Billick, whose two-year regular-season record as a head coach after Halloween is 13-3, also communicated and interacted with his players. He accepted and respected their input.
“You can’t be afraid of the players,” Marvin Lewis said. “You’ve got to get along with the players. We are here because of the players, so you’ve got to be flexible. For the older guys, you’ve got to show them how it makes the team better. If you can’t prove that, you’re not going to have them.”
“Billick understands that his philosophy and the personnel and his plays, the way he conducts his practices and treats his players, all has to match up,” said quarterback Trent Dilfer. “The days of killing your players in practice just don’t work anymore because you don’t have depth in case they get hurt.”
The evidence is clearly in the results. Billick’s troops, under the watchful eyes of strength and conditioning coaches Jeff Friday and Chip Morton, as well as trainer Bill Tessendorf, rarely missed action.
During the final eight weeks of the regular season and heading into the postseason during the 2000 season, only safety Kim Herring was injured, and that was a nasty high ankle sprain that came on a freak play in the Wild Card game against Denver.
Upon arriving in Tampa on Monday, the players were stunned to see giant billboards all along their bus route between the airport, their headquarters hotel at the Hyatt Westshore, Raymond James Stadium and their practice facility at the University of South Florida, welcoming them with one simple message: “RAVENS!”
They were similar to the “BILLICK” billboards placed along I-83 in Baltimore the previous year, but featured the giant purple Ravens’ logo with the “B” and the menacing, side-view bird.
The brainchild of David Modell and his marketing staff, led by Dennis Mannion, the purchase of the billboards was optimistically set into motion three weeks earlier, when the team’s front office started to get mentally focused on making the trip to Tampa.
It was all part of the Billick-Modell bye week agenda.
Baltimore advertising executive Bob Leffler and the Leffler Agency carried out the duty earlier in the month, and the billboards drew more attention to one team than anything in the history of the Super Bowl, according to many league insiders. No one had ever attempted such a marketing scheme at the site of the game.
It made a colossal statement about the Baltimore Ravens and accomplished several ancillary goals:
- It was a class act. It said, “We Belong!” and “We want Tampa to know we’re here.”
- It gave identity to a franchise that previously was only known as the team that Art Modell stole from Cleveland. It was absolutely impossible for the media, visitors and locals not to see the billboards. They were gigantic, and they were everywhere.
- It was guerilla warfare against the big-market New York Giants and their players. Not only did everyone else see it, but the Giants’ team buses were forced to gaze at the Ravens’ “rah-rah” billboards daily, when their team buses escorted them all over Tampa as well. By Sunday, it must’ve felt psychologically like a road game for them.
- It took giant brass balls by Modell and the team to buy all of that media before the team had even beaten Tennessee three weeks earlier. Leffler, who also serves as the advertising agency for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had unbelievable contacts in the region and got the billboards for pennies on the dollar. There was even a contingency plan had the Ravens not made the big game.
- And for the NFL insiders and Park Avenue types in New York, who privately thought that the Ravens were a joke, it said that David Modell and the front office had their act together. They had a plan.
The Ravens arrived in the late afternoon on Monday and Billick immediately met with the national media, who were frothing at the mouth to get a piece of the head coach of the bad boy, arrogant AFC Champions.
Billick, always with a game plan of his own, beat them at their own game.
Taking the podium, just moments after getting off the plane, in the media tent at the Hyatt Westshore, Billick leveled the assemblage with an eight-minute tirade, assaulting not only faulty news judgment on coverage of the Ray Lewis incident, but doing everything short of inviting the media into the back alley for a bare-knuckled donnybrook prior to Super Bowl XXXV.
“We will not have the Ray Lewis case tried again here in Tampa,” a stone-faced Billick scolded the throng, “because you’re not qualified!”
After Billick called their type of journalism, “ambulance chasing,” a meek yet somehow bold media representative attempted to return the serve of the head coach.
“Who do you think you are telling the media how to do its job?” he said. Billick chirped back about how the assembled group was there to see him, because he was the head coach of the AFC Champs.
Two hours later, I spent more than an hour in Billick’s penthouse suite watching ESPN’s coverage of the Ray Lewis story in Tampa, awaiting my own opportunity to get some pre-game media work done for the week.
YOU CAN HEAR NESTOR’S CHAT WITH HEAD COACH BRIAN BILLICK FROM TAMPA IN JANUARY 2001 HERE:
Billick turned more beet-red with anger by the minute, cursing the television and pointing out every inaccuracy in Jeremy Schaap’s one-sided story of the family of the Atlanta victims who lived in Ohio. At one point, the brother of one of the victims stared blankly into the camera and said, “Ray Lewis killed my brother!”
For his part, Billick still swears that the tirade upon his arrival was not rehearsed or scripted in any way.
“It was not planned and I didn’t think about it until I got on the podium,” Billick now says. “I’m allowed an opinion. The media second-guesses everything and I thought I had a qualified opinion, just like them.”
Led by the self-righteous New York media, he became the poster boy for NFL coaching arrogance to the national media. The media headquarters was abuzz all week about what an asshole Brian Billick was.
“The real reporters, the national football guys who call me every week, and all of the local guys who cover the team on a daily basis know what I’m all about,” Billick said. “As a matter of fact, I think they were rather amused by the whole thing.”
He’s right. They were.
