Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  They settled for a field goal on that drive and the final was 20-6. Ogden’s injury took a lot of joy out of the postgame locker room. Billick told them he was proud of the way they had gotten their act together after the poor start and told them to enjoy being 4-2. The defense had again been superb, intercepting Bledsoe four times, sacking him on four occasions, and keeping the Bills out of the end zone. The offense had been just good enough. Chester Taylor had produced 89 yards on 21 carries. Boller’s numbers were hardly gaudy: 10-of-19 for 86 yards, but, after the fumble, he had taken care of the football. Sanders had finally gotten a shot on offense, but the reverse called for him had produced a 10-yard loss.

  “We didn’t run it right,” he insisted when Fuller and Lewis gave him a hard time about producing negative yardage.

  What was most important was the final score. A win was a win. But it had not come without cost. Playing the Eagles would be tough under any circumstances. Playing them without all three of the offense’s Pro Bowl players would be even tougher.

  If Billick liked opportunities created by adversity, he was going to love the next seven days.

  19

  The T.O. Dance

  PART OF MIKE NOLAN’S POSTGAME ROUTINE every week was to circle the locker room to shake hands and have a quiet word with each of his players. The conversations were always brief, Nolan’s comments ranging from “great job” to “hang in there,” to “don’t hang your head,” depending on how the player and the defense had performed that day. Sometimes, he just said, “Thanks.”

  As he circled the room after the victory over the Bills, Nolan should have been flying high. For the second week in a row, the defense had been superb. It had not given up a touchdown, it had created four turnovers, and it had turned the game in the Ravens’ favor with a big play.

  Nolan felt none of that. More than anything, he felt slightly sick, his stomach twisted into a knot he couldn’t untangle. “Deep down, I knew I’d been out of line,” he said. “It was something that just happened in the heat of the moment. Almost as soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back.”

  The moment Nolan couldn’t escape had occurred in the first half. Brian Billick leaves it up to his coordinators to call the game from the press box or the sideline. He and Matt Cavanaugh had decided before the season began that it would be better for Cavanaugh to move up to the press box. For one thing, it made him less of a target. For another, with Jim Fassel downstairs to eyeball Kyle Boller when necessary, Cavanaugh could get a better sense of the game from up above.

  Nolan had always been a press-box coordinator, too. But, concerned about the big plays the defense had fallen prey to in the exhibition season and in Cleveland, he had decided to move downstairs for the Steelers game. “Normally I think you need to be upstairs, you see the game better from there,” he said. “I like to joke that the only coordinators who work from the sidelines are the ones trying to get on TV to get head jobs. But I thought being down there, where I could communicate more directly with the guys, particularly Ray, since I talk to him so much during the game anyway, might not be a bad idea.”

  The new plan had worked well against the Steelers except for one miscommunication in the first half. Billick had challenged a catch made by the Steelers. When the challenge was upheld and the ball came back, Nolan wanted different players on the field. He asked Billick about calling time-out and thought Billick said okay. So he called time-out. The next thing he knew, Billick was screaming at him for calling time-out. By game’s end, everyone was laughing about it—as is frequently the case when Billick explodes on the sideline. Most of the time he directs his anger at Gary Zauner, whom he has known the longest among his coaches and who tends to say things that might cause an explosion. Billick yells at Zauner so frequently that when Zauner’s contract had come up for renegotiation a year earlier, Zauner put in a clause that allowed him to wear headphones to the press box that covered both ears at all times. Most coaches just cover one ear so they can hear what is going on around them. Zauner didn’t want to hear what was going on—or what was being yelled in his direction.

  The two games after Pittsburgh—Cincinnati and Kansas City—had gone so poorly for the defense that Nolan decided to end the sideline experiment and go back upstairs for the Redskins game. All had gone well that night, so he was back upstairs for the Buffalo game. The coaches’ box is always a tight fit, regardless of the stadium. The Ravens’ offensive coaches—Cavanaugh, Wade Harman, and Jedd Fisch—sat on the left side of the front row, with the defensive coaches—Nolan, Dennis Thurman, Mike Pettine, and Phil Zacharias—to their right. Bennie Thompson, the special teams assistant, sat behind them with his own phone and headset. Three seats separated Cavanaugh and Nolan, and since both men were almost always on headsets to the sideline, they rarely spoke while the game was going on.

  With Jamal Lewis not in uniform, Cavanaugh—with Billick’s approval—had tweaked the offensive game plan to throw the ball more often, even if a lot of the play calls were for short passes. Midway through the second quarter, after the defense had spent a good deal of time on the field (in part because of Sanders’s interception return for a touchdown that put the defense right back on the field), Cavanaugh opened a series with two straight passes. One was caught for no gain, the other was incomplete. Chester Taylor then picked up a first down with a 12-yard run. On first down Boller again threw incomplete on another short route, this one to Musa Smith. That was it for Nolan.

  “What the hell are you doing!” he screamed at Cavanaugh, who wasn’t even certain at first that Nolan was yelling at him. Nolan went into a profane rant—out of character for him—screaming about giving the defense some rest and making calls that were best suited (in his mind) for the Ravens’ offense. “Pass, pass, pass, what the f —— are you thinking?” he said. He continued in that vein for a couple more sentences before finally sitting down. By then, Cavanaugh knew that Nolan was talking to him and knew what he was saying.

  “I was surprised,” he said later. “And, yeah, sure, I was hurt. You don’t expect that kind of thing from one of your own guys. I mean, we’re all trying to win the game together. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t think it would help anything if I did. But at that moment I was certainly a little bit steamed, to say the least.”

  The other coaches were stunned. Wade Harman, perhaps the gentlest soul among the coaches, was as white as a sheet, embarrassed and upset by what he had heard. The other defensive coaches didn’t know what to say. They couldn’t tell Cavanaugh, “Hey, just ignore him, you’re doing fine,” and, in effect, contradict their boss.

  The person most upset with Nolan was Nolan. “I’ve been on the other side,” he said. “I’ve been in Matt’s shoes, been on the side of the ball that wasn’t performing as well as everyone wanted it to perform. If anyone should have known better than to do something like that, it’s me. But I didn’t. I was frustrated and I let it out and took it out on Matt. I was out of line. Way out of line.”

  This was the stacking that Billick had been concerned about. There were several areas in which he thought he saw it: Boller was getting more and more heat each week, Jamal Lewis was dealing with the drug conviction, Chris McAlister had been dealing with his contract (Billick hoped that was now behind him), and the coaches—all of them—were thinking about their future. Which Billick could understand, because he had been an assistant coach once, too, and he had been a coordinator wondering when his chance to be a head coach was going to come.

  “We went 15-1 the last year I was a coordinator,” he said. “That made it a lot easier for me. I had two coordinators worried about next year—Matt’s wondering if he’s going to keep his job; Mike’s hoping he can get another job. Rex Ryan’s twin brother just became a coordinator [in Oakland], and he wants to know when he gets his chance. I had already told Phil [Zacharias] that he needed to look for another job at the end of the season and a couple of the other guys knew they were on the bubble and their future might depend on how
we did. That can create a lot of tension.”

  Now the tension had exploded. When Billick heard what had happened, he decided to say nothing to Nolan—at least for the moment. “Mike’s a bright guy and he’s a guy who knows right from wrong,” he said. “I was guessing—hoping—he’d do the right thing.”

  As soon as Nolan got home from the Bills game, Kathy, his wife, could tell something was wrong. His defense had dominated the game, and the look on his face was more what she would have expected after a 40-10 loss. He told her what had happened. She wondered if it had been as bad as he thought; perhaps Cavanaugh hadn’t heard all or most of the rant. Nolan knew better. “He had to hear,” he said. Then he went to bed and didn’t sleep for most of the night.

  The next morning he was in his office, getting ready to break down tape of the Buffalo game and start working on a game plan for the Eagles. Pettine and Thurman came in to ask about practice plans for the week. Nolan asked them to sit down for a minute.

  “What happened yesterday in the box,” he said. “Do you think I should apologize to Matt or just let it go?”

  They both answered at once: “Apologize.”

  The way they answered erased any doubt Nolan might have had about what to do next. He walked down the hall to Cavanaugh’s office. The lights were out and the offensive staff was in the room watching the Buffalo game tape. Nolan knew the entire offensive staff would know by now what had happened, so their presence didn’t bother him.

  “Matt, I wanted to apologize for yesterday,” Nolan said. “I was out of line. I shouldn’t have said what I said under any circumstances, but I certainly shouldn’t have said it while you’re trying to call a game. I’m really sorry.”

  Cavanaugh, sitting behind his desk, had stopped the tape when Nolan walked in. “I appreciate it, Mike,” he said. “It’s really good of you to come down here and say that. Thanks.”

  There were no hugs or even handshakes. Nolan was probably in Cavanaugh’s office for less than a minute. He walked out feeling better. Cavanaugh felt better, too. The air had been cleared. But the tension wasn’t likely to go away anytime soon.

  It was bound to be a tense week under any circumstances. The game with the Eagles had been metaphorically circled since the day in March when the special master had urged the league to make the deal that landed Terrell Owens in Philadelphia, not Baltimore. The loss in the exhibition game, especially with Owens catching the 81-yard touchdown pass to start the game, had stung, but everyone knew that, ultimately, it was completely meaningless. This game would have plenty of meaning. The Eagles were 6-0, one of two undefeated teams remaining in the league. The other was the New England Patriots, who had extended their league-record winning streak to twenty-one games and were going into Pittsburgh to play the Steelers—who had not lost since their trip to Baltimore. If the Ravens and Patriots could win on the road, the Ravens would be tied for first place with the Steelers in the AFC North. If both home teams won, the Steelers would have a two-game lead over the Ravens. The consensus in the Ravens’ locker room was that the Steelers were about to find out what it was like playing against one of the NFL’s big boys.

  Then again, the Ravens were also playing one of the NFL’s big boys—and they were doing it without Jamal Lewis, without Todd Heap, and, as Billick had suspected the minute he went down, without Jonathan Ogden. The diagnosis was pretty close to what everyone had expected as soon as Ogden reached back and grabbed his left leg: a tear in his hamstring, meaning he would be out at least two weeks. As a result, Ethan Brooks would be playing in his place against a defense that probably blitzed more than any in the NFL.

  Billick is a major movie buff who often likens real-life situations to movies he has seen. “This is like the scene in Apollo 13,” he said, sitting in his office just before practice on Wednesday. “The guy starts throwing all sorts of stuff on his desk and he says to his people, ‘Find something in here that will give them air up there.’ We’ve got to throw everything we have on the desk and figure out a way to beat the Eagles.”

  One thing was certain: good play from only one side of the ball wasn’t going to be enough. Donovan McNabb was having an MVP season at quarterback, unless—as many people believed—Owens was the MVP. They had become the most dangerous deep-passing combination in the league. With Jamal Lewis out, the offense was going to have to be able to move the ball through the air to keep the Philadelphia defense honest. Which meant that Kyle Boller had to play well—something he had not done for several weeks.

  All of Boller’s coaches—Billick, Matt Cavanaugh, and Jim Fassel—were searching for ways to jump-start his confidence. On Monday, Cavanaugh told Boller he would like him to take the lead in the Saturday night tape sessions. Normally on Saturdays, Cavanaugh would take the players through a dozen or so key plays on tape, calling out questions to players about blocking schemes or what coverage the defense was in or what a player’s responsibility was on a given call. Cavanaugh wanted Boller to take over that role: in part to remind everyone that he was the team’s offensive leader, in part to make him feel more involved in the game plan, and in part to let Boller know that no one was doubting his leadership of the team. Boller liked the idea.

  To back that up, Billick called Boller in to tell him that regardless of what he heard or read, no one was giving any thought to changing quarterbacks. “If you’re ever on the bubble as far as starting goes, you’ll hear it from me, not from anyone else,” Billick told him. “You aren’t on the bubble, you aren’t even close to being on the bubble. I know you can play better, and so do you. But there isn’t any doubt in my mind that you’re our quarterback and there shouldn’t be any doubt in yours.”

  Boller told Billick there hadn’t been any doubt in his mind, but he appreciated the reinforcement.

  Last but not least came Fassel. Boller had already become close to Fassel because, unlike Billick and Cavanaugh, Fassel concerned himself only with Boller. On Monday, Fassel suggested they go to dinner, get away from the facility and all the prying eyes, and just talk football and whatever else was on Boller’s mind. Boller liked that idea. They went to a Ruth’s Chris Steak House not far from Owings Mills and sat in a private room. Fassel ordered a bottle of red wine and they talked.

  Alone with Fassel, Boller felt he could open up. He didn’t think people were being fair to him, especially the now-growing list of people wondering why Ben Roethlisberger was racking up wins and putting up numbers as a rookie that were outshining Boller’s as a second-year player. Roethlisberger was actually older than Boller by several months. More important, he was throwing to high-quality receivers with great speed: Hines Ward, Plaxico Burress, and Antwaan Randle El.

  “I really thought coming into the season that TT [Travis Taylor] and I were going to have a big year together,” Boller said. “And I knew that Todd would catch a lot of balls. Then they both get hurt. Don’t people understand that?”

  Many people didn’t understand that. Boller was throwing to Kevin Johnson, who had great hands but had trouble getting open; backup tight end Terry Jones, who was a solid player and an excellent blocker but nowhere near the receiver Heap was; Randy Hymes, who had improved greatly but was still very inexperienced; and now the rookie Clarence Moore, who was becoming more important to the offense with each passing week.

  “Not exactly anyone who resembles T.O. in that group, is there?” Fassel said.

  “They’re are all good guys and they’re all working their butts off,” Boller said. “But I can’t remember the last time I had an easy throw, you know, one where the guy is so wide-open, there’s no way I can mess it up.”

  “You have to be perfect almost all the time,” Fassel said.

  Boller laughed. “And, as anyone in town will tell you, I’m far from perfect.”

  They each drank a glass of red wine and looked forward to better things.

  There was one piece of good news during the week: the Ravens and Jonathan Ogden had worked out what he expected to be his last contract. O
gden had turned thirty on the first weekend of training camp and had told the team he wanted one final long-term contract that would carry him to the end of his career. Even though he had now been injured twice during the season, the Ravens still figured Ogden was about as good a long-term risk as anyone in the game. He had been durable throughout most of his career, he kept himself in excellent shape, and he was one of those rare players they knew would never get into any kind of trouble. The deal was for seven years and $50 million. What was most significant to Ogden was the $20 million signing bonus because that money was up front and guaranteed.

  Ogden has a way of carrying himself as if the weight of the world (like carrying 345 pounds isn’t enough) is always on his shoulders. The most frequent answer he gives to people who ask how he’s feeling is one word: tired. Whenever Ogden was asked to do something by the marketing or public relations people, he would roll his eyes, shrug his shoulders, and say, “Well, if you really need me . . .” And then he would do it. When word about his new deal spread, Ogden was universally congratulated. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t think he deserved the money and the extension.

  Of course, Ogden found a dark cloud in his financial silver lining: “Now I really can’t vote for John Kerry,” he said, smiling.

  The presidential election was a topic of conversation among some of the Ravens that week. Most of the players were either neutral, not interested, or Republican, like many Americans in the upper tax brackets. Ogden tended to lean more left than most of his teammates and was no fan of George W. Bush. “I can’t possibly vote for him,” he said. “I voted for Al Gore in 2000 even though I knew he’d raise my taxes, because he’s an old St. Albans guy like me. I probably wasn’t going to vote either way before this [the new contract]. Now I can’t possibly vote for Kerry because he’ll absolutely raise my taxes. I guess I’ll have to sit this one out.”