Meet the New Boss

"A lot of it focused on me, but it was always inclusive," Billick said. "Yeah, there were times when being part of it was rough. I had to say to Ozzie and Steve, 'You know I'm sitting here, right?' Because they were taking a pretty good hunk out of my ass at times, talking about a number of different things. But at the end of the day, if you were able to take the ego out of the way, they were valid observations.

"And they were observations that I appreciated because I knew what their intent was. Their intent wasn't to punish me, it was to help me. It really was. And I had to joke with my wife. I'd come home and talk about it and she'd get upset and I'd say: 'Why are you getting upset? These people are saying things you've been saying for 25 years.' And she said, 'Yeah, but I'm your wife.' "

At the time, it was widely assumed in football circles that Billick would be fired. And yet inside the meetings at the Ravens' headquarters, that was the last thing Bisciotti wanted to do. At one point, he walked into the office of Kevin Byrne, senior vice president of public and community relations, and said, "You know, I have no intention of firing Brian."

Instead, the bigger concern, according to those in the process, was that Billick wouldn't want to stay, either because he was tired of Baltimore or because he wouldn't be able to adapt to the job they were designing.

But Billick was excited by the chance to make something new. It was a peculiar place for him: helping to create an ideal vision of what a head coach should be without knowing if he would actually stick around to be that head coach. Yet because of the strangely creative atmosphere in the room, it didn't seem that unusual to the men inside.

"It was good to have a coach who has been a coach," Newsome said. "It's easy for us to say, 'This is the way we want it to be,' but we weren't the ones who were going to have to turn around and go down to the locker room."

Then he laughed.

"We sit here all the time and ask, 'What does it take to be a good quarterback?' Wouldn't it help to have a quarterback to tell you what it's like?"

Ultimately, when they created the job description they wanted, everyone turned to Billick. A decision had to be made. They could take their list of criteria and begin a search all over the country for 20 candidates who might be able to fit in, or keep the man who helped create the list, asking him to change by delegating lesser responsibilities, talking more to his players and listening more to his assistant coaches.

Billick said he wanted to stay.

"Three men came together, did a thorough critique of their organization, laid out the objectives they want at the end of the day, through the critique," he said. "Then the owner put the money where his mouth was, so to speak. At the end of the day, he said: 'Here's what we want you to do and we think you are the guy to do it. Do you want to be on board?'

"Allowing me to have an input on what we were doing, how can you ask for more than that?"