The Byrne Identity: Art and Steve

ART AND STEVE

Attended a salute to Art Modell Tuesday night that was very special. About 900 people joined the celebration, and it was clear that everyone there enjoyed the evening. The tribute raised money for Baltimore’s Sports Legend Museum, but the focus was on Art. Former Colts Lenny Moore and Tom Matte, former Raven Rob Burnett, along with Ozzie Newsome, Brian Billick and David Modell spoke, as did John Mara, the CEO of the Giants. There was humor, some tears and a continued message that Art needs to be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

At the event, I saw Art and current Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti spend time together. My good fortune is that I’ve worked for both gentlemen and consider each a friend. But, I’m not the only Ravens associate who can make that claim, which says more about Art and Steve than it does about all of us. The two highly, highly successful business men have much in common. Their abilities to succeed in the corporate world and produce lots of income are obvious to all. Those closer to each see the two as regular guys who hit it big, but have stayed grounded in the way they live and treat others. They are guys who can be both boss and friend.

Art is a high school dropout. He did that after his father passed away when Art was 16. Modell then started working in the Brooklyn shipyards, cleaning out the hulls of ships as an electrician’s helper. He did this to support his mother and two sisters. Steve graduated from both high school and college, but as Steve tells the story, “at a very average C level.” Steve’s father died when he was 8, and Steve, his brother and sister all worked regularly to help the family and get spending money. Steve mowed lawns, babysat and worked at a gas station. Both Steve and Art are good, but not great athletes. Both stress the importance of family and keeping long-time friends.

When I watched the two men sharing a laugh before the banquet, I wasn’t thinking of their wealth, or business achievements. I thought: these are two good guys. Two guys you can watch a football game with while having some junk food and beer. They are two guys who know the names of my children and what my kids do. These are two that would help any Ravens associate in trouble. They are two guys who love to laugh, are not uptight and certainly don’t hold their successes over others. They are about as regular as can be. You can disagree with them, and they listen. You can rib them, and they’ll give it right back – or, as often is the case, they’ll start the ribbing. We all know people who work for jerks, or maybe you have that burden. At the Ravens, we’re lucky – we’ve worked for two good, regular, high-energy, competitive, self-made guys.

THE BYE AND LOSING

In our business, you really look forward to the bye. This is not a complaint, but a reality: we work every day from the first day of training camp until the season ends – except for the bye weekend. Selfishly, you want to win before your bye for obvious reasons. It makes the bye better. Everybody is more upbeat; there is more energy in the building, and your hopes are higher. When you lose, as we did in Buffalo, the bye hurts. It gives an extra week to ponder failings and that next game – for us it’s at Pittsburgh on Monday, Nov. 5 – can’t come fast enough. The only salve for a loss is winning the next game.

Also, because we’re not playing a game for 15 days, and we have no activities for the media to cover during the bye week, we get that last loss shoved at us for a longer time. Reporters still have to produce stories about the Ravens – the fans demand that from the media. They’re not going to report about the next game yet – so, we get a little more abuse this week…a lot of dissection, criticism and suggestion. We could have prevented a lot of that by winning in Buffalo, but we didn’t. As we like to say in our business, “it is what it is.”

Coach Billick will kick the coaches out of the office Thursday and tell them to come back fresh Monday morning. Dick Cass, our president, will close the office tomorrow, (Friday, Oct. 26) in hopes of giving all of us a long weekend. We should all take advantage of these days off. Knowing my fellow workers, many won’t. They’re too competitive. They’ll want to find ways to make sure we win at Pittsburgh and then against Cincinnati the following Sunday. Here’s my guess, if I stop in here Friday and Sunday, there will be a good number of coaches, personnel folks and other staff working. We try to hire hard-working, intelligent and competitive people here. Many always take the extra step to be better. I know Brian, Dick and Ozzie Newsome hope that some of these people, who feel compelled to work while the office is closed, will take the time to get refreshed - so that all of us will be alert for our attack at Pittsburgh.

The players are off this week. Some headed for hometowns to visit family or in-laws. Some of the younger players will go see their college teams play this Saturday. Most will stay in Baltimore. Anyone who saw our game against Buffalo noticed that we were a banged up team with lots of starters (7), including QB Steve McNair and 4 other fellow Pro Bowlers (Jonathan Ogden, Todd Heap, Chris McAlister and Trevor Pryce) on the sideline. That means the training room has been pretty busy this week. The good news is that it looks like all of these players could be back for the game at the Steelers. How good will that be? It would be the first time since the opening quarter of the season at Cincinnati that we had the team this healthy. (I’m knocking on wood right now.)

Coach Billick will have two extra practice days for the players next week. The team will have meetings and practices on both Monday and Tuesday. The players will then be off on Wednesday before beginning the normal pre-game preparations on Thursday. (Those “normal” weekly training/teaching sessions for the next opponent regularly start on Wednesdays, but are pushed back to Thursday when we play on Monday nights.) Playing on Mondays gives the coaches one less day to prepare for the next opponent. In our case, that means one less day to prepare for the Nov. 11th home game against the Bengals. To help ease that burden, Coach Billick and the coaching staff spent most of Tuesday studying Cincinnati.

What the coaches also did this week was evaluate every play from our first 7 games. Part of that self-study had coaches asking: are we putting the players in the spots to best take advantage of each one’s skills; are we calling the right plays; are we playing the right players at the right time; can we be more aggressive; should we be less aggressive and on and on. Ozzie and his staff also join the evaluation, and some of the results from all of this will be presented to the players next week.

WHAT WE'VE LEARNED

As we’ve limped through a 4-3 start to the season, we’ve learned a lot about some of the younger players on the roster. They have had to play because of the unusual number of injuries we’ve had to key veteran players. Here are some of the things we’ve noticed:

• Marshal Yanda, the 2007 3rd-round pick from Iowa, is a Raven. He prepares and plays like we want our players to perform. He is tough – really tough, fearless, smart, loves to practice and play. He has held his own at right tackle and will be a long-time contributor to Ravens success. When Adam Terry and Jonathan Ogden are healthy, Yanda will go back to being a backup, but those two veterans will know he’s knocking on the door.
• Jared Gaither, the supplemental pick from Maryland, should be playing against Georgia Tech and Clemson, but he’s lining up against Pro Bowlers in the NFL. Jared is really raw – he played just two seasons at Maryland and only two years of football at the prep level. Well, because of the injuries, he hasn’t had the time we wanted to give him to learn to play at this level. He was thrown into the water, barely knowing how to swim – and he survived. He held his own and has a chance to be very good. He seems willing to do all the things you have to do to succeed in the NFL. Good signs here.
• Chris Chester can be an NFL starting center. At this level, the center has to make all kinds of calls before the ball is snapped. The position is just not about knocking defenders back and protecting the quarterback. Chris can handle this, and he’s an outstanding athlete. Remember, 24 months ago, he was an Oklahoma tight end moving inside on the line to help the Sooners. We took him in the 2nd round in ’06, and he’s the real deal. When Mike Flynn is healthy, Chester will back up, but we’ve found a long-term answer at center whenever Mike decides to hang ‘em up.
• 2007 1st-round pick Ben Grubbs is also the real deal. Typical of Ozzie and his staff’s 1st-round selections, Grubbs is really good. He’s making some mistakes, but the NFL game is not too big for him. He could be a 10-year starter.
• TE Quinn Sypniewski is better than we thought he would be when we took him in the 5th round in ’06. With injuries to Heap and the very capable Daniel Wilcox, “Syp” has had to step up. He has. Lost in the shuffle of injuries to Pro Bowl-type players has been the injuries to Wilcox. We miss him. With Heap coming back, hopefully, soon, we need “Syp” to be ready, and he has done the job.

A few words on a couple of veteran replacements who have helped us stay close to Pittsburgh in the AFC North:

• QB Kyle Boller: he gives us everything he has. He’s courageous on the field and can make every throw a quarterback needs to make. The former starter replaced the injured McNair, and Kyle has clearly progressed. When you compare our top two QBs – McNair and Boller – to other teams’ top tandems, we come out pretty good. We know we can win with Kyle if something happens to Steve. Some teams hope their backup can win. We know we can win with Kyle.
• Corey Ivy might epitomize everything we want from a player’s effort. He has bounced around the NFL (New England, Cleveland, Tampa and St. Louis) before landing here in 2006. We have players who play as hard as Corey, but no one plays harder. He is absolutely fearless and believes he will win every matchup he encounters. He has been described as too small (5-9) and too slow, but he’s playing cornerback in the NFL at a pretty good level. He’s smart, does what the coaches ask and inspires his teammates with his spirited play in games and practices. As Ozzie likes to say: “He’s a Raven.”

(By the way, our special teams will get better when players like Ivy and Sypniewski and, hopefully, Wilcox, get back into the regular rotation with those groups.)

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE

Coach Billick said it at last Monday’s press conference: “We are what we are. We’re 4 and 3. We earned those 4 victories and earned those 3 losses.” We can all speculate that we would have a better record if we had a little luck with our injuries. But, Brian doesn’t accept that. He’s into the “next man up” theory. If Todd Heap and Daniel Wilcox can’t play, Quinn Sypniewski is paid to step up. If Ogden is hurt, then Marshal Yanda has to grow up fast. Would we have won at Buffalo and at Cincinnati if Steve McNair wasn’t injured? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter. We are what we are.

We’re going into our 8th game of the season. It will be at Pittsburgh in a Monday night special. The winner of that game will be in 1st place in the AFC North at the halfway point of the season. That would be a nice “we are what we are” moment if the Ravens find a way to win that battle.

Talk to you next week.

Kevin

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Kevin Byrne is the Ravens’ Senior Vice President – Public and Community Relations. He has worked in the NFL since 1977, when he was the then-youngest public relations director in the league (for the then-St. Louis Cardinals), except for the two years he was the Director of Public Affairs for TWA (Trans World Airlines). He has been with the Ravens since they began, and before that was a vice president with the Cleveland Browns. He has won a Super Bowl ring with the 2000 Ravens and an NCAA basketball championship with Al McGuire’s Marquette team in ’77. He was on the losing end of historic games known for the “Drive” and the “Fumble.” He has worked closely and is friends with some of the best in the game: Ozzie Newsome, Brian Billick, Ray Lewis, Bill Cowher, Marvin Lewis, Mike Nolan, Marty Schottenheimer and Shannon Sharpe to name a few.