This was an uncomfortable situation for all three men. Rabach and Flynn were best friends. They lockered next to each other and spent time with each other away from the field. Flynn was where Rabach wanted to be: locked into a four-year contract worth an average of more than $1 million a year—in addition to the $1 million signing bonus he had received. This was Rabach’s year to prove that he was worthy of that kind of money, and he was in the process of doing just that. Deep down, he knew that he was probably going to have to go to another team to get paid the kind of money he was proving he was worth. The Ravens had already made a financial commitment to Flynn and didn’t think Rabach was worth big money as a guard. Like Flynn, his best position was center. Rabach had been a third-round draft pick out of Wisconsin in 2001 and had patiently waited for his chance to be a starter. He had expected to compete with Anderson in training camp at the right guard spot, but that competition had come to a halt when Flynn got hurt.
Anderson was one of the most popular members of the team. He was one of the last survivors from the late, unlamented XFL, having played for the Chicago Enforcers in 2001. He had tried out briefly with the St. Louis Rams—his hometown team—after graduating from Tennessee State in 2000. “Didn’t even make it to camp,” he said. “They cut me in July before camp started. Needless to say, I didn’t feel as if I really got a chance.”
He spent the fall working out and coaching before signing with the XFL, where he was paid $40,000 for the season as a starter. That spring, looking for “camp bodies,” Ravens offensive line coach Jim Colletto invited him in for a tryout. Every player who signs with a team as a “camp body” does so convinced that he will catch the eye of the coaches and make the team. Anderson proved to be one of those rare exceptions. He not only made the team, he became a starter and had become a mainstay. He had signed a two-year contract in 2003 and was hoping that 2004 would put him in a position to get a long-term deal with a big signing bonus. It had not gone that way so far. Whether his problems were being caused by Brown having a tough time playing next to him or because defensive linemen had figured him out was tough to say.
In any event, Flynn’s return and Rabach’s play at center meant that his playing time was likely to shrink over the next few weeks. Naturally, Anderson wasn’t thrilled with that likelihood. Flynn was less than delighted with playing out of position and sharing time. Rabach simply felt uncomfortable because he knew his two friends were not happy.
“In a lot of ways this has been the toughest season I’ve ever had in football,” Flynn said. “When I was young and still trying to prove myself, being on special teams or not starting was part of the deal and I understood it. I didn’t want it to stay that way, but I understood it. Now I’m being paid all this money and it kills me that I can’t go out and play the way they expect me to play. I know I’ve been injured and people understand that. Being in here the first seven weeks, seeing the guys getting ready to go play, and knowing I can’t play has been brutal. My wife finally told me one night that I just had to calm down and not let it bother me so much.”
Flynn was going through what many athletes experience when they are injured or when age has cut back on their playing time. He was in the locker room but didn’t feel as if he was of the locker room. “It isn’t as if the guys aren’t friendly and encouraging, they are,” Flynn said. “But the fact is, when you’re hurt, you aren’t part of the team. You aren’t taking part in practices the way everyone else is. You aren’t getting ready to play a game the way the other guys are. You feel almost invisible when you’re in the locker room. I can’t stand feeling that way.”
One reason for Flynn’s success is his intensity. In today’s NFL he is a small offensive lineman at six-three, 305, although about average for a center. Before games, he would roam the locker room, headphones on, talking to himself, taking deep breaths to get himself ready to play. By nature Flynn was outgoing and friendly. On game days he was not someone to be trifled with. Moving to guard would make him one of the smaller players in the league at that position—by comparison, Anderson and Edwin Mulitalo each weighed 345—and would put him at a position where he had little experience. He understood what the coaches were thinking, but it didn’t make it any easier for him.
Everyone on the team had become concerned about the offensive line. In 2003 it had been one of the team’s great strengths. Ogden had been his normal unbeatable self, Flynn had become one of the league’s better centers, Mulitalo had become a player worthy of Pro Bowl consideration, and Anderson and Brown had been very solid. They had been healthy almost the entire season, and when one of them had been nicked, Rabach and Ethan Brooks had played well in backup roles.
This year the line had been in flux since the start of camp. Brown had been understandably distracted by his mother’s death, Flynn had gotten hurt, Ogden had now been hurt twice, and neither Mulitalo nor Anderson had been the same player as a year earlier—perhaps because of what was going on around them. No one was exactly sure how Flynn’s return would affect the play of the line. It should help—a good player returning to the lineup. But he was coming back to an unfamiliar position, and his presence could—almost surely would—create doubts in Anderson’s mind, not only about the present but about the future. The Ravens needed to be able to run the football, especially in the second half of the season, when they would play the Jets, Patriots, Colts, and Steelers—arguably the four best teams in the AFC (they hoped other than themselves)—during the season’s final eight weeks.
“I’m not exactly sure where any of them are mentally right now,” Jim Colletto said of his players when the coaches met after the Eagles game. “We just have to keep mixing and matching until we find the best combination.”
Not exactly the way you wanted to feel about your offensive line halfway through the season.
Playing at night is a mixed blessing for a football team. Players and coaches like the idea that they are playing in the only game going on at that moment; that, even on Sunday, a lot of the league and most of the country is watching them. There’s a different feeling in the stadium at night. It isn’t like a one o’clock game on Sunday, when fans roll out of bed to head downtown for their tailgates. They’ve had all day to get ready, they’ve probably had more to drink at their tailgates, and the fact that the game is on national television adds an extra bit of tingle.
The flip side is the waiting. Players like to wake up and get ready to play. Most are accustomed to early-afternoon kickoffs, which mean eating a pregame meal, getting to the stadium, getting in uniform, going through pregame drills, and then playing. There really isn’t much time to accumulate pent-up energy or to think about the game. “You have to wake up ready to get right at it,” Billick often says on the night before a one o’clock game. “You go from bed right to Jump Street.”
That’s not true with a night game. The day passes slowly. Some players watch other games on TV, others prefer not to. On the night of the Browns game, the Ravens already knew that the Steelers had beaten their second undefeated team in two weeks—this time it was the Eagles—by the time they began showing up at the Hyatt for the pregame meal. There is plenty of food available at the pregame meal: steaks, chicken, pasta, omelettes, lots of fruit, and, if someone asks, pancakes or waffles. Most players eat light, not so much because they are worried about having food in their stomachs at game time but because their nerves are too raw to eat very much. Many—if not most—football players have bad stomachs on game day.
The weather for Browns II was, again, close to perfect. “It’s amazing how rarely we get bad weather here,” Billick said as he crossed the Hamburg Street bridge, all the while giving his two walking companions grief about George W. Bush’s victory over John Kerry the previous Tuesday. “Coming from Minnesota, it took me a while to get used to the notion that you could have a night like this in November.”
Another Bush voter, Matt Stover (“I’m conservative economically, liberal socially,” he liked to say) was, as always, one of
the first Ravens on the field. “Now that Bush has been reelected, are you going to start collecting social security?” Browns punter Derrick Frost, a second-year player from Northern Iowa, asked Stover.
“Don’t start with me, kid,” Stover said, laughing. Frost was nine years old when Stover was an NFL rookie.
Kickers, punters, and long snappers are a cult in the NFL. They spend most of their time practicing apart from the rest of the team, and it is important that they get along because they spend so much time together. Because their jobs are so different from those of the rest of the team, they often have to look to one another for friendship and support and often become friendly with the kickers and long snappers on other teams since they all speak the same language. Stover could often be seen standing on the field three hours before kickoff, dispensing wisdom on subjects ranging from crosswinds to which flagpoles in the NFL could be trusted and which could not.
The pregame sidelines were alive with activity. Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer who had won six gold medals and eight medals in all in Athens, was on the field with his mother. He was scheduled to be introduced as the Ravens “twelfth man,” an exciting prospect for him because he had grown up in Baltimore and was a Ravens fan. Phelps appeared completely at ease talking to players and coaches before the game. Two nights earlier he had been arrested and charged with driving under the influence. It was a mistake that far too many nineteen-year-olds make. The arrest would be big news and he would have to deal with being labeled some kind of drunk or miscreant even though he was a very good kid who had made a very bad mistake—one he readily admitted, without making any excuses. The police had agreed not to make the news public until Monday so Phelps could enjoy his moment running out of the tunnel with the Ravens.
As usual, the scouts congregated on the sidelines, talking about the college games they had seen that week. By now, Phil Savage and Eric DeCosta had each seen almost twenty college games apiece—picking up extra games by going to weeknight games and occasionally seeing a day-night doubleheader—in addition to numerous practice sessions. The draft was still more than six months away, but already the scouts were putting together a draft board, at least in their heads.
“I’ll go out on a limb right now and say our first pick will be Dan Cody,” DeCosta said. “Linebacker from Oklahoma. Our kind of kid.”
Phil Savage wasn’t even certain he would be in the Ravens’ draft room in April. As he always did, he stood as close to the field as he could while the teams went through their pregame drills, watching the opposing team’s players warm up. “You never know who will be available at some point in the future,” he said. “You can always pick something up watching how a player gets ready for a game.” He might have been watching the Browns a little more closely than he watched most teams. Since the euphoria of their opening-day win over the Ravens, the Browns had struggled. They were 3-4 and the whispers about Butch Davis’s future had grown louder. Since Davis was one of those coaches who also controlled personnel decisions, his departure from Cleveland would probably mean the Browns would need a general manager. Savage would be at the top of anyone’s list if a general manager’s job opened up.
There was one pregame problem that had to be dealt with: Deion Sanders’s towel. Sanders was penciled into the offensive game plan and was also probably going to be back on a couple of kicks. He had a towel tucked into his belt so he could keep his hands dry throughout the game, something a lot of players do. Because a lot of players do it, the NFL (surprise) has a rule on how big the towel can be: six inches in length is the maximum. Knowing the NFL Big Brothers would be looking over his shoulder because of the game being on national TV, Bruce Laird had told Jeff Friday during pregame drills that Sanders’s towel was two inches too long. Friday sighed and found Sanders in the locker room to tell him the towel was too long. Sanders sighed, got some scissors, and cut the towel by two inches. Crisis averted.
In the meantime, Corey Fuller was in full rant. Fuller’s role with the team was one that seemed to shift from week to week. In many ways he was one of the team’s respected elders because he had accomplished a good deal during his NFL career. But everyone—including Fuller—knew that the end of the season was going to bring a lot of change to Fuller’s life. He was still with the Ravens in large part because of his close relationship with Billick and his friendship with Ray Lewis and Deion Sanders. The plan had been to move him to safety in preseason, but Dale Carter’s illness and Sanders’s on-again, off-again status had forced him to play cornerback. At thirty-three, he wasn’t the player he had once been, which sometimes caused problems because he still thought of himself as someone who should be on the field more often than not. Mike Nolan saw him as more of a last resort.
There was no denying Fuller’s passion for the game. Next to Lewis, he was the most verbal player in the locker room. Sometimes, when Lewis wasn’t yelling at his teammates prior to a game, Fuller took up the baton. This was one of those nights. “Now, everyone in this room knows that we took these guys for granted the last time,” he said, stalking around in a circle. “We better not do that tonight! We need to go out there and kick their butts on every single play! Every play! Everyone understand that?”
There was no response, so Fuller stalked over to Lewis, who was sitting in front of his locker, headphones on, listening to gospel music, as he often did before games. “Five-two, are you angry?” Fuller asked, addressing Lewis by his number (52) rather than name the way players often do. “I’m ready to hunt!” Lewis answered. “I’m ready to play football!”
“Y’all hear that!” Fuller barked. “Five-two is angry. We all might as well be angry!”
He was about to go on when Billick walked into the room. The Ravens were wearing black uniforms, a newly minted, third uniform that teams create nowadays as a marketing tool. “Our uniform color fits our mood,” Billick said. “We owe these guys in a big-time way. Let’s let them know that right away.”
Any hope of that happening disappeared on the opening kickoff. Wade Richey’s kick floated to Richard Alston at the 7. He started to his right, broke one tackle, then another, and then a third. While the message boards at either end of the stadium were still showing a picture of the Ravens’ “Kickoff Kid of the Game,” Alston was sprinting down the sideline for a 93-yard kickoff return. Fourteen seconds into the game, with many of the crowd still not in their seats, the Browns had a 7-0 lead. In a sense, Gary Zauner and his special teams players had seen this coming. On Saturday morning, sensing that a lot of people weren’t paying serious attention during a tape session, Adalius Thomas and Bart Scott had called a players-only meeting for the special teamers. Apparently, there weren’t a lot of people paying attention then, either. Alston’s touchdown was more the result of poor tackling than anything brilliant either he or his blockers had done.
There was a good deal of anger on the bench after the touchdown. No one was any happier when the offense went three-and-out. The second series didn’t start any better than the first. Boller tried to find Sanders on first down, but he was well covered and Boller had to throw the ball away with pressure coming. He took a hit, went down, and came up holding his shoulder. Behind the baby face, Boller is a physically tough player. He waved quickly to the bench to let trainers Bill Tessendorf and Mark Smith know he was okay. Kordell Stewart grabbed a ball and walked behind the bench to warm up, just in case. He had yet to take a snap all season. Two plays later, Boller completed a pass over the middle to Kevin Johnson and took a vicious hit from Kennard Lang after he released the ball. Lang was called for roughing the passer, and Boller popped back up to make sure everyone knew he was fine. The drive stalled soon after that, and Mr. Social Security came in and kicked a 44-yard field goal to make it 7-3.
In the meantime, Billick and Mike Nolan were conducting a lively dialogue on the headsets. Nolan and his coaches were using Sanders more and more each week. He had made a key interception against the Redskins and two more, including the one that turned the game a
round, against the Bills. He had played well against the Eagles. But with the passing game struggling and Sanders campaigning to play more on offense, Billick had given Cavanaugh the green light to use him. Each week there were a few more plays in the game plan for Sanders. “I just want to help,” Sanders said. “I feel good. I’m only going to get a certain number of snaps on defense, why not let me help on offense?”
Nolan’s answer to that was that he was too important to the defense to risk him on offense. Just as Gary Zauner was concerned with B. J. Sams breaking down because he was being given more chances on offense, Nolan worried that Sanders was more susceptible to injury being on the field more often, especially in a role he wasn’t that familiar with. Seeing Sanders on the field with the offense, Nolan reminded Billick of his concerns about Sanders’ being overused. “I heard you, Mike,” Billick said. “We’re keeping track of his snaps.”
“I’m just worried that he’s going to get hurt and we’re going to be short on defense again,” Nolan said.
“Mike, I’ll tell you what I tell my wife in these situations,” Billick said. “The first time you tell me something, I’m grateful for the reminder. The second time you bring it up, you’re nagging me—and I don’t like being nagged.”
Nolan dropped the subject.
With or without Sanders, the offense struggled. Late in the first quarter, the Ravens started a series on their own 37 and on first down Boller dropped back to pass and got hit by Ebenezer Ekuban, who had beaten Orlando Brown with an outside rush. Boller fumbled and Ekuban recovered at the Ravens’ 33. The defense stopped the Browns right there, but Phil Dawson came in and kicked a 50-yard field goal for a 10-3 lead. The boos—directed at the offense—were getting louder with each series.
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