Brian Billick has always been the corporate type of head coach. His background is in public relations and there hasn’t been a podium that he’s met that didn’t feel like home to him.
You hear it in his vocabulary. He regularly uses words that would be the equivalent of touchdowns in a game of Scrabble. We’ve joked about them often and while we may get a chuckle or two at Billick’s expense, it isn’t hard to imagine Billick as an Executive Vice President of a Fortune 500 firm.
I thought about that while observing his press conference this week as he painfully announced the departure of Jim Fassel and that he would assume play calling responsibilities.
Many of us have assumed that Billick’s hand has always been in the mix of play calling. After all, he is the common denominator of a perpetually inefficient offense.
Billick during the press conference explained that he delegated play calling responsibilities to Matt Cavanaugh sometime during the 2000 season and that those responsibilities were handed to Jim Fassel in 2005.
We’ve all been skeptical. Many of us have accused Billick of micromanaging and we’ve pinned guilt on him for the team’s offensive failures. After all it is his playbook, right?
Billick’s statement about passing the play calling torch to Cavanaugh in 2000 gave me cause to look back at 1999. In 1999 the Ravens finished 14th in the league in points scored with 324 points. He did that with Tony Banks and Scott Mitchell at quarterback, an ailing Priest Holmes who played only 8 games, Errict Rhett, Chuck Evans, Obafemi Ayanbedjo, Quadry Ismail, Patrick Johnson, Justin Armour, Jermaine Lewis and an injury prone rookie named Brandon Stokley.
That’s the equivalent of 20 points per game and it’s safe to say that the current collection of offensive talent is superior than the aforementioned one.
Since Brian Billick has taken over as head coach the Ravens are 48-13 when they’ve scored 20 points or more. Might Billick calling the plays be the difference? Could his full and unbridled guidance of the offense be the missing ingredient?
"If you have a real skill, you should take advantage of that real skill," Ron Wolf, former Green Bay Packers GM and frequent rival of Brian Billick said. "Brian had a real skill in Minnesota. It didn’t matter who the quarterback was, they won.
"You can’t take that away from him. When he became head coach, he relinquished a key part of what made him a good coach."
There’s that corporate coach creeping in again. He delegated those responsibilities. He wanted to manage the bigger picture. He no longer wanted to be the featured sax player of the orchestra. He wanted to be the conductor.
But that featured sax player has failed and now it’s time to tune up that instrument again. The last guy wasn’t quite in tune and he missed a few notes in key situations.
The Jim Fassel hiring was always a bit of a dangerous one. Like in the corporate world, even in small business settings, hiring and working with friends almost always is a dicey situation. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t and when they don’t, it’s often pretty bad.
Could Jim Fassel have taken advantage of a friendship simply to keep his face plastered upon the NFL landscape with the sole intent to once again become a head coach?
Perhaps.
Certainly top dog on a NFL sideline has been and continues to be Fassel’s goal. And Fassel without question had an opportunity to shine. After all he took over an offense that by most counts could only get better.
Most counts were wrong!
It got worse. Who would have thought that Matt Cavanaugh would be missed?
Rumors are swirling that Fassel’s work ethic wasn’t what it should have been and that the weak effort undermined the best interests of a head coach and friend already on thin ice.
At this point, it doesn’t matter what went down. What matters is that the Ravens have a 4-2 record and they are in dire need of offensive improvement.
The Ravens don’t need to be the best offense. They just need to be about as good as they were the last full season Billick orchestrated the play calling. Twenty points per game isn’t a lot but it’s enough as the Ravens history suggests.
Come next Sunday, all eyes will be on Brian Billick and his play calling.
