Over the next few weeks, Billick went on an all-out mission to get to know his team, his staff, his new city and his new fans.
The honeymoon period would not be brief. Here was a bright, articulate, funny personality who had chosen to come to Baltimore over other places.
It cannot be said enough, the inferiority complex that Baltimore sports fans have felt through the years. Having an NBA team taken away to Washington in 1973. Seeing the Colts stolen in the middle of the night in 1984. Even during the 1970s and early 80s, there were rumors that the Orioles could be headed to the nation’s capital. And, watching other cities finish first and bitching about it seemed to be a provincial pastime.
While the original Modell job search looked strongly at former UCLA coach Terry Donahue in December 1998, the Ravens were also hopeful of at least garnering a visit from two former Super Bowl-winning coaches during January 1999. George Seifert, who won two titles with the San Francisco 49ers, and Mike Holmgren, who had been 1-1 in Super Bowls in recent years with the Green Bay Packers, were both on the hunt for head coaching positions and big money. Both talked of coming to Baltimore as a second or third option, but neither found their way into BWI Airport or Owings Mills. Holmgren, who wound up in Seattle, wanted more control and a lot more money than the Modells were offering. Seifert, out of football for a year, wanted to come back from his television analyst stint and have a job where he could fish to clear his mind. Both snubbed the Modells, and in no small way, snubbed Baltimore as well.
Billick, however, had a chance to go to a variety of different places. He was the hottest assistant in the league and was being given chase in several places, including Cleveland.
By and large, the fans of Baltimore and Maryland (except for gloating Gov. Parris Glendening) were extremely sympathetic to the Cleveland situation at first. Everyone understood the hypocrisy, and the fans certainly didn’t need Bob Costas standing on the 50-yard of Memorial Stadium on NBC prior to the Ravens’ inaugural game in September 1996 – which he did – pointing it out to the masses.
Cleveland had its team stripped away. Baltimore had its team taken in the middle of the night.
We were kindred spirits, similar cities but with different stories to tell.
Baltimore fought, begged, cajoled, bought crab cakes for fat cat owners, was lied to repeatedly, was used as a modern-day civic prostitute for the NFL and, finally, covertly and almost grudgingly, stole a team. It just happened to be at Cleveland’s expense.
Cleveland had its team taken away and in a little more than 30 days after the end of the 1995 season, they had an iron-clad guarantee to get their team, colors, name and heritage back within 36 months. The way Baltimore folks saw it, they got a sweetheart deal of their own and they didn’t have to buy one crab cake to get it done. Especially considering how much they hated Art Modell before the move. They were finally rid of the guy who had never taken them to a Super Bowl.
But the Clevelanders and their fans wouldn’t let it rest and the rivalry heated up. Using the Internet, plane banners at Ravens games (both home and away) and the press, Browns fans made Baltimore and Modell the ultimate bad guys of the NFL.
Stoking the fire even more was the baseball venom, where the Orioles eliminated a heavily favored Indians’ team from the American League playoffs in 1996. The next year, the Tribe evened the score by beating a similarly favored Orioles squad in the ALCS to go the World Series.
Fifteen months later, the two cities would again compete, this time for the services of Brian Billick, the hottest offensive mind in the NFL.
Realistically, by the time the Vikings were eliminated on that Sunday night of the NFC Championship Game in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Baltimore were the only two places left for Billick to really consider. San Diego was a very lukewarm third option.
With Cleveland, there was a staff in place that Billick knew intimately. Team president Carmen Policy and personnel henchman Dwight Clark were from the same family that spawned Billick – the San Francisco 49ers umbrella of Eddie DeBartolo and Bill Walsh.
He knew them perhaps too well. Policy’s feud with one of Billick’s best pals and mentor, Walsh, was legendary. That didn’t help the Browns case an iota.
In Cleveland he would inherit an expansion team with very little chance of winning out of the gate but with a honeymoon period that might see it through. Jacksonville and Carolina won relatively quickly, so it could be done. But how much control over decisions and personnel would he really have with two strong personalities already in the pipeline to owner Al Lerner? And, realistically, how much time would he be given to get the team over the hump?
Baltimore had its own set of inherent problems, but nothing that Billick deemed to be unsolvable. Unlike many who had bought into the “Art can’t win” theory, Billick had done his homework. He knew the Modell franchise had historically been one of the most successful in the league. Art had just never been to the Super Bowl. He also was keenly aware of the financial limitations of the Modell family at the time – very similar to the circumstances he endured in Minnesota until Red McCombs bought the team in 1998 – and that scared him a bit. He knew Modell’s passion for the game and for winning and saw firsthand the enthusiasm of Baltimore’s fans six weeks earlier on Dec. 13, when the Vikings came into PSI Net Stadium a two-touchdown favorite for a freezing 4 p.m. game and 69,074 came out to watch a 12-1 team beat a 5-8 team, 38-28. At least in Baltimore he had Ray Lewis and Peter Boulware and Jonathan Ogden – first-round stud building blocks that Cleveland wouldn’t be able to offer.
Despite insisting that he was coming to Baltimore on Tuesday to interview first, fulfilling a promise made by his agent Ray Anderson, Billick was stalked that Sunday night by the Browns contingent.
When David Modell talked with Anderson, the message was clear: take all the time you need. Modell, of course, had been on the losing end of three AFC Championship Games and had compassion and understanding about grieving a loss of that significance.
When Policy spoke to Anderson, Anderson told him not to bother coming to Minneapolis right away, that Billick would come to Cleveland after he had visited Baltimore on Tuesday. Playing the heavy, Policy sent Clark ahead to Minneapolis anyway, and Clark showed up at Anderson’s hotel room just hours after the heartbreaking loss, trying to pirate Billick back to Cleveland.
Billick and Anderson were offended, and the aggressive plan backfired. When Billick refused to go, Policy called a morning news conference on Monday to announce the hiring of then-Jaguars offensive coordinator Chris Palmer, basically taking Billick’s negotiating leverage away in Baltimore. For Billick, it was Baltimore or bust at that point.
Just 24 months later, as Billick hoisted the Lombardi Trophy in Tampa, Chris Palmer was looking for work after being fired as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.
Billick’s first public radio appearance was on Feb. 10 at The Barn, a crab house and bar that had hosted my live radio show for more than three years, before a packed house of rabid Ravens fans ready to give a hero’s welcome to their new football savior.
Six days later, Billick orchestrated a covert meeting with one member of every Baltimore media organization at an extremely informal luncheon for 15 in the back room of an Owings Mills restaurant. There would be no pens or paper. No cameras. No tape recorders or notes taken. And only one member from each outlet was invited. There would be no evidence or report on the six o’clock news that this rendezvous had occurred.
It was there, The Boss laid down the law. There was a new sheriff in town and his name was Brian Billick.
“I wanted to let everyone know that it was going to be different with me,” Billick said. “I know that in the past most media members were used to it being very confrontational, very difficult. I told them that I would be accessible, helpful, user friendly. I’ve seen it done the other way. I saw it in Minnesota with Denny (Green) and it just didn’t look like fun. It didn’t have to be that way.”
Billick said that he was absolutely going to use the media for his own purposes. He said if you wrote something incorrect, he was going to challenge you. He was going to call you out, but never hold it against you. But you were always going to be able to get what you needed to do your job.
Billick cut his teeth in the NFL as an assistant director of media relations with the upstart San Francisco 49ers in Joe Montana’s rookie year. He was the guy who set up interviews and dealt as a liaison between players and the media.
Being in the media as I’ve been for 16 years – more than half of my life – you can’t begin to appreciate the bizarre nature of this luncheon. First, most coaches could care less what the media says or does, but one of two things was happening. Either this guy was so unbelievably arrogant that he thought he could control what was said and done with a free lunch or he was just a pretty damned good guy who wanted the relationship to be casual and friendly and not confrontational and combative. Maybe it was both.
Either way, the usually dour and skeptical media was impressed, and during the first two years of his tenure, Billick backed up his words. And the media, for better or worse, presented him to the public as a future king, the genius who would bring respectability, if not a championship, to Baltimore.
He was always honest, very infrequently evasive, but always accessible. Of course, some called him “Compu Coach,” because of his frequent computer-like references to statistics, and some called him an egomaniac because he obviously loved being the center of attention. The word “arrogant” even popped up from time to time, because – like E.F. Hutton – when he spoke, people listened. And, unlike Ted Marchibroda, whom he replaced as head coach, he was always sure of himself. Nowhere was that better evidenced than at the Super Bowl when he got the focus off of Ray Lewis and onto himself upon landing at the Tampa Airport the Monday before the game with an eight-minute monologue about responsible journalism and ambulance chasing for a crowd of more than 1,000.
Billick wasted no time laying down the law with the players either. He was an equal opportunity opportunist. You would have the chance to do things right, and if you didn’t, you were gone.
If the media and players had a dead pool for the first victim, it would have easily been safety Ralph Staten. Staten, an Alabama guy and a woebegone project of Vice President of Player Personnel Ozzie Newsome and Director of College Scouting Phil Savage – both Crimson Tide sympathizers – had been the beneficiary of being a rare stellar athlete and playmaker in the Marchibroda system. He got away with driving with a handgun and not being cut. He was frequently late and inattentive for meetings. He basically was a bigger accident waiting to happen.
Billick knew of the legend and pulled him aside. “You’re gonna get one chance in my system,” Billick said. Staten missed a meeting days later and was gone on Monday morning.
