He is, at once, cerebral and brash, forthright and manipulative, practical and complex, charming and irritating.
He is the “new age” football coach, all things to all people; the media’s best quote and harshest critic; innovator and instigator; the computer geek who can relate to his players as adults while resorting to the most elementary tactics to motivate them.
Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick embraces both qualities and flaws, and it all seems to be working even though his position comes with enough baggage to weigh down the most buoyant of personalities.
“He can be brutal to a fault, but I like that,” tight end Shannon Sharpe said. “I love Brian. We all love Brian.”
To love him as a Ravens player is to stand behind him when he takes the brunt of what seems a weekly assault. It also means to defend him when he goes on the offensive, as he so often does.
Last year, his first as head coach, Billick accused the NFL of wanting the Browns to win in their first meeting with the Ravens because his team had moved to Baltimore from Cleveland. He topped that with the suggestion that the Cleveland crowd would intimidate officials.
Over the last several weeks, Billick told Ravens fans that Denver coach Mike Shanahan is a better tactician than he is, offended the cities of Miami and Oakland when he predicted the winner of the Baltimore-Tennessee playoff matchup would go to the Super Bowl and alienated the city of Nashville by, well, just by being himself.
For an encore, Billick brought his team to Tampa for Super Bowl XXXV and promptly criticized the national media for what he interpreted as unfair scrutiny of Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis.
“When he says something, we have to go defend him,” Sharpe said. “We have to make sure he doesn’t have to eat his words and we’ve done that thus far. Brian sincerely cares about all his players. It would be so easy for you to turn your back on a guy in a situation [like Lewis’], but Brian [didn’t].”
For that he has taken a verbal pounding this week from the reporters he called “ambulance chasers,” and even a gentle rebuke from mentor Bill Walsh.
“He is so intense and so involved and so emotional over where he is and what he is doing that, in a sense, he’s already playing the game,” said the San Francisco general manager, who gave Billick his first job in the NFL as a media relations assistant for the 49ers. “He’s already competing. And when he felt uncomfortable about the way things were headed, he lashed out. He was going to defend his team.
“I can’t say it was good judgment, but he’s so emotional and so high-pitched he was ready to take on everybody. This was a mistaken direction to take things.”
Billick refers to his public relations background often, perhaps as a way to give credence to his approach with reporters, which if nothing else is always organized and always planned.
“I have used the lessons I learned [with the 49ers] throughout my entire career and they served me really well,” Billick said.
It was not, however, what he had in mind.
A communications major at Brigham Young, Billick was an 11th-round San Francisco draft pick, cut by both the 49ers and Dallas Cowboys. He then became an assistant coach at the University of the Redlands, while helping a local high school team on the side. He spent one year as an assistant at BYU.
Billick said he called a former public relations contact currently with the 49ers on behalf of a friend who was looking for a job and was told the 49ers wanted someone with a playing background.
“He told me, `I’m not interested in your friend, but do you want the job?’ It kind of caught me off guard,” Billick said. “So I said, what the heck, I’ll explore it. It was a great experience.”
Walsh remembers Billick, who worked for the 49ers in 1979-80, as “a very young man with a determination to be part of the National Football League who would take any job of any kind to get a start.
“He was totally overqualified for that job and he wasn’t going to be there long,” Walsh said. “But he turned it into a very effective and valuable job. He met the people who later would be a big part of his life and very important to his career.”
Walsh helped Billick get an assistant position at San Diego State, and from there he moved on to Utah State and Stanford. There he worked with Dennis Green, whom he had met in San Francisco and with whom he would serve as offensive coordinator for the Vikings.
But it was Billick’s work with Walsh on a 500-page coaching textbook “Finding the Winning Edge,” that Walsh said helped earn Billick respect in NFL coaching circles.
Coaching a Vikings offense that scored an NFL-record 556 points in 1998 didn’t hurt Billick either.
Ravens owner Art Modell said it was Billick’s teaching and communication skills that impressed him most. But it was also Billick’s ability to adapt to a defense-oriented team that has won him respect around the league.
“That demonstrates he’s a complete coach because he can adapt to his personnel, take advantage of his assets and control the liabilities, which is basically his offense,” Walsh said.
“He has managed that offense not to self-destruct, to find a way to make a play or two during the game that may win it and to depend on the defense. Others would not understand and would try to make it [an] aerial circus or prove their prowess by force-feeding the offense.”
Somehow, however, in submerging his own instincts and ego on offense, Billick maintained his reputation for cockiness.
“I don’t particularly think [arrogant] is negative unless people want to extrapolate that out and say I’m also self-serving or self-centered,” Billick said. “I hope I’m not those things. But if arrogant means you’re self-confident and focused and directed toward a single objective, then yeah, I’m arrogant.”
And yeah, so is his team.
“We do feel like it’s us against the world,” Ravens offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden said. “Brian has a lot of confidence and we have a lot of confidence. We feel that no matter what we do, it’s going to turn out right in the end. So yeah, we’ve adopted his personality a bit.”
When Billick handed out his team’s Super Bowl itinerary Dec. 4, three weeks before the regular season ended and before the Ravens had even clinched a playoff berth, his team barely flinched.
“He believes in what he’s doing and he doesn’t waver from that,” Ogden said.
Billick said he does not consider himself a motivational coach.
“I think of myself more as a facilitator,” he said. “I think motivation lasts about as long as you get ear-holed on that first kickoff. Then all that motivational win-one-for-the-Gipper stuff goes out the window.
“I’m a facilitator in the sense of making sure they’re aware of their circumstances, their environment, what it’s going to take to win, what our expectations are and what their responsibilities are.”
Although his players praise Billick for giving them the freedom to be themselves–“He doesn’t want a team made from cookie-cutters, he wants us all to be individuals,” defensive end Rob Burnett said–they also seem to respect his occasionally abrasive approach.
Midway through the season, after a particularly awful practice by the offense and in the midst of its five-game scoreless streak, Sharpe remembers a Billick moment:
“Brian sent the defense in and he called over the offense and said, `You know what, guys? I have $40 million in signing bonuses just on this side of the ball. I can get a guy off the street to do what you just did. We’re going to practice again.’
“I like that. We all do.”
