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Choices, choices Baltimore enjoying the fruits of Billick's decision
BALTIMORE -- It was mid-January 1999, and Minnesota assistant coach Brian Billick had a tough call to make. Would it be the newly formed Browns, in Cleveland, or the old transplanted Browns, in Baltimore? Fresh off the Vikings' record-setting 1998 season, both Baltimore and Cleveland had the talented and personable offensive coordinator as their top head-coaching candidate. Just hours after the Vikings' stunning overtime loss to visiting Atlanta in the NFC Championship Game, Billick and his agent were ensconced in a room at a downtown Minneapolis hotel, plunged into the details of the negotiations. On the phone was Baltimore Ravens president David Modell, the son of team owner Art Modell. Doing his bidding in person was Browns director of football operations Dwight Clark, who late that afternoon had flown a private jet directly to Minnesota in order to woo Billick.
It may be harder to remember now, but the conventional wisdom of that time counseled that Cleveland was the wiser option. All those high-round draft picks. All that cap room to maneuver in free agency. All the collected goodwill of the fans and the city, ready to re-embrace their beloved Browns. With its revenue-rich new stadium, what head coach wouldn't covet the Cleveland job? It was a clean slate. A new organization to mold and build from the ground up. I covered the Vikings and Billick at that time, and I recall more than once asking him how he couldn't jump at the chance to oversee the historic return of the Browns. Baltimore, too had a shiny new stadium, having opened its in 1998. But the Ravens had three consecutive losing seasons in their new city/incarnation, an aging quarterback in Jim Harbaugh, and the team's ownership was facing almost certain long-term financial problems. Real or imagined, there was a perceived minor-league image that had already attached itself to Baltimore's NFL franchise.
My, how two years have changed the picture. My, how prescient Billick looks today. Even if he wound up flipping a coin in a darkened closet -- and trust us, he didn't -- Billick today has every right to crow about that choice he made in accepting the Ravens' six-year, $9 million offer the very next day. Baltimore under him is enjoying its NFL renaissance. Cleveland, without him, is still very much in the dark ages. Love him or loathe him, since Billick got to town, the Ravens have gone 21-12, with two non-losing seasons. That includes this year's 13-4 playoff-team edition, which beat Denver in Sunday's AFC wild-card game, officially becoming the toast of the town. It was the city of Baltimore's first postseason victory in 29 years. Meanwhile, the mood in Cleveland isn't quite as festive. The new Browns are 5-27 in their first two seasons, feature one of the worst offenses in recent NFL history, and even some of their most ardent fans have been forced to question if truly stinko football beats having no football at all. Head coach Chris Palmer, who the Browns hired after Billick turned them down, is under fire and already in danger of losing his job if he doesn't make significant changes to his coaching staff. The front office is evenly split on Palmer's fate, while Clark and team president Carmen Policy have themselves endured a humbling year, in which they were both fined by the NFL for their part in San Francisco's salary cap violations of recent vintage. It's a good time to be Billick. It's a good time to be in Baltimore. "I was fortunate," said Billick, sitting his office on Monday, less than 24 hours after the first playoff victory of his head-coaching career. "A lot of it has to do with fate. I knew coming in we had a good talent base. And that this is a good organization. But there were fewer obstacles to winning here than I thought there would be." The only obstacle standing between the Ravens and a date in the AFC title game is defending conference champion Tennessee (13-3), who Baltimore plays Sunday in a divisional-round game at Nashville's Adelphia Coliseum. What made Billick's decision? A gut feeling about people. In the end, he trusted the fit of things with Modell and Ravens vice president of player personnel Ozzie Newsome more than he did with Clark and Policy. That and he got a good look at the Ravens' top-flight defensive talent that was just coming of age. That didn't hurt the equation.
"These are good people here, they really are," Billick said. "Dwight, I picked Dwight up at the airport when he was a rookie with the 49ers. Carmen's a class act. Carmen's sharp. I like and respect Carmen. But it was a matter of who would you rather work with?" And make no mistake, Baltimore was more desperate for Billick, who was considered the hottest of that season's "hot" assistants. The Browns wanted him. The Ravens needed him. Enough so to promise him he could have the authority and input he felt necessary. "It was obvious that Ozzie was in a great position to literally run the football side of it, and run it unimpeded," said Ray Anderson, Billick's agent. "And frankly we didn't see the same situation for him in Cleveland. It was going to be the Carmen and Dwight show in Cleveland. For Brian and me, that was vital. "You've got to project ahead and see what's going to help you win. Brian didn't think he'd get as much of a chance to be influential in personnel decisions in Cleveland, and I think that made the final decision." Billick is well aware that some within the league may feel he fell into a great situation, one that was on the way up, given the wealth of defensive talent that the Ravens had stockpiled. And he was wise enough to keep defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis on, ensuring continuity on that side of the ball. But in fairness in Billick, whose forte is offense, the Ravens were a gifted but somewhat incohesive defensive team that ranked 25th overall in 1998. With him around to provide direction from the top spot and assemble the rest of a defensive staff, the Ravens have blossomed into a top five defense in each of the past two years. This season the Ravens set an NFL record for fewest points allowed (165) in a 16-game season. "There was talent here when Brian arrived, but what Brian did was he came in here and got us all pulling in the same direction," said Ravens director of college scouting, Phil Savage, another holdover from the three-year Ted Marchibroda era. "He painted a big arrow on things and made sure we were all focusing in the same direction and working together. That wasn't the case before." That is a head coach's No. 1 job, isn't it? Making sure that the entire organization is on the same page and chasing the same goal? Sounds easy, but it may be the toughest thing an NFL head coach has to do. Billick has done it without creating enemies or fiefdoms within the Ravens organization, and he has done it quickly. While his friend and fellow head coach Jim Fassel might get all the glory these days for his gutsy (or desperate?) late-season playoff guarantee, Billick was out on that limb last January. Billick said if his Ravens didn't make the playoffs in 2000, their 8-8 improvement of 1999 would have been for nothing.
When Art Modell echoed the playoff prediction on draft day, after the team landed top 10 picks in running back Jamal Lewis and wide receiver Travis Taylor, Billick didn't blanch, saying you can't make the playoffs if you can't talk about the playoffs. "The reason I said that was this organization, because of what it had to go through (in moving from Cleveland), it had gotten mired in mediocrity," Billick said. "I don't know if everybody could really see past that. They needed that kind of definitive goal. "This town, it felt good about the 8-8. Felt like we were going in the right direction, and had a lot of faith in me. But if we were going to seize this town, if this thing was going to take off, it had to happen now. This was not a situation where we could have said, 'Give us three or four years.' It could not have handled that. It would have been too tough and it had waited too long already. "If that put a lot of pressure on us, then so be it. But that's what this town needed." Let me be one of the first to say it: What Baltimore and its Ravens needed was Brian Billick. After all these years, he has both of them believing in the possibility of winning an NFL championship again. And you can't say that these days in Cleveland. Don Banks covers pro football for CNNSI.com.
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