game would be not giving Bledsoe time. He was a smart, veteran quarterback but lacked mobility. He was vulnerable to the sack and also was capable of throwing interceptions if forced to throw the ball quickly.

  The week seemed to crawl by for everyone. They had been eager for the week off, but now they wanted to play again. For the first time all fall, the weather was truly lousy—cold and rainy, forcing three straight days of practice indoors. Billick began the week by ripping the league for not allowing a suspended player to train at the facility during his suspension. “Isn’t it better for him to have some order in his life, to be working out, even if it’s on his own, around people who know what they’re doing?” he said. “What exactly do you accomplish by keeping him away?”

  Nothing. As it turned out, the league agreed. The day after Billick’s salvo, Ozzie Newsome got a note from the league office: the rules on suspended players had been changed. Lewis was welcome to work out at the facility, he just couldn’t work out with the team. Whoops.

  “I guess you could say this was one where we didn’t get the memo,” Billick said. “Literally.”

  Lewis was already home in Atlanta by the time the team got word. Plans were made for him to stay there through Sunday, then report back to Baltimore on Monday morning. With Lewis gone, the offensive game plan had to be adjusted somewhat because neither Chester Taylor nor Musa Smith was the pounding type of runner that Lewis was. The offense would try to run more to the outside and would include more short passes. The thought was that short passes would help Boller, too, because they were easier and less dangerous. Taylor would be the primary back; Smith would take Taylor’s role, coming in on pa
ssing downs. Both men had known since the announcement of the trial date during training camp that this week was almost certainly going to come at this point in the season and both appeared prepared for it. The only hitch came early in the week when Kevin Byrne told Taylor there were several extra media requests for him. Taylor is one of the quieter players on the team, almost to the point of being a loner. When Byrne told him he would be expected to spend extra time with the media, he rolled his eyes. “So now they want to talk to me, when I’m the starter,” he said.

  “That exactly right, Chester,” Byrne answered. “When you start, more people want to talk to you.”

  Byrne has been in public relations for almost thirty years and knows how to deal with players. He and his staff put out a booklet each year for the benefit of the players, telling them who the media are in Baltimore, what the players may be asked to do during the course of the season, and why it is important that they cooperate with the media. The players cooperate with him and with his assistants, Francine Lubera, Chad Steele, and Marisol Renner, in part because most of them do understand why they should but also because they know Byrne has the complete support of Billick, Newsome, and Bisciotti. If Byrne tells them he thinks something is important, they take him at his word. The players are expected to do the same. Chester Taylor did all the interviews Byrne asked him to.

  Byrne had another issue to deal with during the week that had nothing to do with the Buffalo game. Each week NFL teams supply one key player for a conference call with writers from the opponent’s city. This is usually routine: the Baltimore writers might ask for Drew Bledsoe and the Buffalo writers would ask for Ray Lewis or Kyle Boller. The only thing the PR people tried to do was make sure the same player wasn’t asked to do the conference call every week. Ed Reed, coming off his huge game against Washington, was the Ravens’ rep to the Buffalo writers for the week. Byrne was already in negotiations with Derek Boyko, his counterpart in Philadelphia, about the conference calls for the following week since the Ravens and Ray Lewis going to Philadelphia to play the Eagles and Terrell Owens was going to be a big story not only locally in the two cities but nationally.

  The Baltimore writers wanted—surprise—Terrell Owens. The Eagles said no. “T.O. doesn’t do conference calls” was Boyko’s official excuse.

  The Philadelphia writers wanted—another shock—Ray Lewis. As soon as the Eagles said no to T.O., the Ravens said no to Lewis. Byrne knew that Lewis wasn’t going to want to get into any T.O. rehash, but once Boyko said no to T.O., he didn’t even have to go back to Lewis to see if he would consider it.

  Stalemate.

  The issue was finally resolved the next Monday: Reed would talk to the Philly writers, and Donovan McNabb to the Baltimore writers. Peace was at hand. . . . Sort of.

  Billick and the players weren’t the least bit concerned about who was going to be on the next week’s conference call. By the end of the week, everyone was a little bit tense. During practice on Friday, Terrell Suggs was teasing co-secondary coach Dennis Thurman in the way players and coaches often tease one another; silly macho stuff. Everyone on the team knew that Suggs was completely harmless, a constant talker who was best handled with laughter. Even though he was in his second season, he had just turned twenty-two and frequently acted younger than that. He was rapidly becoming one of the better pass-rushing linebackers in the league and had taken to punctuating his sacks with a dance that was so bad, no one wanted to tell him to stop because it was always good for a laugh. “He may be the only person I’ve ever seen who is a worse dancer than I am,” Dick Cass had commented one day.

  No one understood the give-and-take between players and coaches better than Thurman, who had played in the league for nine years (with thirty-six career interceptions) before becoming a coach. This time, though, he snapped at Suggs. “Sizzle, you need to learn when to just shut the hell up,” he said, walking away from Suggs. There were other skirmishes, some on the field, some off. By Saturday night Rod Hairston felt compelled to begin his sermon by saying, “Fellas, I know this environment can wear you out.” He went on to talk about opportunities that life presented one with; occasionally opportunities that appeared in the form of adversity.

  Billick was fully aware of the tension in the locker room. Although he understood some of it was circumstantial—weather, time off, concerns about Jamal Lewis’s absence—he was also beginning to think that “stacking,” the psychological component he had heard about at the BCA convention, might be starting to infiltrate his team. “The Rev had a hell of a message tonight,” he said. “It was about opportunities. This is an opportunity to prove we can overcome difficulties. We’re without the league’s best running back [Lewis], our best receiver [Todd Heap], and our starting center [Mike Flynn]. But I still think we have everything we need in this room to win this game. I told you before the season, we would face adversity. The way we deal with that adversity that we knew would come in some form will ultimately determine how successful we are.”

  “I wonder how we’ll react to all of this,” he said on Sunday morning while crossing the Hamburg Street bridge with Vernon Holley. The day was just about as miserable as the rest of the week had been. Billick’s concern was apparently not shared by the team’s fans. Rain or no rain, they were in a joyous mood on the bridge, delighted by the victory over the Redskins and convinced that the 1-4 Bills would be little more than a walkover. Billick didn’t share their confidence.

  He was even more concerned when he went on the field for pregame warm-ups. Something was missing. Because of the weather, there weren’t as many people in their seats early as usual. It seemed to him that the players were flat as they went through their pregame routines and drills. There was very little of the usual chatter. Even Ray Lewis was relatively quiet. When Billick gathered the team around him before they went out to be introduced, he abandoned his normal pregame format. “I may be completely full of shit on this, I know I am on a lot of things and I’m not even sure if the way you warm up matters even a little bit,” he said. “But what I saw out there just now was not a team ready to play an important football game. I’m gonna tell you guys something: never do you go out on this field if you aren’t ready to play. You cannot go out there today and expect this crowd to pick you up. They’re wet, they’re cold, they’re bundled up, and it’s been three weeks since we last played here. You have got to provide the emotion. You can’t count on anyone else to do it, not me, not the coaches, you. Now, if you aren’t ready to go out there and play with emotion, don’t go out there! Understand? Now, I’m going to go stand by that door and I want every one of you to look me in the eye and tell me you’re ready to play. If you don’t feel like you can do that, don’t go out there!”

  There was a lot of football rhetoric in the speech, but Billick’s concern was genuine. His instincts had told him something wasn’t right, and he thought he needed to get their attention before they dug themselves a hole the way they had in the Kansas City game. Billick always stands in the doorway and offers a word of encouragement to each player as he goes by. This time, he wanted the words to come at him, rather than from him.

  They all said the right things going out the door, insisting they had gotten the message. But the game didn’t start that way. After B. J. Sams returned the opening kickoff to the 30-yard line, Taylor tried to run left on first down and was nailed for a 2-yard loss. Boller dropped to pass on second down and was swarmed by defensive end Aaron Schobel and blitzing linebacker Jeff Posey, who blew by the left side of the Ravens’ line. Boller fumbled, and Posey pounced on the ball at the 22. The game was forty-three seconds old and boos were wafting down from the stands. The fans might have been too cold to clap but they weren’t too cold to boo. Bledsoe immediately found tight end Mark Campbell for a 16-yard pickup to the 6 and the bleak day looked even bleaker.

  But the defense dug in and forced the Bills to settle for a field goal. Then the offense pieced together a twelve-play drive that stalled at the Buffalo 6 but still produ
ced a Matt Stover field goal that tied the game. And then Deion Sanders took over. Facing third-and-9 from their own 45, the Bills lined up in shotgun formation. Bledsoe dropped back, was rushed hard, and tried to force a pass to running back Willis McGahee. Sanders stepped in front of McGahee and had nothing but 48 yards of Momentum turf between him and the end zone. With the stadium erupting, he waltzed into the end zone, then turned and put a hand up to stop his onrushing teammates from mobbing him. It was time for Prime Time. He danced along the end line while everyone stood and watched. One could only hope that Suggs was watching; he could have learned a thing or two.

  Once again the defense had completely changed the tenor of a game. The Bills went nowhere on their next possession and the Ravens opened the second quarter with what might have been their best sustained drive of the season—83 yards in nine plays, with Sams, starting to get some snaps on offense, scoring on a sweep left from the 5-yard line. After the brutal start, they led, 17-3. That was the margin at halftime. By then the Ravens’ defense had control of the game. The Bills managed a third-quarter field goal to cut the margin to 17-6, then marched to the Ravens’ 5 with just under six minutes left in the game. But Chad Williams, in the game on third down, intercepted a Bledsoe pass on the 1-yard line and almost took it back all the way, finally running out of gas and being caught by wide receiver Eric Moulds at the Buffalo 6 after a 93-yard return.

  Williams’s not scoring hardly seemed significant at that point. What was likely the Bills’ last gasp had been stopped. But on the first play after the interception, as Taylor swept left, Jonathan Ogden grabbed his left leg and went down in a heap. Just as in the Meadowlands when Ogden had gone down, the bench went from raucous—players were still teasing Williams about not scoring—to silent. Ogden was finally helped off the field, and as in the Meadowlands, Andy Tucker’s initial diagnosis to Billick was one word: “hamstring.” Billick groaned. He was certain, even without knowing the details, just judging by the way Ogden had looked coming off the field, he wouldn’t play the next week in Philadelphia. No Lewis, no Ogden, no Heap going to play on the road against an undefeated team.