On game day, there was purple throughout Adelphia Coliseum, as many fans found tickets to be exceedingly easy to obtain on the walkway leading into the stadium. I saw folks trying desperately to get even $10 for their $65 seats. I heard one older man, who quite frankly, looked like a street hobo with a change cup, saying “I want a ticket to the game and I’m not willing to pay one penny for it!” And I bet he got a ticket, too!
The perceived arrogance of the Ravens and their trash talking was on full display the week of the game.
Despite the Ravens’ eight-game winning streak, yet again, most major media outlets and their “experts” had picked against the Ravens – they were again a six-point underdog in Nashville – spawning a series of defensive comments from team members about their quiet confidence.
“Nobody is picking us to win,” was the common theme. “We’re going to prove to the world how good we are.”
The cocky quotes appeared generously throughout the media:
- “Eddie George should take his panties off,” from defensive lineman Lional Dalton
- “Eddie George folded like a baby the last time,” from cornerback Chris McAlister
- “Facing our defense is like having 11 billiard balls thrown at you. Eventually, you’re going to get hurt and lose your will. Imagine what it’s like to finish a run against us, and look up and see seven or eight purple jerseys standing over you,” from defensive end Rob Burnett
- “When we play our best game, Jim Brown couldn’t run on this defense,” again from Burnett
- “Ray is our leader, no question, but it’s not like we have any weaknesses,” again from McAlister
Before the game even began, their own words were fed back to them via the Titans and their video display boards at Adelphia Coliseum.
Just after the national anthem, while CBS was taking a commercial timeout prior to kickoff, the players began their traditional, final pre-game stretch. Those two minutes are usually spent in the bowl of the coliseum readying for battle with some pump-up music or highlights of the home team’s past conquests.
Instead, as the crowd quieted, the Titans ran a video of WWF wrestler The Rock wearing Titans’ colors and urging the crowd on. Once the video got the attention of the crowd, the Titans began showing clips titled, “A Special Message from Brian Billick and The Baltimore Ravens.”
The Titans had put together a nifty video montage of Ravens’ arrogance: a convenient edit of Billick’s post-game speech from eight weeks earlier (“I’ve got a cover of Sports Illustrated here. It says the Titans are the NFL’s best team. Maybe they are. But not today!”), the Ismail comments from the previous week (“Who is the only team to defeat the Tennessee Titans at Adelphia Coliseum?”) as well as Dilfer talking on the sideline about the relative ease of throwing on the Titans’ defense from the last game at Adelphia.
It was about as tasteless of a display as the Redskins’ public address butchery in Landover earlier in the year, but more was at stake here.
For the millions of people watching on television, they’ll never know how bad it looked on those video screens inside that stadium. But it was a bush-league display for the ages.
Simply put, the plan backfired.
Instead of firing up the Nashville crowd, it instead served as a rallying point for the Ravens, whose media arrogance had now clearly run upstream to fall on its head coach, Billick, who probably had more swagger than any of his players.
“I found it kind of amusing at first and I had a smile on my face,” Billick said weeks later. “It served our purpose because we knew what they were trying to do.”
Instead of angering up the fans, it angered up the Ravens’ players, who quickly displayed a bunker mentality in regard to a coach that they truly liked.
“It was almost like we had to have Billick’s back after they ran that shit,” defensive end Rob Burnett said. “We had to stick up for him.”
Billick went from mildly amused, to angered, to completely pissed off as the Titans showed the clip again and again throughout the game, always during television timeouts. It was a private show for the Titans fans.
“The league is constantly pushing us for access,” Billick said. “NFL Films wants in the locker room after games, they want to be at practices and I’ve been open with them and accommodating. But at some point, there needs to be a sense of privacy because this is an emotional game. I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Titans when I made those comments to my players after the first game. Believe me, we respect the Tennessee Titans.
“It was an emotional moment for this team after we won that game and the way we won that game and coming out of the ‘Dust Bowl’ the way we did. They were coming into our bedroom in a sense, and I didn’t like it being used as a public rallying point. It was disrespectful and embarrassing.”
The Titans organization formally apologized for the incident later in the week, but they needn’t apologize for their play on the field that day.
Watching these teams battle in the first quarter that day, you could clearly see that these were the two best teams in the NFL, especially on the defensive side of the ball.
