Play Like You Mean It: Passion, Laughs, and Leadership in the World's Most Beautiful Game (15 page)

When I first got to Baltimore, I really thought that would be it. That’s really strange to say when you’re in this job, but I just had this feeling that my days of bouncing around the country from job to job were over. And really, by the standards of this job, they were. I lasted 10 years in Baltimore, and that’s an eternity for an assistant coach. We found our first real home. When we bought it we made sure to be around great schools, because we wanted our kids to grow up there. We celebrated a Super Bowl victory in our second year and that was just an amazing moment. In less than two years, we were entrenched.

Now, that didn’t mean I wanted to be a defensive line coach my whole career. No offense to position coaches, specifically defensive line guys. I’ve been around a lot of great ones. John Teerlinck in Indianapolis wrote his master’s thesis on defensive line play. Jim Washburn up in Tennessee is another great one. Clarence Brooks, who worked with me in Baltimore, is awesome. Mike Waufle, who was with the New York Giants in 2007 when they won the title, is one smart guy who knows how to get guys going. Those guys love that job, and they’re geniuses with inventing new tactics and new ideas. They love the details. So do I, but I also wanted to be a head coach. I felt like I had a passion for it, and possibly an ability to go the distance with it.

After Marvin Lewis left to spend a year with Washington and then became the head coach in Cincinnati, Mike Nolan got the defensive coordinator job. Like me, Mike is the son of a former coach, the late Dick Nolan. Mike is a good guy, a little uptight but
definitely a guy who understood how to run a defense. He’s probably a little more conservative than me in calling blitzes, but Mike was really consistent in how he laid out a game plan and explained his thinking to the rest of the coaches. He lasted there until the end of the 2004 season and then got hired as the head coach at San Francisco, which was sort of a homecoming for him, because his dad had been there, just like my dad was an assistant coach with the Jets back in the 1960s and ’70s. The most encouraging thing to me was that the Baltimore defensive coordinator job was more and more a good springboard to becoming a head coach.

In 2005, I got the job of defensive coordinator and, man, did I feel ready. For years leading up to that, I had been studying how Billick ran the team, how he addressed the coaches and put in the game plan. Billick is a disciple of Bill Walsh (he even cowrote Walsh’s great book
Finding the Winning Edge
), so he had a really specific way of putting in the game plan, of how to run meetings and how to install the things we were working on with the players. Everything was systematic.

There’s one problem with all that Walsh stuff—you’d better have a great quarterback, like Joe Montana or Steve Young, to make sure it all works. My first year in Baltimore as defensive coordinator, our quarterback situation … well, how should I say it?

Okay, it sucked.

We alternated between Kyle Boller and Anthony Wright. Those guys tried, but we didn’t score 20 points in a game for the first 10 weeks of the season. Our 2005 season finished at 6-10, which was sort of a continuation of what we had been doing ever since I got there. We’d be great for a season or two and then we’d really drop off. The reason is pretty simple: We never had that franchise quarterback. We tried. We drafted Boller in the first round and he looked the part pretty well: big guy, strong arm. But he was just too inaccurate. Even in our championship season, we ended up going with Trent Dilfer and then let him go after the season because Dilfer, as tough as he was, just wasn’t a franchise guy.

For me, this was another lesson. You know the saying “Defense wins championships”? Well, there’s plenty of proof in that. Our title season was a good example. Two years after we won it, Tampa Bay played Oakland in the Super Bowl. It was the No. 1 defense against the No. 1 offense. Tampa Bay killed them.

But here’s the other part that even great defensive coaches have to admit: While you can win a title with a great defense and it’s more important to have a great defense than a great offense, if you don’t have a great quarterback, you’re going to be limited to one or two shots.

Just look at the history of the league: There have been 44 Super Bowls; 10 quarterbacks have combined to win 26 of the Super Bowls. What that tells me is that having that one guy, that special quarterback, gives you a chance every year. Look at New England with Tom Brady or Indianapolis with Peyton Manning, even if Manning has won only one title. If you have that quarterback, you have a chance every year if you can just build around him.

In Baltimore, we didn’t get a guy who looked like a real franchise guy until my last season there, when we got Joe Flacco. In my four years as defensive coordinator, we finished fifth, first, sixth, and second in overall defense. We were in the top three in run defense three times. But after we went 6-10 in 2005, we went 13-3 in 2006, 5-11 in 2007 (after which Billick got fired), and then 11-5 under John Harbaugh in 2008. We might have been consistently great on defense, but our results were all over the place because we didn’t have the quarterback.

That’s why I made sure that the first thing I did when I got to New York was to draft Mark Sanchez. Sanchez was a young guy who I felt would be a franchise quarterback for us for a long time, but I’ll come back to that in detail later.

The other important lesson I learned during this time is that you have to head off problems right away. You can’t be afraid to make tough decisions. In 2006, we made a strong move to go get Steve McNair, a tough, warriorlike quarterback who was let go in Tennessee when they drafted Vince Young. It was kind of sad to see the
Titans do that to such a great leader, but those are the breaks and it helped us. We also already had one of McNair’s favorite targets with Derrick Mason, who we signed the year before as a free agent. He was a really good possession receiver with enough ability to hurt you over the top—a complete football player.

We got McNair late in the off-season and he showed up as soon as possible. At the time, Jim Fassel was our offensive coordinator. Fassel, who had been the coach of the New York Giants when we beat them in the Super Bowl, was really good friends with Billick from way back in their West Coast days. Both guys had gone through Stanford and knew a lot of the same people. Fassel had been the head coach of the Giants for seven years and had his ups and downs with players there. Typical stuff. After he got fired in 2003, we hired him in 2004. As I said, our offense wasn’t very good in 2004 or 2005, but most of the blame went on the quarterback. There’s only so much you can do.

When we got McNair, there was a lot more expectation. Maybe we weren’t going to put up 30 a game, but we had a chance to run an offense that could complement our defense, control the ball, change field position, and keep the defense fresh. Well, we got McNair and Fassel was on vacation at the time. He came back for a few days and worked with McNair, then went back to be with his family. All right, I understand that getting time with the family is hard and vacations generally are pretty sacred. But this was a time when you have to look at your family and say, “We don’t get quarterbacks like this at this time of the year very often” and they have to understand.

I’ve never coached a quarterback directly, but everybody was expecting that Fassel would have this guy ready to go. Here you have a chance to work with a really smart veteran who had the potential to take us a long way as a team if he was just decent—and you passed up the chance to grind away with him for a few weeks? As you can imagine, a lot of our offensive position coaches weren’t real happy about that. Then we got into the season and the offense was just kind of limping along and not really improving. We opened with two solid games, then went three straight where the offense didn’t score
more than 16. We held on to win two of those games. We opened the season 4-0, then dropped two straight before heading into the bye week. In the bye week, all of a sudden, Billick fired Fassel. I came to find out that Fassel was spending most of his time on the phone at that point, calling around trying to get a head coaching job. Assistant coaches couldn’t get in his office to work with him, so they were getting frustrated. It was ugly all the way around. You just can’t have that in the season. Look, I know what it’s like to get frustrated when you don’t get the job you want, but you don’t handle it that way. You’ve got to keep pounding away, giving your job everything you can. That’s how you’ll finally get what you really want.

After that, Billick took over the offense and we got rolling. That was a big year for Billick because the owner, Steve Bisciotti, was examining everything we did. We won nine of the next 10, and we scored at least 20 points in all but two games. The whole thing was really coming together. We finished 13-3 and had the No. 2 seed in the AFC playoffs. We had a bye before we played Indianapolis in the playoffs. It was all set up for a big showdown between San Diego and us. Then the setup came apart when we lost to Indianapolis 15-6 and San Diego lost to New England. That’s the year Indy ended up winning the title over Chicago, and man, was that frustrating. I truly believe that any of the top four teams in the AFC would have beaten the Bears. I know we would have beaten the Patriots that year in the AFC. We were staring right down the pipe of another title, but we couldn’t come up with a score on defense. We had a couple of chances to intercept Peyton Manning, but they slipped through our hands. If we had caught those two passes, we would probably have run them back. They were touchdowns, plays that would have completely changed the game. But I give Manning a lot of credit, because he didn’t force a lot in that game. He knew what our defense could do and he played for field goals instead of getting greedy. That’s a heck of a quarterback.

Billick got a contract extension after 2006, but things went backward in 2007. McNair got hurt and the offense was inconsistent again.
Our watershed moment that season was probably the Monday-night game against New England in Week 13. The Pats were 12-0, on their way to 16-0 for the regular season before losing in the Super Bowl to the Giants. We were 4-7 at the time, not going anywhere, but our defense still had so much pride on the line. It was just amazing how hard we played that night. Early in the fourth quarter, we got a touchdown to grab a 24-17 lead. We held that great offense to a field goal for the next 12 minutes, and with us leading 24-20 with 1:48 remaining, when they were facing a fourth-and-1 situation. Right as the Pats are about to snap the ball, I called time-out. The ref hears it, but not in time to stop the snap. Tom Brady tried to sneak it, we stopped him, and our guys thought the game was won. But I called time-out. Oh geez. I thought we were in the wrong alignment and we ended up making a great play. I felt like an idiot.

From there, the whole thing really unraveled. Eventually, New England was facing fourth-and-6 and we got called for an illegal-contact penalty. We got them in fourth down again and Brady threw an incomplete, and we got called for another penalty that gave them first-and-goal from the 8. They finally scored on a pass that had to be reviewed. Brutal, just brutal. Our guys just lost it. Bart Scott got called for two unsportsmanlike penalty calls, including one for throwing a penalty flag in the stands. We got called for offsides on the point after. It was all coming apart. Strangely, we almost won the thing on a Hail Mary throw to Mark Clayton at the end, but that loss was just brutal. The Patriots had the greatest offense in the history of the game that year and we stopped them. We should have won.

After the game, everybody was asking Billick about the time-out. They didn’t realize right away that I called it. I felt bad for Billick, and he was classy about it with the media. He never said I was the one who called it. He never threw me under the bus. Eventually, they saw on the tape with one of the sideline cameras that it was me calling the time-out. I told our guys it was my fault. What can you do?

The season just petered out from there. We ended up losing nine straight at one point, including an overtime loss at Miami that was
the only game the Dolphins won all year. We beat Pittsburgh in the final game, but they were resting most of their guys. The next day, on New Year’s Eve, Billick got fired. Really, we all got fired, technically. As a coach, you get conditioned to this happening, but this hurt a lot for me. Billick brought me into the league and he gave me a lot of freedom to do what I thought worked. He didn’t interfere and he didn’t second-guess. I appreciated that and I was loyal to him, even when some of our players would start complaining.

I ended up interviewing for the head coach job. I also interviewed in Atlanta and with Miami. I had a great interview with Bill Parcells; man, we hit it off. I loved talking to Parcells, but he had his guy with Tony Sparano, the offensive line coach of the Cowboys when Parcells was in Dallas. The Falcons hired Mike Smith from Jacksonville, who did a great job down there and had been with us in Baltimore. Smith and I came to Baltimore the same year, and he stayed for four years before going to Jacksonville with Del Rio. Smith is Billick’s brother-in-law. I like Smith—he’s a real upbeat, positive guy. I thought I had a better résumé at the time, but then again, you always believe in yourself.

Really, I thought I was the best candidate for the Baltimore job. I thought it was going to be mine. I really did. Again, I thought I’d never leave Baltimore—and maybe that worked against me. Over the next couple of weeks, the Ravens interviewed Jason Garrett and John Harbaugh for the job. They offered it to Garrett, but he turned it down when Dallas gave him a monster contract to stay as the offensive coordinator. Harbaugh was the special-teams coach in Philadelphia, and I had worked with him when I was at Cincinnati. I really like John, great guy, son of a coach, his brother was a terrific quarterback in the NFL for a long time (and recently took over as head coach in San Francisco)—the whole package. John is a really positive, organized, upbeat guy. I can see why anybody would like him. Plus, Bisciotti got a call from Bill Belichick telling him that Harbaugh was great. That’s a pretty great recommendation.