Despite an honest effort – Billick offered the Vikings first- and third-round draft choices – Johnson went to the Redskins in a trade for first-, second- and third-round draft picks. A nice player was Johnson, but not worthy of an entire draft.
Instead, Billick opted to deal a 1999 third-round pick and 2000 fifth-round pick to the Detroit Lions for veteran southpaw Scott Mitchell.
Let’s just say Billick’s first move – a move he sold to the skeptical media and fans as “a leap of faith” – didn’t work out so well. Mitchell showed up for camp in poor condition and threw all of 56 passes in two starts before being pulled for lifetime third-stringer Stoney Case, who was acquired at the beginning of training camp from Indianapolis.
St. Louis defensive lineman DeMarco Farr called Mitchell a “water buffalo” after the Rams defeated the Ravens in Week 1 in what would eventually be their first step to a Super Bowl title of their own in 1999. Mitchell was the biggest bust in franchise history, an expensive quarterback who was counted on to be a leader, and proceeded to go 0-2 before finding the pine only to be found the next season in Cincinnati.
Like Lucy Ricardo, the “quarterback guru” had a lot of “ ’splaining to do.”
Billick went with Case as a starter for four weeks – and the team went a respectable 2-2 – but an embarrassing coming out party on a Thursday night nationally televised game, a 35-8 pasting at the hands of the Kansas City Chiefs, forced Billick to his third-stringer, former St. Louis Rams bust Tony Banks.
Banks, who started the regular season in Billick’s doghouse because of poor work habits, rallied the troops and finished the season 6-4 as a starter, earning Billick’s confidence along the way.
The team finished Billick’s first season at 8-8, and he clearly wasn’t satisfied.
“We’ve raised the bar,” Billick said at the time. “We can’t go back. We are at a new level, and we will move forward. Our fans, the media, the organization – all have new expectations for us. They’re justified in wanting more success. Eight and eight is not going to get it anymore. We need to take the next steps to become a playoff team.”
The players would take his words to heart and come back in the summer of 2000 ready to win a World Championship.
My relationship with Billick is not only special because I was there to greet him at the clubhouse door in Minneapolis on that snowy day in January 1999. It’s special because of what I think he represents. An unrelenting, positive, brilliant, hard-charging and entirely competent personality who publicly is known for his egotistical and arrogant approach, but who privately welcomes in his friends and associates to laugh about his public persona.
“From the minute he arrived, we saw that he was different,” said Vice President of Public Relations Kevin Byrne, who manufactured a press release the day Billick was hired, quoting the new coach. “The press release was all ready to go, and when he looked at it, he saw himself quoted and it was a word or two off. He said, ‘That’s not how I want to say it.’ He was very specific right away. We were nuts with people calling and a press conference about to start, but he wanted it corrected. He had already shown his independence and his attention to detail was greater than anything we were accustomed to.”
Billick was hired after the organization, led by President David Modell, found 27 people to give character references on the then-offensive coordinator of the Vikings.
“We only found one person who had anything bad to say about him and we found out that guy wasn’t a very credible source,” Byrne said. “He was just an angry ex-employee of the Vikings. Brian is just a good guy. He’s got a sense of humor, he’s fun to be around. From the organization’s perspective, he was the anti-Belichick.”
The Modells, still stinging from the national lambasting due to the move to Baltimore, were also feeling the effects of former head coach Bill Belichick’s rocky tenure in Cleveland. After hiring Marchibroda, who was clearly a nice man but no longer completely competent, they needed a better leader. The organization had won with a jerk, who completely alienated everyone in the organization, and then had lost with a nice guy.
“It was very clear that we were never going to work with an ass who can win again after Belichick,” one insider said. “We decided that it didn’t have to be unpleasant to win. Belichick won games in Cleveland but it was not any fun at all going to the playoffs in 1994.”
Belichick was salty with the media. He was frigid to the front office staff. The fans sensed his difficult nature. He reflected poorly on the team when he did anything publicly in the community. Everyone in the office and on the team walked on eggshells all day, every day.
“It was a relief when he went somewhere else in the building,” a longtime Modell employee told me. “Just as long as he wasn’t near you, you were OK. It was hard to even root for our own team on game days because he had treated you like shit all week and you almost wanted him to lose on Sunday. Then when he did lose, he was hell again all week. Winning didn’t even make him happy.”
This time, the Ravens wanted a good football coach and a good guy. Led by the younger Modell, they reasoned that this person existed and it was up to the organization to find him.
“Under the terms we had set up in that coaching search, Bill Parcells would be unhirable by the Ravens,” said another organization insider.
“A month into his time with the team, Billick was like a dream,” Byrne said. “Ozzie (Newsome) and David (Modell) stuck their head in my office and were saying to me, ‘When is this guy going to be a jerk?’ We just couldn’t believe he could be so perfect for that job.”
In addition to the fact that the Modells were strapped financially when Billick was signed to a six-year, $9 million contract in January 1999, Billick had another small concern about the structure of the front office.
Usually when teams lose – they were 16-31-1 under Marchibroda – it reflects poorly on everything about the team.
“The first thing I had to do was cut through the preconceptions myself,” Billick said. “The record (16-31-1) and everyone on the outside (of the organization) said that it was all screwed up here. When I got here, I was pleasantly surprised by how this organization was full of incredibly competent, good people. At every turn, really good people. I realized quickly that the Modells attracted good people across the board. From the scouts to the front office people to public relations to the secretaries to the way we did business and the feeling everyone here had about each other. They were good people who also were very good at what they did. The Modells only associated with and welcomed certain people into the party…I just happened to fit.”
The mandate to hire those people came directly from David Modell when the team moved to Baltimore in 1996. In a front office of more than 70 in Cleveland, there were more than 50 people who didn’t make the trip east for a variety of different reasons.
