Early in the fourth quarter, Brunell took the team into the end zone on a 61-yard drive, capped with a 1-yard toss to Keenan McCardell. On the next play from scrimmage, Banks threw an interception to defensive lineman Tony Brackens – not an easy thing to do – at the 21-yard line and the big guy took it to the house for a Jags touchdown. In the span of 16 seconds, the Ravens had gone from a nine-point lead to a six-point deficit. Down 22-16, the Ravens rallied with a 49-yard drive of their own, with Banks connecting with fullback Chuck Evans for a 3-yard toss to take a 23-22 lead with 6:26 remaining.
The Jaguars appeared, finally, to be on the verge of defeat midway through their eventual game-winning drive when Brunell faced a fourth-and-1 from the Ravens’ 34. Alas, he continued his brutal assault on the Modell franchise with a four-yard pass to McCardell that set up a James Stewart 4-yard run that eventually won the game, 30-23, with just 1:39 on the clock. The final tally of the winning drive: 12 plays, 78 yards in 4:47.
The Ravens fell to 4-7 that day, November 28, 1999.
It would be the final time the defense would cave in during the fourth quarter of a game before lifting the Lombardi Trophy 14 months to the day later.
The Jekyll and Hyde act abruptly ended the following week against the Tennessee Titans at PSI Net Stadium. If there is one day in the history of the Ravens organization – other than the move to Baltimore itself – that can be pointed to as a day where the team got its wings, it was December 5, 1999.
The Ravens came out hungry that day and simply buried a team that six weeks later would be one yard away from winning Super Bowl XXXIV in Atlanta. The stars aligned for a star-crossed franchise in the span of 60 minutes in a 41-14 rout. Tony Banks threw four touchdown passes. Priest Holmes ran for 100 yards on just nine carries. The defense held running back Eddie George to just 32 yards on eight carries. Rod Woodson picked off quarterback Steve McNair and ran it back 47 yards for a touchdown. Chris McAlister added another interception. It was an all-out mauling as the Ravens amassed 447 yards, and every time the Titans got going offensively, someone made a big play or delivered a vicious hit.
“We grew up that day,” Marvin Lewis said. “That game gave us confidence that day, but a few weeks later, it meant even more, watching them go to the Super Bowl. It made people around here realize that this is what you can do. You beat this team! You’re good enough to go to the Super Bowl, too!”
The win spurred the team on to three more consecutive victories, including wins at home against New Orleans and a shutout of Cincinnati the day after Christmas.
The biggest road victory of the year, however, came on the heels of the Titans victory, when the team went into dreaded Pittsburgh and finally claimed victory.
For defensive end Rob Burnett, who had spent 11 years in the Modell organization, it was the first time he would taste victory at Three Rivers Stadium. As Brian Billick walked off the stadium carpet following a 31-24 win, a sign appeared in the north end zone tunnel area, mocking a similar one made famous during the Steel Curtain days of the 1970s. The sign, relayed a thousand times on NFL Films says, “Pittsburgh is Steelers Country.” This homemade job, tugged in from East Baltimore said, “Pittsburgh is Ravens Country.” Billick mustered a smile and a wave, but only Burnett, Newsome and the Modells could fully appreciate what a significant step and hurdle a victory at the confluence of the Allegany, Monangahela and Ohio Rivers represented.
“I’ve never lost in Pittsburgh,” boasted Billick at the press conference to announce his hiring eight months earlier. That day, he laced his post-game speech with the same phrase.
The Ravens, finishing 8-8 in 1999 with a couple of huge, late-season victories under their belt, were on their way.
So happy with the effort of the season were the Ravens that no significant changes were planned on the defensive side of the ball for 2000.
The team lost cornerback DeRon Jenkins almost immediately to free agency as expected when the Chargers gave the 1996 second-round pick a fortune. The Ravens reached to free agency and replaced him with veteran Robert Bailey for pennies on the dollar.
The only obstacle to bringing back the defense intact was signing defensive tackle Larry Webster. Webster got his multi-million-dollar deal in February and just a few days later was suspended for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. Billick was absolutely livid and vowed not to bring back the Maryland graduate and native even if his suspension was lifted.
The suspension forced the team to either draft for help at defensive tackle, which it didn’t want to do with its eye clearly on offensive weapons in the draft, or find a veteran with the right makeup to join a group that had basically grown up together.
Bigger than the task of finding just one player was the notion that this team was close to being a playoff contender and had been built from the ground up. They needed a solid, complementary piece, not necessarily a difference maker for that slot. More than that, they needed someone who would immediately fit in the system.
Defensive tackle Sam Adams, a former first-round draft pick with the Seattle Seahawks, was given his walking papers three months earlier by head coach Mike Holmgren. A year into his operation – he was hired the same month as Billick – Holmgren was purging his organization of what he felt was a lazy element and a poor working environment. Adams, despite his ability and promise, was deemed expendable.
“I was pissed because people questioned my character, my heart,” Adams told The Sun. “That’s something that just burns me up. Every time I put my hand down (before a snap) I remember that. I had people telling me I wasn’t very good, people telling me I wasn’t worth what a number of other defensive tackles were paid. It offended me. There were teams that offended me by the things they had to say.”
From the moment he showed up in camp in Westminster, Adams saw that it would be different here. Adams possessed unbelievable physical ability, but hadn’t cultivated it in the Pacific Northwest. Here, he would be accountable, and he would be ridden by the work ethic and code of the Ravens defensive line.
“Sam Adams is an incredible physical specimen,” one coach told me early during the preseason. “He’s got size, quickness, balance – everything you want. But he’s definitely got some dog in him and we’ve seen it. The difference is, here he won’t get away with that shit. McCrary, Burnett, Goose – those guys are going to ride his ass, and he’s going to play here. Those guys won’t let him get away with what he got away with in Seattle.”
That same source, also told me that same night, “You watch, Sam Adams is going to the Pro Bowl this year with these guys around him.”
Adams had a lot of problems adjusting to his new setting at first.
“He had to acclimate,” said defensive tackle Rob Burnett, an original Raven who made the trip from Cleveland in 1996. “He really didn’t fit in at first. We are the loosest, most happy-go-lucky group you’d ever find. But he was off to the side and he wasn’t warming up. It always takes some time, especially with us because we’d been together so long.”
Siragusa, another vocal force and leader of a unit full of leaders, was a notable absentee from the July and August camp in Westminster, Md. He was in the midst of a nasty holdout, trying to leverage the team for a longer contract and more money. So consolidated was this group that Burnett and McCrary took turns wearing his No. 98 at practice when he was gone. “It really screwed the coaches up watching film,” Marvin Lewis said. “We’d be looking for guys making plays, and all of a sudden No. 98 got quicker and much smaller.”
Adams, meanwhile, was lost amongst the new faces, except for McCrary, who played with Adams in Seattle and helped Billick and Ozzie Newsome recruit him back in April.
But, make no mistake, it was during that training camp in August that Adams got the message loud and clear.
Despite their long-standing friendship, it was McCrary who led the charge to get Adams to fulfill his potential. McCrary and Adams fought several times in camp. Really fought, with fists barreling and helmets flying.
“Guys were climbing up his ass every day,” Marvin Lewis said. “It was scariest when he and McCrary would go because they were roommates and had to go back to the same room together at the complex. But that’s what happens with family. They were like brothers and sisters going at it.”
The fights usually surrounded who was playing hard and who was taking downs off. The jawing, which began in a friendly tone, had taken on a rough edge.
After that, it was Rob Burnett and Adams who nearly went toe to toe in a meeting room early in the season.
“I saw Day One that he could play,” Burnett said. “He had unbelievable strength and great feet. He was going to help us. But he was running his mouth in a meeting room and made some snide remark, and I went after him. I told Goose I was going to kill him. Thankfully for both of us, Goose caught me and intervened.”
Burnett said there was a code among the defensive line: pride, hustle, it’s not about individual statistics, it was collective goals. “We never had selfish players and we didn’t want them,” he said. “You have to be a part of the unit. Sam learned and then he became a part of us. We learned to love Sam.”
Adams finished the season with 69 tackles, two sacks and a load of respect from his peers, not only in his clubhouse, but around the league as well. Adams not only won a Super Bowl in his first year in Baltimore, he got fitted with that grass skirt as well in Honolulu in early February.
“He has unparalleled physical ability because of his size and strength,” Marvin Lewis said. “He might be as good as anybody who has ever played the game. When he’s playing mean every down, he’s as nasty as they come.”
Said Ray Lewis: “He just tears up everything he sees in the backfield.”
Pairing Adams with Siragusa, who has made a living for 12 years in the league as a run stopper extraordinaire, made opponents a one-dimensional operation for all 20 weeks of their Super Bowl run. Through its championship run in January 2001, the team hadn’t allowed an individual player a 100-yard rushing game since December 1998, two games before the Brian Billick era began.
“We just watched teams completely fold up,” Burnett said. “I’ve been in this league for a long time and I could see it in their eyes, in their attitude. They were looking to ride out the storm, so they could just go home. They knew they had no chance against us. When a team comes out and can’t run and they’re getting pounded physically, humiliated and gang tackled, it takes a lot to stomach that for an offense.”
The goal wasn’t just a shutout or a three and out. The goal was to make them surrender.
“You can tell when you’ve put their fire out and we put a lot of fires out this year,” Burnett continued. “Our goal was to make somebody lay down. It was a point of pride for our defense.”
As essential as stopping the running game was, the true pressure in 2000 was on the secondary. Let’s be honest – the team stopped the run effectively all of the 1999 season and the most they could muster was an 8-8 campaign.
“The key for us was drafting Chris McAlister and moving Rod (Woodson) to safety,” Marvin Lewis said. “We then put our knowledge in the middle of the field. We gave ourselves two legitimate cornerbacks (McAlister and Duane Starks) and two legitimate safeties (Woodson and Kim Herring). I told Ozzie the day we drafted Chris, ‘Now we’ve gotten better. Now we can go out and play this defense the way it’s meant to be played.’”
Five years and one Super Bowl into this young franchise’s history, many players stand out as special talents – guys who will be talked about 20 years from now as great players in the NFL. In Ray Lewis, Jonathan Ogden, Rod Woodson and Shannon Sharpe, this team has four almost sure bets to go to the Hall of Fame. Yet, to a man, there is no one in the organization who is more highly thought of than McAlister.
“Of the all the guys we have on this defense, the only one who is pure is McAlister,” Marvin Lewis said. “He’s the one guy every person in the NFL was in agreement on. He’s fast, he’s strong, he’s smart, he’s big, he’s a great learner. No one in this league ever had a doubt about Chris McAlister or the kind of player he would become. He’s so good now that they don’t even throw in his direction.”
The adage that one man’s junk is another’s treasure would apply here.
Ray Lewis, too small to play middle linebacker. Jamie Sharper, no good in coverage. Peter Boulware, a tweener who wouldn’t work as a linebacker or defensive end. Michael McCrary, too small and not strong enough to go four quarters. Tony Siragusa, good against the run but a two-down player who had bad knees. Sam Adams, a loafer who underachieved. Rob Burnett had a bad knee and was too small. Kim Herring, good instincts and average speed – a second-round guy. Woodson was washed up after 1996, too injured and too slow to play anymore. Duane Starks was too tiny, a midget.
“Nobody wanted these guys at some point in their career,” Marvin Lewis said. “Part of that is what I use every day. These guys are hungry because people doubted them. Many people doubted them. You think Ray (Lewis) doesn’t realize every day that more than 20 teams passed on him on Draft Day?”
Marvin Lewis, knowing the run had been properly stuffed by the defense in 1999, had it all figured out once training camp began in 2000 and relayed his message to the youthful Starks and McAlister.
“We will go as far as you take us,” he told the cornerbacks. “If we give up a ball over our heads, we’re in trouble.”
Lewis felt strongly about his defense after seeing the team’s four preseason games, when they went undefeated. “We were going to be pretty doggone good,” he said.
Instead of being nervous about not getting enough of a pass rush or about someone blowing coverage or just not being good enough to get to the ball – like he had been the previous four years – he could finally unleash some of the weaponry he was taught by defensive guru Dom Capers when he was in Pittsburgh in 1995.
“We didn’t have to hide anyone out there anymore,” Lewis said. “There used to be no margin for error. We used to make mental mistakes and those are the worst kind. The physical problems you learn to live with because their offense is going to make some plays, too. But when you spend the whole week preparing, you don’t want guys to blow their assignments and be in the wrong place. I felt with this group that that wasn’t going to happen.”
After the second week of the season, when Starks was abused by Jaguars wide receiver Jimmy Smith but the team won despite the breakdowns, the problems went away and the confidence grew.
“When the ball went up in the air it was a 50-50 proposition as to who was going to come down with it,” Lewis said. “Our cornerbacks can catch the ball. But more than that they can run and they can tackle.”
As good as the pass rush was during the 2000 season, the sack total wasn’t among the league leaders with just 35 on the season. Most teams didn’t have the ball for enough plays during a drive to allow the defensive line to get a push and opposing quarterbacks adjusted to their speed by getting rid of the ball on three- and five-step drops.
The team’s best pure pass rusher, Peter Boulware, was coming off of a two-year old shoulder injury that required surgery after the 1999 season, when he played 12 games in a harness that limited his mobility.
Boulware was invited to the Pro Bowl in 1999 and instead of opting for immediate surgery in December 1999 when he was obviously hurt badly, he went to Honolulu and participated in the game’s festivities and put off the operation until February. It wound up costing him part of training camp and got him off to a noticeably slow start in 2000.
“I think he understands he made a mistake by not getting the surgery right away,” Marvin Lewis said. “He didn’t have the strength and confidence that he needed when we began the season. He really needed the practice to get the confidence.”
