The Ravens went 8-8 in 1999, their first season under Brian Billick, which was good news. The team was obviously getting better and the defense was starting to realize its potential, finishing the season as the league’s No. 2 unit.
The better news was that the Atlanta Falcons, in defense of their NFC crown, had faltered. The team lost Super Bowl quarterback Chris Chandler in the first game of the season and star running back Jamal Anderson in the first quarter of their second game of the season, a 24-7 loss to the Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football. The team would start the season 0-4 and be 3-11 on Christmas morning before winning its final two games to finish 5-11.
The trade that Ozzie Newsome had solely orchestrated eights months earlier brought the Ravens the bounty of a No. 5 overall selection in the April 2000 draft.
The frustration that Billick and Savage had suffered through would now bear fruit. Delayed gratification would send Savage and his scouting staff out to the combines and into the video room looking for a difference maker for the Ravens. The Ravens held the fifth and 15th picks of the first round.
The 2000 Draft would be the most important and difficult draft yet for the Ravens because they knew they were close to becoming a playoff team.
The mandate throughout the organization was to get some skill position weapons to help augment quarterback Tony Banks, who had stepped up as the team’s starting quarterback at the end of the 1999 season.
The group of wide receivers and running backs on the board was extremely deep and complex.
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The wide receivers:
- Peter Warrick, Florida State – an unbelievably talented speedster who played for the national champions but had his reputation tarnished in a “free gifts” scandal in Tallahassee midway through his final season. He was a running back once he caught the ball, and every time he touched the ball he was a threat to go all the way. He was too special to fall to No. 5. The Ravens would have to deal up and give away picks to get him.
- Plaxico Burress, Michigan State – a large receiver in the Randy Moss mold, about whom no one in East Lansing had anything good to say about in the work ethic department. He was mercurial at best, but his play in the Citrus Bowl vs. Florida (13 catches for 185 yards and three TDs) made him a sure-fire lottery pick. His upside was tremendous if you could coax it out of him.
- Travis Taylor, Florida – A run-after-the-catch guy who froze defenders with precise routes in an offense that loved to throw the football. Matched Burress in the Citrus Bowl (11 catches for 156 yards and three TDs) and was the game’s MVP. He was the MVP of the Orange Bowl as a sophomore the previous year. Size was above average at 6-1, 200 pounds and he was smart, articulate and married, which showed some maturity and stability.
- Sylvester Morris, Jackson State – Despite being a small-school guy, the Ravens liked him enough to consider him at 15. He was enormous at 6-3 and was smooth and athletic.
The running backs:
- Jamal Lewis, Tennessee – A big load at 5-11 and 231 pounds who had injury problems at Knoxville in his sophomore year and was lightly used during his junior (and final) season. Extremely fast for a guy of his size and ran with a chip on his shoulder.
- Thomas Jones, Virginia – A wonderful character guy who piled up yardage at Charlottesville. He was smallish in size at 5-9 and 205 but ran hard and looked like a solid selection. But he wasn’t going to run over people.
- Shaun Alexander, Alabama – Obviously he got the most attention. He was a ‘Bama guy! The brass was not impressed with his heart and toughness. He also didn’t have breakaway speed. A nice player, but with the 5 and 15, the Ravens felt they could do better. They could deal back and still get him.
- Ron Dayne, Wisconsin – Everyone had doubts about his ability to hit holes quickly enough or turn corners in the NFL. While winning the Heisman in Madison, he ran over smaller defenders. He couldn’t catch the ball at all and was thought to be one-dimensional and some even doubted that dimension at the next level.
There were eight prime candidates and the Ravens had two picks in the Top 15. With defensive end Courtney Brown, linebacker LaVar Arrington, tackle Chris Samuels and defensive tackle Corey Simon going near the top of the board, the guys in purple were clearly going to fill their needs on Draft Day.
The question was what players and in what order.
Savage got his first look at Jamal Lewis on television in the summer of 1999. There was a news feature on his rehab assignment from a knee injury suffered midway through his sophomore year against Auburn.
“There he was running through a sand pit and working his butt off during two-a-days,” Savage said. “You always like to see a guy working hard, especially after an injury. He looked like Jim Brown kicking sand up all over the place.”
Savage broke out the tapes from before the injury and immediately had Lewis in his early Top 6. On Oct. 23, 1999, Savage witnessed Lewis terrorize his beloved Crimson Tide in person in Tuscaloosa, rushing for 117 yards on 23 carries and basically slamming the door by running out the clock in a 21-7 Vols’ win.
8“He was an absolute stud mule,” Savage said. “The kind of fourth-quarter runner you have to have in the NFL. Everyone in Knoxville was screaming about Travis Henry (the other Vols running back) and I thought they were crazy.”
Once Lewis got fed up with his treatment in Knoxville and declared for the draft, Savage dispatched scout T.J. McCreight to work Lewis out. Prior to McCreight’s visit, Savage had rated him as 7.0 on his board (a Top 5 guy) and Terry McDonough, another scout, had him as a whopping 7.5, which would have made him the highest-rated player in the draft.
McCreight called Savage from his cell phone as Lewis crossed the finish line during his 40 time. “Lewis just ran a 4.38!” McCreight screamed into his phone.
The repaired knee had checked out fine, and Lewis also jumped through the roof, just for good measure.
“Every one of us loved him,” Savage said. “It was kind of scary. We are all going to be very right or all very wrong. We had never had such a strong, positive consensus on a player.”
Around the league, Lewis was an enigma. He was used sparingly by a Tennessee team in 1999 that had won a national championship without him in 1998, he had suffered a major injury and he was a quiet guy. Half the teams in the league thought he would be a bust and most teams were not clamoring to draft him.
Three days before the draft, on April 12, 2000, the Ravens made a major move to strengthen their chances to get the two players they wanted – Lewis and Travis Taylor. They knew they would get either at the 5 but sitting until 15 meant they would surely lose the other. Denver was sitting on the No. 10 and wanted extra picks to supplement their team, which had won a pair of Super Bowls but was getting ravaged by free agency and the aging process. The fact that they had finished 6-10 and even had a No. 10 was a wake-up call for coach Mike Shanahan and owner Pat Bowlen.
8Ozzie Newsome orchestrated a trade that would surrender the Ravens’ second-rounder, a No. 45 overall, along with the 15 to move up five spots. It would ensure that they would get their guys – Lewis and Taylor – and if confidence and bravado were to strike on Draft Day, they could always inquire about backing up again with another trade. It was an insurance policy more than anything.
Draft week got more complicated when the Ravens lost starting defensive tackle Larry Webster to a drug-related suspension – he was a third-time offender – and the team began to explore the possibility of selecting Corey Simon with the fifth pick.
The Ravens were desperately trying to come to terms with veteran free agent Sam Adams to replace Webster and had him into the team’s complex in Owings Mills on Friday, April 14 – the day before the draft – trying to get the deal done, so they could move ahead with their plan to draft for a running back and a wide receiver. Without a defensive tackle in the fold, the strategy would change.
Adams, with a standing, acceptable offer waiting in Green Bay, grew frustrated in the early morning of Draft Day Saturday, and arose early headed to the airport to fly to Green Bay.
Billick arrived the morning of the draft, thinking the team had at least appeased and stashed Adams, to find that they didn’t know what hotel he was staying in, what his cell phone number was or how to contact his agent. This was Draft Day, for crying out loud.
Billick put out an APB and put on his hard hat.
“The recruiter in me from my college days started coming out,” Billick said. “I tracked him down on his cell phone and he had checked in to get on a plane at BWI Airport. He was literally at the gate and I had to keep him from catching that plane to Green Bay.”
8Adams, who was also recruited hard by former teammate Michael McCrary, was already relatively salty because it was mid-April and he was a former first-round pick in Seattle blowing in the wind without a deal. He wound up not getting anyone to pay anywhere near what he thought he would get. Interest was surprisingly light, until a few days before the draft from Green Bay and Baltimore.
The Ravens had a dual plan. Get Adams back to Owings Mills and sign him while keeping Green Bay from knowing what was going on so they could potentially bluff a trade back and get some more picks. With Adams in the fold, they knew they didn’t need Simon, but no one else knew. If Simon was on the board at No. 5 – and they knew he would be with Brown, Arrington, Samuels and Warrick all but written in blood going to their respective homes at the top of the board – they could coax back a second-rounder and get both of their guys in Lewis and Taylor by swapping with the Eagles or someone else who wanted to swipe him.
Adams arrived back in Owings Mills and when he didn’t land in Green Bay later in the morning, the cover was blown. “I didn’t want to play on the frozen tundra,” Adams would later tell me on WNST-AM in October at The Barn. “I missed five or six flights trying to get the deal done because this is where I wanted to be. We have a great chance to go to the Super Bowl here and we’re gonna get it done.”
Win the Super Bowl they would do, but as for the Ravens’ leverage that day – ironically over the Eagles, who had bluffed them two years earlier, and had the No. 6 and wanted Simon badly – it had evaporated when the big man didn’t land later that morning.
The only other player of any note on the Ravens’ board was tight end Bubba Franks, who wound up in Green Bay at No. 14. Billick had talked of a two tight-end set with Franks and newly acquired Shannon Sharpe, but it never materialized when the final game plan was enacted.
When the clock started ticking, the Ravens stuck with their plan to get their main men. Even though they could have bumped back and probably gotten Lewis and Taylor, there were no teams willing to trade up and give away picks. The board went entirely as it was scripted. Once Lewis was selected, the plan fell into place. Simon went to Philly, Jones was taken by Arizona, Burress went to to Pittsburgh and Chicago drafted linebacker Brian Urlacher.
Taylor was an easy pick at No. 10 and the Ravens had a long wait until pick No. 75 late into the evening.
8By surrendering the 45 to Denver to move up – ultimately it made Taylor a Raven instead of Sylvester Morris – the team had killed any hope to get its second-round surprise, the quarterback of the future, Louisville’s Chris Redman. Or so was the popular opinion.
Redman was the first guy that Savage scouted in May of 1999 after the infamous “Redemption Draft” fell apart a month earlier. His first thoughts were that this guy could have come out with the deep quarterback class of 1999 and held his own.
“All he did was complete passes and take hits,” Savage said. “He was tough as nails. Those Conference USA teams never get respect and they give SEC schools and ACC schools a run every year. This wasn’t a second-division quarterback. He read defenses, he was smart and he threw accurately.”
Savage had him in his Top 10, along with Jamal Lewis, going into the 1999 season.
After the season, as Redman’s stock seemed to drop along the way, he went to the combine in Indianapolis and ran an abysmal 5.32 40-yard dash. Painfully slow in a category where the good ones run a 4.7 or so, he was getting beat on the 40 charts by most offensive linemen, the slowest guys on the field.
“In less than 10 seconds he ran himself from the first round into the third,” Savage said. “I loved the guy. I was thinking, ‘How could I be so wrong about a guy? Why didn’t more people like him?’ ”
8After selecting at the 10, an extremely pleased war room watched name after name come off the board. With so many teams selecting quarterbacks in the previous two drafts, and with so many other acute needs around the league, there were very few potential suitors for a project quarterback with upside potential.
Kansas City, New Orleans and New England might have some interest, but they had other needs. The only team who was a potential match was San Francisco, and they had passed on Redman twice in the second round for defense, taking defensive end John Engelberger and defensive back Jason Webster. They had one pick remaining at No. 65, and the Ravens thought long and hard about trading in front of them to cut them off at the pass, but the room had lost drafts picks and depth at an alarming rate over the past two drafts – drafting just 11 players in two years – that they were willing to take their chances.
There was high drama as pick No. 65 rolled onto the board.
The Niners shocked the world and selected lightly regarded quarterback Giovanni Carmazzi with the pick. Carmazzi was very intelligent and very big with a rifle arm, but what did he know about reading defenses playing at Hofstra? He was beating Towson State not Florida State. The Ravens liked what was happening.
There were nine picks remaining, but the worst was clearly over.
When Green Bay selected defensive tackle Steve Warren from Nebraska with pick No. 74, the war room erupted.
“That room has never been so excited,” Savage said. “There were tears, hugs, high-fives. The coaches thought the scouts were nuts. They didn’t get it. I still can’t explain why he fell. It was a glorious day for the Ravens to get three guys that we all universally felt were first-round picks, maybe all three Top 15 guys.”
8The Ravens lined up later that week at the April mini-camp with Chris Redman at quarterback, handing off to Jamal Lewis or faking and throwing to Travis Taylor.
“If you would have told me in August of 1999 that we would see that in purple in April, I would have called you a fool,” Savage said.
The Ravens also landed a physical freak on Sunday, nailing Southern Mississippi’s Adalius Thomas with pick No. 186. Most draftniks had the defensive end going in the Top 100, and he wound up dressing for the Ravens by the time the playoffs rolled around in January 2001. Redman was happy to have Thomas as a teammate because everytime Louisville played the Golden Eagles, the 270-pound giant was on top of him.
“Best player I played against every year,” Redman said. “I didn’t even want to practice against him. He put 10 stitches in my chin in college when he sacked me.”
“Every coach we talked to in Conference USA said he was the best player in the conference on defense,” Savage said. “Some scouts didn’t think he played mean enough.”
He progressed so quickly and impressed defensive line coach Rex Ryan so much that he was actually inserted onto the field in a pass-rush situation with the AFC Championship on the line in Oakland in the final four minutes of the game, when Jamie Sharper intercepted Bobby Hoying to seal the Ravens’ first trip to the Super Bowl.
There is very little question that all of the miles flown and driven by the scouting team were absolutely essential in building the championship team of 2000.
8Savage said his job is made easier because the chain of command from the first day in the Spring of 1996 has been simple.
“Most guys who do what I do for a living have to go through six doors to get to their boss and get a pick made,” Savage said. “Here, there’s only one door. It’s Ozzie’s and it’s always open. It’s an anomaly.”
It was a long road from South Alabama to a world championship for Savage and his staff. The long nights. The bad hotels. The bad players. The bad picks.
But it all added up to a World Championship.
“We sat up so many nights asking questions, looking at more film, wondering if we were making the right decisions,” Savage said in his slow, Southern drawl. “It’s such an inexact science.
“At the end, all I can say is whatever we did, it was right. ‘Cause it worked!”
