Billick gives Ravens the freedom to repeat

Sporting News, The, July 30, 2001 by Dan Pompei

Give Tony Siragusa a crown and scepter. Fan out his purple velvet robe. Feed him grapes one by one. Bring him the finest meats and cheeses.

He is the Super Bowl King, the embodiment of the player who lives the high life of a champion. Appearances? He makes them like Santa in December. Interviews? Put a microphone in his face, and he sings like an oriole.

The only time you see him sweat is when he's signing autographs. He gorges himself like a bear in a cave. And he smiles with his mouth wide open.

What does Brian Billick, Siragusa's coach with the Ravens, do about it? He gives him a wink and permission to skip mandatory minicamp practices.

It is part of Billick's unconventional plan to make the defending champions the repeat champions, a plan formed with help from the book Sacred Hoops, HBO, Elvis and Joe Torre.

"I spent the whole offseason dealing on how to overcome boredom and complacency that comes with being a champion," Billick says by telephone from a Minnesota cabin, where he is vacationing.

"The diffusion of focus is the most likely problem. You're doing so much more in the offseason that you are not preparing the same way. You're complacent, not working out the way you did before you were a champion. To a degree, some of that is absolutely unavoidable.... I've given my players a great deal of latitude. You have to let a champion be a champion. Otherwise, they'll ask themselves why did we do it? You can't stop it anyway."

Like a tai chi master, Billick is not resisting a potentially negative force so much as he's trying to channel it so it isn't harmful. Billick believes his players can be indulgent as well as hungry.

He believes the enjoyment his players have derived from celebrating their success will help motivate them to duplicate it. But history says that doesn't often happen. The 1985 Bears, the most similar champion to the Ravens, are a textbook example of how a team can overdose on its own accomplishments.

Bill Walsh lectures corporations about the fallout from success. The former 49ers coach said that of the 45 players on his 1981 championship team, nine self-destructed before the start of the next season because of drugs, domestic problems or financial problems.

We kid about Siragusa, but we aren't suggesting that this is happening to him or any of his teammates. Billick says he won't dictate what Siragusa does with his free time. He says he'll just make sure the Goose understands what his obligations to the team are.

During his first meeting with the Ravens after being named head coach, Billick told his players he would treat them like men if they acted like men. He didn't change his nobed-checks policy during Super Bowl week. And he's not going to change now. As he wrote in his book, Competitive Leadership, the message he hopes to convey to his players is that he trusts them. That is the foundation for what Billick built and hopes to build again.

Quite a few coaches have responded to a championship by tightening the reins on their teams and increasing their demands. "That's a mistake," Billick says. "You have to make sure your team is prepared mentally and emotionally as well as physically."

Toward that end, Billick is pulling back during training camp, and he already was running one of the lightest camps in the NFL. Billick intends on borrowing the philosophy of Sacred Hoops author and Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who made a point of not wearing out his 1991-92 Bulls team when they were going for their second straight championship.

Billick also learned from the approach of Yankees manager Torre, who has won three straight World Series and recently counseled Billick. He also had conversations about the challenge with Broncos coach Mike Shanahan and Walsh, who both guided repeat champions.

He came to the conclusion that in order for the Ravens to remain a great team, he has to bring his players back to their childhood playgrounds, where games were played because they were games. "I want to make them understand that you get to a stage where it's not about money or even a championship, because you have one," Billick says. "It's about all the reasons that drew you to the game in the first place, and that you only have a limited amount of time to enjoy them. It's tapping into that boyish feeling, their sheer love of the game."

Most coaches of a defending champion wouldn't invite extra attention any more than a landlord would attract ants into his apartment building, but Billick is leaving crumbs on the porch. When he was told of HBO's interest in making a six-part television series out of the Ravens' training camp, Billick found just what he was looking for. The result will be four cameras having nearly complete access to the Ravens' training camp to produce the show Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Baltimore Ravens.

"I want to get them used to the idea of being scrutinized," Billick says. "It will be a lot tougher for guys to fall asleep in meetings, which happens in every training camp in the NFL. It's the ultimate eye in the sky, and it should energize the training environment and force them to be at their best at all times."