Next Man Up

by John Feinstein

  Gary Zauner—who would later play an important role in bringing Solwold to Baltimore—was the Vikings’ special teams coach at the time. Late that night, when Stringer died, coaches made the rounds to players’ rooms to tell them what had happened. “I think it was about four-thirty in the morning,” Solwold said. “He knocked on the door and when I opened it, I knew before he said a word that Kory had died.”

  All of Solwold’s wanderings had produced appearances in twelve NFL games: eight with Dallas in 2001, four with Tampa Bay in 2002. But Solwold had a Super Bowl ring because he had been on Tampa Bay’s IR list when the Bucs won the Super Bowl in 2003. He also had started making plans for life after football. He had applied to graduate school for the fall of 2005. And yet football wasn’t completely out of his blood, either. Soon after being cut by the Ravens during the summer, he had been walking through a mall when he spotted a lacrosse net in the window of a sporting goods store.

  “The toughest thing about snapping is finding someone to snap to when you aren’t on a team,” he said. “The lacrosse net was six feet high and narrow. Perfect for me to snap into.”

  He had remained in the town house he had bought the previous spring a couple of miles from the Ravens’ facility, working out to stay in shape should the phone ring. It hadn’t until Friday, December 10, when George Kokinis called and asked if he could come to the Ravens’ new facility the next day. There was some doubt, he said, about whether Maese could snap on Sunday.

  Solwold drove over the next day and, after the team finished its Saturday walk-through, snapped to Dave Zastudil and Nick Murphy. In a bit of cruel irony, Murphy was helping to work out the player who would ultimately replace him on the roster. If Maese was healthy, Murphy would still be on the fifty-three for the Giants game as insurance for Zastudil. If Maese couldn’t go, the Ravens would need a spot on the roster since Maese would simply be inactive for the game, not placed on the injured list.

  With Kokinis and Gary Zauner watching, Solwold snapped for about thirty minutes. “It felt good,” he said. “I was glad I had kept working. I wasn’t nervous, I was doing something I knew I could do. When it was over, Coach Zauner said to me, ‘You’re it.’”

  There was an if, though. If Maese’s back felt okay on Sunday morning, he would dress. The Ravens signed Solwold to a contract on Saturday. He wouldn’t know until Sunday morning if he would play under that contract or just watch.

  Steve Bisciotti spent close to an hour with Chris McAlister on Thursday after practice. Rather than harp on McAlister’s performance in the Bengals game, Bisciotti talked about living up to one’s potential. “Why should it be automatic that Ray Lewis passes the leadership of this defense to Ed Reed?” he asked McAlister. “I’m not knocking Ed, believe me, but you should be right there with him. You have that kind of talent and, when you want to, the kind of personality that will make people want to follow you if you lead them.”

  He went on to tell him about the meeting Monday, the time spent on one subject—him—and the belief among the coaches that they were missing something because they hadn’t been able to reach him with any consistency. “I didn’t think it would help to beat him up again and tell him how frustrated everyone was with him,” he said later. “I wanted him to maybe think of me as the guy on his side since he seems to think the coaches are out to get him.”

  Bisciotti tried to talk to McAlister as one imperfect human being to another. He told him that he liked to party as much as the next guy. “I stop drinking twice a year for a month, just to prove to myself that I can do it. I’ve got friends who can’t do it, we all do. We’re going to have guys on this team the next few years who aren’t going to be perfect—like you and me. I need someone I can send them to, a player, not a coach, not an owner, a player who can say to them, ‘Look, I’ve been there. I made mistakes and here’s what I learned.’ Who am I going to send them to: Todd Heap? You can be that person, Chris. You’re a star and you should be a bigger star. Guys will look up to you and listen to you.’”

  Bisciotti wrapped up the meeting by saying to McAlister: “Seven years from now [the length of his new contract] if you have just been a good player, or even a very good player, I’ll feel as if I’ve failed and we’ve failed. And that would mean I invested a lot of money in you and made a mistake doing it. Here’s my goal: when you give your induction speech for the Hall of Fame, I want you to mention my name.”

  McAlister listened. Bisciotti couldn’t know it at the time, but he was preaching to the choir. “I had already decided by then that my partying days were over,” he said. “I haven’t seen the inside of a club since the night Corey and I talked. I understood Steve’s message, but to a large extent I’d already gotten it.”

  Billick’s message to the team wasn’t nearly as complicated. He reverted to Al Davis-speak: Just win, baby.

  “Don’t play down to their level,” he said on Saturday night. The Giants had lost five straight. “This is a struggling team, and we need to remind them why they’re a struggling team right from the start. Let’s not give them the idea that they have any chance to win this game.”

  Billick had decided prior to the game in New England to take a page from Belichick’s book and have the team introduced all at once—on the road. “We’ll let people boo all of us at the same time rather than individually,” he said.

  Kyle Boller and Anthony Wright had suggested to Matt Cavanaugh that they do the same thing at home. Cavanaugh said he would ask Billick about it. Billick shook his head. “Tell them maybe next year,” he said. “We need that jump-start from the individual introductions, especially today.”

  It was the offense’s turn to be introduced, and Billick thought that the last two players coming out of the tunnel, Heap and Jamal Lewis, would get the crowd going. On the surface, there was no reason to believe the Giants had any chance. But Billick had already been burned once by feeling too confident. He wasn’t going to let that happen again. He might have been tighter on this Sunday morning than on any Sunday all season. When Kevin Byrne brought him the Giants’ list of inactives, he smiled broadly when he saw that Mark Jones, a backup wide receiver, wasn’t up. “He’s got the kind of speed that can hurt us,” he said. “That helps.”

  The Giants helped right from the opening kickoff. Derrick Ward took the kick, got hit by T. J. Slaughter, and coughed up the ball. Ed Hartwell jumped on it at the New York 27. “Come on, capitalize!” Billick screamed as the offense headed onto the field. “Get seven!” Like everyone else, Billick was getting a little tired of Stover kicking field goals instead of extra points.

  It wasn’t easy, but they got the seven. They needed help from referee Bill Carollo, who ruled Jamal Lewis down by contact on what appeared to be a fumble at the 12-yard line. On the next play, Boller found Clarence Moore in the back of the end zone for a 6-0 lead. The snapper on the extra point was Mike Solwold. Joe Maese’s back had felt tight in the morning, and taking no chances, Billick and Zauner had activated Solwold. His snap was perfect, 7-0.

  From there, they built the margin. Eli Manning, whom the Giants had ransomed a large chunk of their future to acquire on draft day in April, was making his fourth NFL start. He had no chance against the Ravens defense, and he got almost no help from the rest of his offense. Tiki Barber, the talented but occasionally stone-fingered running back, fumbled on the Giants’ second possession, leading to a Stover field goal. A long drive by the offense in the second quarter, climaxed by Heap’s first touchdown catch of the season, made it 17-0. The game would have been a complete rout if Boller hadn’t been sacked on a blitz by Reggie Torbor and fumbled. Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora scooped the ball up and raced 50 yards for a touchdown. The Ravens responded to that momentary glitch with ten more points before halftime: another Boller-to-Moore pass and a Stover field goal set up by an Ed Reed interception of Manning in the final seconds. It was 27-7 at the break. The Giants had 39 total yards in offense and four turnovers. Manning had completed five passes: three to his team
mates; two to the Ravens.

  No one was feeling overconfident in the locker room after what had happened seven days earlier. Billick was concerned because Adalius Thomas and Terrell Suggs had spent time jawing with some of the Giants near the end of the half. “Don’t let them draw you into anything,” he said. “They’re losers—don’t get sucked in by them.” He reminded them that the job wasn’t done. The more telling message came from Deion Sanders, who walked from one defensive player to another, saying quietly, “It’s the same situation as last week. Let’s make sure we finish this time.”

  They finished. Stover kicked another field goal and Boller threw another touchdown pass to Heap in the third quarter to make it 37-7. Giants coach Tom Coughlin finally got poor Manning out midway through the fourth quarter, and Kurt Warner produced a consolation touchdown with fifteen seconds left to make the final score 37-14. It was an easy, dominating victory, one that they absolutely had to have. If Manning ever became a star quarterback in the league, he would look back on this game as his low point: he had completed 4 of 18 passes for a total of 27 yards. By contrast, Boller had been superb, throwing four touchdown passes while completing 18 of 34 for 219 yards. The next night he would tell Fassel how badly he felt when he blew a read in the fourth quarter and threw the ball to the wrong receiver, missing a chance for a fifth touchdown pass.

  “Look at how far you’ve come in a few weeks,” Fassel told him. “You’ve gone from boos to cheers, and you’ve gone from talking about how bad your luck was on two of the interceptions against the Redskins to getting mad at yourself for not getting a fifth touchdown pass.”

  Boller was named the offensive player of the week in the NFC. Even so, there was a hollowness to the victory. They had beaten up on a very bad team with an overwhelmed rookie quarterback. The victory made them 8-5 and kept them tied with Denver, which had beaten the equally pathetic Dolphins, for the second wild-card spot. But it didn’t change what was ahead the next two weeks: trips to Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. Billick may have summed up the feeling best during the Monday personnel meeting: “I feel a little like the guy who jumps off the thirty-story building and as he passes each floor on the way down, says, ‘So far so good.’”

  26

  Almost Perfect

  MIKE SOLWOLD’S COMEBACK with the Ravens lasted one day. On Monday afternoon, convinced Joe Maese would be ready to go the following Sunday in Indianapolis, the team cut him again.

  He left with a smile on his face. “Hey, it was fun while it lasted,” he said. “I knew going in, it was probably a one-day deal. I also know that the way this league works, I could be back on Wednesday.”

  In truth, that wasn’t likely. Gary Zauner had found a long snapper who had recently been cut from the Jets’ practice squad and could also help as a backup offensive lineman. The plan was to sign him for the practice squad. Still, Solwold had no regrets.

  “Look, I know how this works,” he said. “It’s important to me that I had a good day because that may be my last memory of football. On our last punt, [Giants backup running back] Ron Dayne said to me, ‘They told us to kill you on every play so you’d make a mistake and you didn’t.’ That made me feel good. I picked up a nice check [just under $27,000] for one day of work that wasn’t work. I’m glad I showed people that I can still do this in case someone is looking for someone going into next year. I’ve got options.”

  He smiled and admitted the truth. “I’ve played football for seventeen years, since I was ten years old. Always loved it. I can retire and be fine with it. But I’d like to play for a little while longer.”

  In that sense, he was no different from anyone else.

  Those who were not yet retired knew now that the next two weeks would almost undoubtedly decide the fate of their season. They could sit and do all the mathematical calculations they wanted to, but it was always going to come out the same: if they didn’t beat Indianapolis or Pittsburgh, the regular-season finale at home against the Dolphins would almost certainly be the season finale, too. That wasn’t the plan Billick had laid out for them in June or at any time since then.

  “Get me rewrite,” Phil Savage said, trying to find some humor in it all. “We’ve gone off script.”

  Savage was just one Raven employee whose name was being bandied about during the week. On Monday the Cleveland Browns had made official what had been rumored for weeks: Butch Davis was out as coach/

  general manager/god of all football operations. The Browns hadn’t won since mid-October and, at 3-10, were headed for their worst season since they came into the league in 1999. Davis, citing exhaustion, resigned on Monday. By that evening Savage’s name was being mentioned as the next general manager in Cleveland, and people were speculating that Mike Nolan might go along with him as coach.

  “I lived in Cleveland once,” Savage said when the team’s young scouts Daniel Jeremiah, Chisom Opara, and Jeremiah Washburn teased him about the job over lunch. “I’m not sure I want to live there again.”

  Everyone knew that was a Nixonian nondenial denial, especially since Savage was smiling broadly when he said it.

  Matt Cavanaugh wasn’t denying anything. His name had popped up in the Pittsburgh newspapers in connection with the opening at his alma mater, created when Walt Harris decided to take the Stanford job. Dave Wannstedt, the former Miami Dolphins coach, like Cavanaugh a Pitt alum and Cavanaugh’s onetime boss in Chicago, had been the first person mentioned, but Wannstedt had withdrawn from consideration. “I’d love the job,” Cavanaugh said. “I’d like to be a head coach; it would be a place I know and I’m comfortable with.” He paused and smiled. “And it would make things a lot easier for everyone around here.”

  Brian Billick knew that. Even though the team had just had its best offensive day of the season, everyone knew it was something of a mirage because of how awful the Giants were. He knew, especially after his preliminary meetings on the future with Steve Bisciotti, Dick Cass, and Ozzie Newsome, that he wasn’t going to be able to rescue Cavanaugh again. In fact, Cavanaugh was pretty certain he didn’t want to be rescued. “Sometimes you have to look in the mirror and say, ‘It’s time to move on,’” he said. “I know lightning might strike and we might explode the next few weeks, but that isn’t likely. They took a lot of heat for keeping me last year. They’d take a lot more if they kept me again this year. There are times in life when change is the best thing for everybody. I don’t lie awake at night, worrying about it, because I know I can coach and there will be a job out there for me. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aware of the pressure Brian’s under or that I didn’t hear what people say. Hell, I’m frustrated we haven’t scored more points, too. There’s no doubt in my mind it would be better for everyone if this worked out.”

  Pittsburgh athletic director Jeff Long had contacted Cavanaugh about getting together and had agreed to fly to Indianapolis on Saturday to meet with him. Billick told Cavanaugh that if he got the job and wanted to get started right away, he was welcome to go. He would take over play calling for the rest of the season if necessary. Billick wasn’t at all concerned that the Pitt possibility would distract Cavanaugh. “Someone else maybe,” he said. “Not Matt.”

  This was not a week when any distractions could be tolerated. Even though the Steelers, Patriots, and Eagles were all 12-1, there were some in the league who believed the Colts, at 10-3, might be playing the best football at that moment. Peyton Manning was a far cry from his little brother. He was now in his seventh year in the league and had shared the MVP award a year ago with Tennessee quarterback Steve McNair. He appeared to be a lock to win the award outright in 2004 because he was breaking records constantly, well on his way to setting an all-time record for touchdown passes in a season. He had a plethora of receivers to throw to, led by the all-world Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, and ex-Raven Brandon Stokely. Since the Colts operated out of a no-huddle offense, it was tougher to get defensive personnel on and off the field. The no-huddle was something of a farce: it took Mann
ing just as long to call the play at the line as it would have in the huddle, but it made it tougher for teams to figure out what formation the Colts were in because they appeared to be in constant motion while Manning was calling signals.

  Billick was confident the defense could handle all the Colts would throw at it. “We react well to games like this,” he said. “Plus, I think Mike [Nolan] has some ideas that will give them trouble.”

  They were about as healthy as an NFL team could hope to be in mid-December. Almost everyone in the building was feeling some kind of pain—that’s the nature of an NFL season. Even those who don’t actually have injuries are playing hurt by the fourteenth game. Deion Sanders had played against the Giants, but his foot still hurt enough that he was planning to take a shot before the Colts game. Billick had gotten Jamal Lewis in for eight carries, then took him out when the game became a rout, to save him for the Colts. Gary Baxter now had a shoulder injury to match the one Chris McAlister was still nursing. “There’s no one in the secondary who doesn’t have something hurting,” Nolan reported during the Monday meeting.

  There was also the issue of the artificial turf inside the RCA Dome. With Veterans Stadium’s turf gone, the RCA Dome was now officially considered by players to have the worst playing surface in the league. It was hard on young, healthy legs, much less old, injured legs. They would have to watch everyone, but Sanders and Lewis in particular, very closely as the night wore on. And it would be night: this was the third and last ESPN Sunday night game on the Ravens’ schedule. The 8:30 kickoff meant the team would get home between three and four o’clock in the morning. They would get off the plane either exhausted and thrilled or exhausted and desperate. The only thing certain was the exhausted part.