In a game that was truly a statement game for the defense, they frustrated and battered the once-potent Jaguars’ offense. Brunell and backup quarterback Jamie Martin threw three interceptions – to Herring, Woodson and Chris McAlister. Martin came into the game as boos rained down on Brunell, whose stock was slipping quickly with Jags coach Tom Coughlin. Not only did the Ravens win the game, 15-10, that night, they forced their former conqueror Brunell out of the game after his third fumble of a snap from center that night and two interceptions. The benching of Brunell was a morale booster and moral victory to go along with a 5-0 start in the AFC Central.
The Ravens defense forced an astonishing eight fumbles in the game, recovering three, including one by Ray Lewis at the 7-yard line that appeared to be a sure Jaguars’ score. Peter Boulware, Sam Adams and Ray Lewis combined for three sacks as well.
“Stripping the ball is all about confidence,” defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis would later say. “We were always doing our job on defense, but you have to have enough confidence to take the next step. We’re always teaching it. But it comes from self-confidence, just like interceptions. Unconfident people don’t intercept footballs. Unconfident people don’t look to strip the ball. That game showed me that we were really growing up.”
After the game, Billick was equally impressed and yet concerned at the same time.
The team was obviously struggling to move the football, particularly in the red zone. But the defense was “magnificent” in his words.
Six weeks into the season, the team was 5-1, including 2-0 over the arch-nemesis Jaguars.
“We had barely won the first time and that was a desperate team, and we really put them away,” Billick said. “But I also realized that we hadn’t scored a touchdown in a couple of weeks. (The win) should have felt better than it did.”
The seeds of Billick’s doubts about the abilities of quarterback Tony Banks to run his offense were planted that night in Jacksonville.
After a timeout in the first half of the game on a pivotal series of downs, Billick and offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh twice sent in a warning to Banks to watch for a blitz off the back side. It was a tribute to the film study of the coaching staff. Banks was twice instructed to take the check off and dump the ball. It was a simple, “If they do this, you do that” type of advisory. Sure enough, the Jaguars sent in the jailbreak off the edge and instead of taking the sure short gain and hitting the “hot” receiver, Banks attempted to throw a home run that ended with another ugly incompletion. Instead of a guaranteed first down and a continued possession, Banks’ carelessness and inattention to detail put the punting unit back on the field for another of nine times that night.
“It made me begin to wonder,” Billick would later say. “He was trying to be Superman and it was hard to fault him because we hadn’t scored. But I was seriously worried about Tony.”
Despite the lack of offensive production resulting in touchdowns, the fans of the Ravens were celebrating a 5-1 start and a chance to see a road game played just 38 miles to the south for the second time in franchise history. Ticket demand for the Redskins-Ravens game on Oct. 15, 2000 at the renamed FedEx Field in Landover, Md., was extraordinary. The Ravens were attempting to go 2-0 in their short history against the hated Redskins. In 1997, the team went into then-Jack Kent Cooke Stadium and won, 20-17, behind the legs of Bam Morris and the game-saving interception of Ray Lewis.
As usual, I rounded up fans willing to pay upwards of $200 per ticket from brokers to caravan an hour down I-95 to see the Ravens continue their dominating defensive ways.
We rolled into the parking lot that day with four busloads of purple-clad maniacs and a bad attitude.
For the players, it was just another game. For the fans, it was a mini-Super Bowl, a chance to exact another dose of revenge against a team and a franchise whose fans were elitist, obnoxious and constantly taking seats at Orioles’ baseball games in Baltimore and wearing their burgundy and gold hats, shirts and jackets and flaunting their vaunted Super Bowl conquests of the past.
The fact that Jack Kent Cooke tried to keep Baltimore from ever getting a team back in the late 1980s and early 1990s also would stoke the hatred amongst the fans. It is a rivalry that will never see the teams meeting twice every season – the television networks need the teams separated for market value – but perhaps that’s a good thing.
Any self-respecting Baltimorean roots for two NFL teams each weekend: the Ravens and whoever is playing the Redskins.
“It didn’t mean as much to us as it did to the fans,” Billick would later say. “How could it? We’re new to the area and we understood there was a history there. It was a game we needed to win, either way.”
If the Modell family was just beginning to digest the Baltimore-Washington rivalry – and I think they did pretty early on with fans in Memorial Stadium cheering every time a Redskins’ deficit was announced on Sunday afternoons – it had clearly sunk in by the time new Redskins owner Daniel Snyder took over the franchise in 1999.
First, Snyder broke every code of NFL conduct in regard to hiring practices by attempting to pillage the Ravens’ front office for sales employees just days after his approval as owner from the league’s hierarchy. David Modell actually filed a grievance with the league that never produced a result.
Then, during Snyder’s first offseason as an owner in early 2000, the proverbial manure hit the fan in a large way when the new Redskins owner began marketing his team in Baltimore for season ticket sales, breaking every gentleman’s agreement the league had ever known.
David Modell woke up on Sunday morning in the summer to find a full-page ad in The Baltimore Sun for Redskins tickets. He went from irate to semi-vengeful, joking with writers from the newspaper that his organization might fly planes over the Redskins training camp practices – the Skins were charging an admission fee for their practices and charging $10 just to park cars at their camp – advertising Ravens’ season tickets and free training camp practices. Later, he thought getting even on the field would serve much more justice than getting mad.
The move by Snyder was not directed maliciousness toward the Ravens or Modell. Snyder went out of his way to annoy just about everyone in the league during his first 18 months as an NFL owner. A tiny man, with a Napoleonic complex and a huge checkbook to match it, Snyder’s laundry list of dirty dealings disgraced 50 years of Washington football tradition – tradition that Baltimoreans didn’t necessarily like but at least could respect. The Redskins were, by and large, a class act prior to Snyder’s entrance.
In a matter of months he had done the Ravens wrong twice, pulled his team’s training camp out of Frostburg, Md., without remorse or regard for a previously agreed to contract, raised ticket prices and forced fans to pay $10 to watch the team practice in July and August. Perhaps his worst sin was meddling with the on-field football operations of the franchise without a working knowledge of the game or its intricacies. He berated head coach Norv Turner – one of the game’s renowned nice guys – he pulled rank on player decisions and he wantonly spent millions of dollars on fossilized free agents like Bruce Smith, Mark Carrier, Jeff George and Deion Sanders without regard to team chemistry or the salary cap.
