Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  He paused to see if anyone wanted to speak up. No one did. He plowed on. “Coach, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t understand why we’re using Deion on offense or on special teams. We need him on defense. Look at last night. When Deion was in the game, the Browns were one-for-six on third downs. After he got hurt, they were four-for-seven.”

  Billick knew that the Deion part of Singletary’s speech came from Nolan. Or perhaps Nolan’s comments the night before had come from Singletary. The two men were that close. He also knew that neither man was trying to nag, that they had genuine concerns. “I understand where you’re coming from, Mike,” he said. “Those are decisions I have to make.”

  Zauner brought up again the uncertainty his players felt. “Gary, that’s the way the league is,” Billick said. “We’ve got fifty-three on the roster; only forty-five can dress. I think it’s a silly rule, but that’s the rule.”

  Zauner, never one to back down, brought up Corey Fuller. What good, he wondered, was a backup cornerback who didn’t play at all on special teams?

  Mike Nolan had been squirming in his seat for a while. Clearly, he didn’t want to say anything. But Zauner’s special team complaints made it impossible for him not to. “Guys, I really don’t want to say anything that’s going to create divisions in here,” he said, starting slowly. “I already spoke up once this season when I shouldn’t have, and I know I was wrong for doing it. But here’s a fact: we’ve got more guys on this team who are strictly special teams players than anyone in the league: We’ve got Stover, Richey, Maese, Zastudil, Morrow, and Sams. Only one of them [Sams] will ever take a snap on offense or defense. I think that makes it tougher on the offense and on the defense.”

  Cavanaugh jumped in behind Nolan: “I don’t see what the big deal is about guys being up or not being up,” he said. “When did players get so sensitive? Last week KJ [Kevin Johnson] came to me about playing time. We have to play the guys who give us the best chance to win. Geez, when I played, I was down all the time. Last I looked, guys still get paid, don’t they? Brian, personally, I think you do a damn good job putting the best forty-five in uniform every week.”

  Billick knew it was time to break up the meeting. He didn’t want it to degenerate into the offense and defense vs. the special teams, and that’s where it was headed. Most Monday meetings lasted forty-five minutes. They were closing in on two hours. “I think you guys are right that I should address some of this with the team on Wednesday,” he said. “I’ll do that. We’ll have to make some decisions on the roster next week. Jim [Colletto], I may need one of your guys to go. Gary, it might have to be Wade Richey.”

  They broke up. The tensions within the room and the team had certainly been addressed. Whether they had been resolved was another question entirely.

  One person Billick had been right to be concerned about was Kyle Boller. He hadn’t played poorly against the Browns (17-of-30 for 142 yards, no interceptions), but the lost fumble early and the offense’s continuing struggle to score touchdowns—its only one had come after the poor punt put the ball on the Browns’ 9-yard line—had given the fans more reason to boo Boller, who had become their favorite target.

  On Monday night, before going to what had now become their weekly dinner, Boller and Jim Fassel appeared together on a local radio show. The host took some calls. Almost always when a player or coach appears on this kind of show, the calls range from complimentary to out-and-out fawning. Part of this is the intimidation factor and part of this is careful call screening. One caller apparently told the screener that he wanted to tell Fassel how lucky he thought the Ravens were to have him. He kept his word. Then, after he had finished complimenting Fassel, he said, “As for you, Kyle, I just don’t understand why you’re still here or why you still have a job. You were a loser when you quarterbacked Cal, and the only reason you aren’t an out-and-out loser right now is because we have such a great defense. The sooner we get another quarterback, the better off we’ll be.”

  Boller stayed cool. “Well, pal, all I can tell you is I’m doing the very best I can and I’m going to continue to do the best I can as long as I’m here,” he said.

  An hour later, sitting at Ruth’s Chris, Boller shook his head. “There is no reason to let it bother me,” he said. “Guys like that don’t understand what’s going on. I know that. But it really does get old. I hear the boos, I know what people are saying. I know that guy isn’t alone. I know when a team does well, the quarterback gets too much credit. But there are times when he gets too much blame. I feel like I’m getting better, but a lot of times people don’t understand why plays turn out the way they do.”

  “You are getting better,” Fassel said. “A lot better. I know that, and you know that.”

  As he frequently did when talking to Boller, Fassel launched into stories about John Elway and Phil Simms. “When I first got to Denver [in 1993], John was nervous as could be,” he said. “Dan Reeves had just been fired, and most people thought it was because of John. He said to me, ‘If we don’t do well, everyone in town is going to say, “They should have gotten rid of Elway, not Reeves.”’ Remember, this was after he’d already been in, I think, three Super Bowls. He’d had the Drive. But he was still nervous, still insecure. That’s the nature of playing quarterback. Ten years from now, when you’re a big star in this league, you’ll still have nights when you feel insecure.”

  Boller nodded. These sessions were good for him because he felt he could tell Fassel things he didn’t tell anyone else. He had gone that day for acupuncture treatment for his back and neck, both of which had been sore for several weeks. He had kept the injuries quiet because he knew he could play with the pain but also because he didn’t want to sound as if he were making excuses. Fassel asked about the acupuncture.

  “It was kind of weird,” Boller said. “But it felt pretty good. I know it won’t make me feel worse, and it might make me feel better.”

  Fassel took a sip of wine and said, okay, let me ask you a few questions. “What did you do well last night?”

  Boller thought about it. “I didn’t make any mistakes that hurt us after the fumble,” he said.

  “Fumble wasn’t your fault, you never saw the guy,” Fassel interjected.

  Boller nodded. “I kept us on the field, we converted third downs well. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “I just wish Matt would call more of the plays I’m really good at,” he said. “There are some routes we worked on all preseason, all through camp, that I feel confident throwing, and it seems like we’ve gone away from those.”

  “Tell him,” Fassel said. “Go in there tomorrow before they put together the game plan and tell him. Don’t wait until Wednesday when it’s done; then, it’s too late. You’re right and I’ll bet he’ll agree you’re right. Tell him the plays you want called. If I go in there and do it, that accomplishes nothing; then, I’m meddling. But if you go in and tell him this is what’s best for you, he’ll do it. I guarantee it. The job of a coordinator is to let his quarterback lead, and one of the ways you do that is to make calls he feels confident about.”

  Boller told Fassel about Cavanaugh’s having him run the video meeting on Saturday nights. Fassel smiled. “That’s smart coaching,” he said. “That’s good for you and good for the team.”

  He paused. “Now, tell me where you need to improve.”

  Boller thought a moment. “I’m still throwing the ball away sometimes too quickly,” he said. “I don’t want to force things, but maybe I’ve been a little gun-shy because I don’t want turnovers, like in the Washington game. I need to know when to throw it away, when to try to make something happen.”

  “Which may be the hardest thing for any quarterback to learn,” Fassel said. “Look at [Brett] Favre. He still forces things. Makes some of the worst throws you’ve ever seen.”

  “Yeah, but he’s Brett Favre,” Boller said. “He knows he’ll make up for it.”

  “He didn’t make up for it in Philadelphia las
t year,” Fassel said, a reference to Favre’s backbreaking interception in overtime of the Packers’ playoff loss to the Eagles.

  “Can you imagine the reaction,” Boller said with a smile, “if I ever made a play like that?”

  Fassel laughed. “Ten years from now, you’ll make a play like that, and you know what? You’ll come back the next year and be a better player. The best thing you’ve got going, Kyle, is your mind. You’re going to keep getting better. Heck, you’ve got most things figured out now. You don’t even need me.”

  Boller shook his head and didn’t crack even a small grin when he answered: “Oh yes, I do.”

  The next morning Matt Cavanaugh was surprised when Boller walked in and asked if he had a minute. Players rarely venture onto the second floor except when someone tells them they’re needed up there. Most agree there is almost never a good reason to venture upstairs. Now, on the players’ day off, Boller was standing in Cavanaugh’s doorway.

  “Absolutely,” Cavanaugh said, waving him in.

  Boller told Cavanaugh that he thought there were some pass routes he felt good about throwing that hadn’t been used enough in the offense. Cavanaugh asked him to tell him more. They talked for a solid thirty minutes. Boller even went to the board and drew up some of the plays he thought would work well in Sunday’s game in the Meadowlands against the Jets. Cavanaugh was delighted. “The more input I get from Kyle, the better,” he said. “Eventually, he needs to feel as if this is his offense. It doesn’t matter how good J.O. is or Jamal or Todd. If he doesn’t walk into the huddle feeling like it’s his offense, it won’t be and he won’t be successful. That’s one reason why I wanted him to be the guy doing the talking on Saturday nights. The guys don’t need to hear my voice, they need to hear his. This was another step.”

  By the time he left Cavanaugh’s office, Boller was excited about the game plan. “If we run the stuff we talked about, it’ll be great,” he said. “Matt told me we should talk that way every week.”

  On Wednesday, Billick followed through on his promise to the coaches to address the issue of uncertainty with the players. He told them not to take it personally if they were down for a week, that often those decisions were predicated on factors that had nothing to do with them but with injuries and with the opponent. “If we didn’t like you and respect you as players, you wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Everyone can’t play every week, that’s an unfortunate fact of life in this league. But you all know that before the season’s over every person on the fifty-three-man roster is going to play a role, so you have to stay ready because you don’t know when that time will come.”

  Next to the Eagles, the Jets were the best team the Ravens had played since Pittsburgh, and when they had played the Steelers no one, including the Steelers, had known how good they or Ben Roethlisberger were going to be. The Jets were 6-2 but were coming off a frustrating loss at Buffalo. What’s more, their starting quarterback, Chad Pennington, had gotten hurt in the Bills game, so Quincy Carter, the onetime Cowboys quarterback cut suddenly in preseason by Bill Parcells amid rumors of a positive drug test, would start.

  For the first time all season, the weather on game day would be truly cold. The wind was whipping when the Ravens arrived at their hotel on Saturday night, with the promise of a similar day on Sunday. Billick’s emphasis in that night’s meeting was on his belief that the Ravens would win almost all of the one-on-one matchups in the game. “They’re about misdirection because, one-on-one, they can’t stand in with us,” he said. “We get them to stand in with us and they beat us, we’ll just shake their hands. But I don’t think that will happen.”

  Both the Ravens and Jets had agreed to allow NFL Films to mike key players and the coaches during the game. There would be no play-by-play and no narration. The story of the game would be told through the sounds picked up by the microphones. Since the tape would be edited into a one-hour film, no one had to worry about profanity or anything embarrassing making it onto the air. The fact that the two teams and the two coaching staffs respected each other and had no serious issues made it easier for Billick and Jets coach Herman Edwards to agree to the project—although it probably made it less sexy than if Billick and the Steelers’ Bill Cowher had agreed to be miked for a game against each other.

  The first thing the players noticed, even those who walked onto the field at 10 A.M.—three hours before kickoff—was the wind. There is no place in football like giants stadium during the second half of the season. Even on a relatively mild day, the wind swirls through the place, usually a cold wind. The game-time temperature was a relatively balmly forty-eight degrees, but on the Ravens’ side of the field, where there was no sun at all, it felt considerably colder than that. Throughout the game, the temperature would drop and the wind would pick up.

  The opening kickoff provided a scare—and a warning. B. J. Sams fielded the kick at the 6-yard line and returned to the 32. But he fumbled as he was hit, the ball flying loose. Fortunately, Bart scott alertly jumped on it. Sams came to the sideline looking spooked. Since his touchdown returns against Kansas City and Washington, he had become a marked man for opponents’ special teams and hadn’t looked quite as confident.

  The offense started the game with the kind of drive coaches dream about. Boller converted two third downs right away, including a third-and-16 on which he threw underneath to Musa Smith—back on the active Roster, with Wade Richey down for the week—for a 25-yard pickup. By the time they reached the Jets’ 8 with a first-and-goal after a crisp Boller-to-Moore completion, they had held on to the ball for almost nine minutes. Three plays later, they faced fourth-and-goal from the 1 after Boller had gained 4 yards from the 5 on a quarterback draw, a play Cavanaugh hadn’t called for him all season. Billick decided to go for the touchdown for several reasons: to hold the ball for so long and only come away with three points would be deflating, he wanted to show confidence in Jamal Lewis and the offensive line, and he figured that even if the Jets held, his defense would force the Jets to punt a few plays later from inside the 10-yard line.

  All very logical and reasoned. Football, of course, is not a game of logic or reason. Lewis tried to run left, not straight ahead but wide, a play call that never would have been made if Ogden had been playing left tackle instead of Ethan Brooks. John Abraham, the Jets’ occasionally brilliant, oft-injured defensive end, knifed in and got him down at the 1 as the stadium exploded with the first real noise of the day. The Ravens Had held the ball for fifteen plays and 9:44 and come away empty. Still, If the defense could hold and they got the ball back in good field position . . .

  The defense didn’t hold. On third-and-1 from the 10-yard line, Carter found his tight end, Chris Baker, across the middle for a key 19-yard pickup, to the 29. The Jets moved the ball almost to midfield before the defense finally forced a punt. Toby Gowin sailed the ball to Sams on the 12-yard line. Sams hadn’t dropped a kick all year. He had fumbled a couple of times after being hit the way he had been hit on the opening kickoff, but he hadn’t dropped a ball yet. Now, in the Giants Stadium winds, he called for a fair catch—and dropped the ball. The Jets’ Kenyatta wright fell on it. Four carries by star running back Curtis Martin Later, the jets were in the end zone and led, 7-0. To make matters worse, chris mcalister wobbled off the field, clutching his shoulder. He had taken a hit to the shoulder in the Buffalo game—but not one serious enough to get him off the field. This was serious. It was a stinger, but it was a bad one, bad enough that he couldn’t stand up straight. Corey fuller had to take his place.

  Later, when they watched the nfl films’ tape of the game, the Ravens’ coaches would hear the Jets’ coaches screaming at Quincy Carter and the offense to attack Fuller the minute they saw him in the game. Watching helplessly from the sideline and without having the benefit of hearing the tape, Deion Sanders knew they were going to do that. When the defense went onto the field with Fuller in McAlister’s place, he called Ed Reed over. “You know you’re going to have to shade to Corey’s sid
e,” he said. “They’re going to go right at him.”

  What could have been a great start had now become a terrible start. It got worse. After the teams traded punts, Boller was sacked twice on the offense’s third series and Zastudil had to punt from the Ravens’ 13. He floated a gorgeous punt that Santana Moss fielded at his own 28. Moss, a dangerous returner, got to the outside and slithered his way to the Ravens’ 40. As it turned out, the ball came back because of a holding penalty. But Moss’s run had forced Zastudil to try to get into position to make a tackle. As he ran down the field in the direction of the play, Zastudil got blindsided—he never saw the hit—and came off the field doubled over in pain, holding his left arm limply at his side. He went straight to the locker room, accompanied by Leigh Ann Curl. He had a severe shoulder separation. There was some talk among the players that perhaps Curl could give him a shot so he could play, but Curl quickly ruled that out. He was done for the day.

  Which left the Ravens with quite a problem. Zauner, always prepared, had experimented a couple of times during camp with backup punters. The two candidates were Boller and Kordell Stewart, both of whom had punted in high school, as many quarterbacks do. Boller—perhaps because it had only been six years since he had punted, as opposed to sixteen for Stewart—had punted better when Zauner watched.

  “Who’s our backup punter?” Billick asked Zauner when he saw the pain on Zastudil’s face.

  “The best one is Boller,” Zauner said.

  “Who’s the next-best one.”

  “Kordell.”

  “Tell him to get ready.”

  Billick wasn’t about to risk his starting quarterback, knowing that the Jets were likely to put on an all-out rush when they saw a backup punter in the game. Zauner went to tell Stewart to warm up his leg.