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From the Coach’s Bookshelf – Brian Billick’s More Than a Game

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During his tenure as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, Brian Billick experienced the pinnacle of NFL coaching success when the Ravens crushed the Giants in Super Bowl XXXV. He also suffered through perhaps the lowest point of his career when he was dismissed after posting a 5-11 record in 2007. Throughout his nine seasons at the Ravens’ helm, though, one thing remained consistent – the grind. In his new book, More Than A Game: The Glorious Present and Uncertain Future of the NFL, Billick talks about first becoming a head coach and the rigors of daily life during the season.
From the first day you put a whistle around your neck and trot out on a football field without a helmet, trying to teach a group of not-much-younger men the fundamentals of what you were doing just a year or two earlier, you start thinking about what it will be like when you get to be a head coach. Most coaches start their career shortly after college, meaning that by the time they work their way up from an assistant’s job to a coordinator’s job to a head coaching job, it’s something they’ve been pointing to for two decades or more.


You watch the men whom you work under. I was fortunate to have some of the best. The great Bill Walsh in San Francisco. Doug Scovill, a sharp, innovative thinker at San Diego State. Denny Green, smart, sensitive to his players, solid as a rock at Stanford and in Minnesota with the Vikings. You learn things, and you file them away, creating a mental composite of how you might be wiser, more prepared, more proficient. The way this coach handles two-a-days, or the way that one manages the clock. That one’s a Neanderthal to his players, but he treats his assistants well. And you decide that when you get to be a head coach, it will be different.


Tony Dungy and Bill Cower vowed, during their days on Marty Schottenheimer’s staff in Kansas City, that they would never sleep in their offices, and when they became head coaches, they worked to create an environment in which their assistants didn’t have to. My vow during my years as an assistant was more technological. I’d seen smart coaches who were irrationally dismissive, even frightened, about the advent of computers, and I was determined to use computers more efficiently in any staff I led.


Like a lot of first-time head coaches, I thought I was ready for the pressure and the responsibility. I thought I wouldn’t be surprised by all the trappings that came with the position. And then, just days after getting hired by the Ravens in January 1999, I found out different.


I had heard before taking the job that, like it or not, head coaches were the face of a franchise. It didn’t matter if you had a visible owner, or an All-Pro quarterback, The coach set the tone for the team, and the city responded to how the coach handled the pressure. I recognized this in theory. But I didn’t really understand it.


After I was hired by the Ravens, I immediately headed down to the Senior Bowl in Alabama, then took a week to return to Minnesota and gather up my things and quickly prepare for the move. I flew back to Baltimore with my wife, Kim, and was just driving into downtown Baltimore when I saw something unexpected from the beltway.


A huge billboard. With my face, however many stories high. And one word: BILLICK.


My first thought was that I am entirely too ugly to have my face blown up that big. The second thought was that there was little doubt what the expectations were going to be. Beside me in the car, Kim just laughed.


Each NFL coach knows that when the fist whistle blows to begin your very first training camp practice, the job is truly 24/7 until the gun ending your last game of the season, ideally in early February at the Super Bowl. Everyone at some point alludes to his or her job as dominating his or her life, or occupying almost every waking minute, but I know of few people in any other profession who work from late July to January without a single day off. Even in the military, soldiers get R & R after a couple of months. Yet in the relentless, remorseless schedule – while always fearful that your opponent is at this very instant working harder to gain some precious edge over you – each coach has to find a rhythm that fits his personality.


Authentic energy and drive are what count. Herm Edwards emphasized that point during the 2008 season when the Kansas City Chiefs made the organizational choice to totally rebuild the team and put one of the youngest teams ever in the league on the field. “These young guys don’t know how they are supposed to act in the NFL,” says Edwards, who knew then that the sacrifice he was making might well cost him his job. (It did.) “You have to be upbeat and energetic, and it can’t just be an act. They will see through that in a minute.”


Now, realize: Everyone works hard. We’re grinders by nature. And yet as a group we still tend to exaggerate because we’re so insecure. It’s madness, but we’re all susceptible. When Sports Illustrated’s Peter King was talking with me about the fabled early hour that Jon Gruden reportedly gets to the office, he asked when I get in. “A half hour before whatever time Gruden lies about getting in,” I said. It’s always been thus: Back in the sixties, George Allen, coming into the office one morning, was greeted by his secretary informing him he had Vince Lombardi waiting on the phone. “Tell him you got me out of a meeting,” Allen said. u

Excerpted from More Than A Game: The Glorious Present and Uncertain Future of the NFL by Brian Billick with Michael MacCambridge. Copyright © 2009 by Brian Billick and Michael MacCambridge.  Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

 






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