'It was a different time': 2000 Ravens were one of the last teams of its kind (2024)

Brian Billick figured the letter was written by a lawyer or maybe an accountant. The author never said, but it was detailed, organized and impassioned. For 12 pages, the letter tore into Billick and the Ravens offensive coaches, citing everything that they were doing wrong and outlining what they needed to do differently.

The author eventually reached the point of resignation.

“At the end, it said, ‘I don’t know why I’m wasting my time telling you this, because you’re just a dumb son of a bitch,’” Billick recalled. “Well, when you haven’t scored in a month, it is what it is. You’re kind of like, ‘OK, well?’”

Billick read the initial letter while the 2000 Ravens were going through a stretch of near-unprecedented offensive futility. “We were just trying to survive,” he said.

More than three months later after leading the Ravens to their first Super Bowl victory, he returned to his office to find another letter written by the same person. It was far more succinct.

“You’re thinking, ‘OK, I took the slings and arrows when we weren’t doing well, so fair is fair.’ I opened it up and it had one line in it. I swear to God. It just said, ‘Don’t get co*cky, you’re still a dumb son of a bitch,’” Billick said.

“What it underlines to me, having come through that, it strengthened the team. We kind of regrouped and found our rhythm as to who we really were: defense, run the ball, don’t turn it over and that will win. We embraced it and that’s what led to the Super Bowl. That was one of those unique situations where I truly believe, in hindsight, that we would have not gone on to have that 11-game winning streak and won the Super Bowl had we not gone through that. We had to go through that baptism.”

Twenty years later and as another Super Bowl champion is set to be crowned, the 2000 Ravens are still reveling in that improbable journey. In a sport now defined by offensive explosiveness and excellence, the Ravens won because of a record-setting defense. In the same stadium where Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes will duel Sunday evening, the Ravens captured a championship with a quarterback in Trent Dilfer who was tasked with just managing the game and not screwing it up.

The 2000 Ravens didn’t score an offensive touchdown for the entire month of October. They made a starting quarterback change in Week 8. They leaned heavily on a rookie running back and a 32-year-old tight end. They adopted an offensive approach where the only unacceptable outcome of a possession was a turnover.

Yet, the formula lifted the franchise to the NFL mountaintop and made those Ravens one of the last teams of its kind.

“It was a different time. Our championship, New England’s and Tampa Bay’s, those three in a row happened at a time where we were transitioning from the great quarterbacks of the time, the Marino’s, the Elway’s and the Montana’s, and we hadn’t yet had the Manning’s, the Rodgers’ and the Brees’. Tom Brady was not yet Tom Brady,” Billick said. “There was a void of great quarterback play, where you could win with just great defenses. The league has changed a lot since then. We’re now as rich and as deep in future Hall of Fame quarterbacks as we’ve ever been in this league.”

Last Thursday, on the official 20-year anniversary of their 34-7 victory over the New York Giants at Raymond James Stadium, members of the Super Bowl XXXV champions gathered for a virtual celebration of the accomplishment. Looking back on it now, that team was loaded. It had four eventual Hall of Famers, three of them getting in on their first ballot. It had players who went on to win AP Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year awards. A good chunk of the defensive starters played in Pro Bowls. Players still talk about the chemistry and the camaraderie that team shared.

Yet, two decades later, the struggles the Ravens endured and overcame are still evident in the feelings of the two quarterbacks who played extensively that year. Dilfer, the backup-turned-starter who effectively carried out the midseason philosophy change on offense, is still miffed about the team replacing him with free agent Elvis Grbac a few weeks after the Super Bowl. He told ESPN for a story last week that the decision “set (the organization’s) identity back light years by getting it wrong.”

Tony Banks, the man Dilfer replaced following a brutal third quarter in a Week 9 loss to the Tennessee Titans, is reluctant to even talk about the 2000 season and would seemingly prefer people forget that he was even on that team. He gave his Super Bowl ring to his father not long after receiving it.

“I’ve always been competitive, I’ve always had a lot of confidence in my ability, so I don’t like sharing a time with people in my career where I wasn’t the starter and my team went on to win without me,” Banks told The Athletic in an interview several months ago. “That’s why I don’t wear the ring. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been in the league and if you don’t know who I am, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, what position did you play?’ Then, it’s the next question. It just bounces to a place I don’t like to go. It’s embarrassing and it still brings back some bad memories.”

The 2000 Ravens did indeed start as Banks’ team. They signed him to a four-year extension in the offseason after Banks led the Ravens to a 6-4 finish the previous year. A former second-round pick of the St. Louis Rams, Banks had a big arm and a gunslinger’s mentality. That fit perfectly with Billick’s offensive vision. Billick, the coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings’ record-breaking offense in 1998, wanted an explosive, big-play attack.

“At the beginning of the year, Brian laid out a clear and easy plan of who was the starting quarterback and Tony Banks was the guy, end of discussion,” said Qadry Ismail, the team’s top returning receiver on that team. “He said, ‘You’re going to be able to throw in my offense for 4,000 yards and you should have about 30 touchdowns the way this offense functions.’ I was straight up salivating. I’m thinking, ‘My goodness, I’m about to be a 1,200-yard receiver.’”

In a 39-36 Week 2 victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars, Banks justified that hype. He rallied the Ravens out of a 16-point halftime deficit by throwing five touchdown passes, including the 29-yard game winner to tight end Shannon Sharpe with 41 seconds remaining.

Through six weeks of the season, the Ravens were 5-1. The Ray Lewis-led defense had already logged three shutouts. The offense was doing just enough, but was starting to show a mystifying inability to get in the end zone. In the final two games of a three-game winning streak, the Ravens totaled 27 points on nine Matt Stover field goals.

“Tony mentally would just have these lapses where it would frustrate Brian, but I didn’t think that he was on the hot seat,” Ismail said. “I thought things were good. It was a surprise to us when they took Tony out and all of a sudden, Trent started warming up. I was like, ‘Wait a minute. What’s Trent warming up for? Trent can’t throw the ball.’”

The Ravens lost 10-3 to Washington in Week 7, their third straight game not scoring a touchdown. That didn’t do Banks in. However, the following week, the Ravens were locked into a tight game with the Titans in the third quarter, when Banks imploded. He threw three interceptions in a four-drive span, including one that was returned for a touchdown. After he was picked off by Dainon Sidney inside the red zone in the final minute of the third quarter, Billick decided he had seen enough.

Baltimore had a championship-level defense. However, there was no defense for back-breaking turnovers.

“You don’t make that change not being cognizant of the fact that there’s nothing that shakes the foundation of an organization more than a change at quarterback. I didn’t just haphazardly go, ‘Screw it. I’m going to switch it.’ And that other stuff about putting him back in, that’s bullsh*t. When you pull a quarterback like that, you know he’s done,” Billick said.

“I knew what it meant to Tony Banks, but the interceptions he was throwing and the last one, in particular, was for a lack of a better word, predictable. We talked about it, told him that he needed to be aware of it and he went right back on the field and threw it. I thought, ‘OK, this team needs better.’ We needed a steadier hand and I knew Trent could give us that hand.”

Dilfer, though, couldn’t rescue the Ravens from a 14-6 defeat to the Titans, and he didn’t play well the following week, when Baltimore lost, 9-6, to the Pittsburgh Steelers. It marked the fifth consecutive game without an offensive touchdown and it dropped the team to 5-4.

“Billick, he never really was my guy anyways. I don’t think he was really big on giving me that contract after ’99,” Banks said. “I think he was looking for an opportunity to make a change and I wasn’t playing well for a couple of games. But if you look at my first 16 starts there, I think I deserved more than a two-game slump, you know? That’s what it was and I ended up being a backup basically for the rest of my career.”

Billick didn’t just make a quarterback change. In inserting Dilfer, he adopted a philosophy change. The swashbuckling coach advised Dilfer to play conservatively and not worry about winning with his arm. The Ravens would play the field position game, leaning heavily on rookie running back Jamal Lewis, Stover and the defense. That was a tough epiphany for a head coach who was hired to bring a high-scoring offense to Baltimore.

Billick also challenged the defense, telling it that it needed to start holding teams to six points or less. His defensive coordinator, Marvin Lewis, took it further. He told his players that the Ravens needed to start out-scoring opposing offenses.

“When we went to Trent, the light kind of clicked in Brian and everybody’s head. It was like, ‘Look, if we don’t turn the ball over and we just punt the ball, play good special teams and defense, the odds were that we were going to win a lot of games,” said defensive tackle Tony Siragusa. “Brian quit trying to force offense. We’ll just win field position, special teams and we’ll win on defense.”

Brandon Stokley was a second-year receiver for the Ravens who had played in just two games as a rookie and had one catch. He also was inactive for eight of the Ravens’ first nine games in 2000. Stokley was one of the unlikeliest candidates to break the NFL’s longest streak without an offensive touchdown in two and a half decades.

In the second quarter of a Week 10 game in Cincinnati, the Ravens faced a third-and-8. Stokley, who developed a nice rapport with Dilfer in practice, lined up in the slot to the right of the quarterback with Jermaine Lewis out wide. Stokley’s route took him toward the middle of the field and then he broke back toward the sideline. Dilfer hit him and Stokley raced to the end zone for a 14-yard score.

“The route was an angle route and a return,” Stokley said. “When I broke at about three or four yards, the guy jumped hard inside and I put my foot in the ground and returned back outside. It was just wide open. Really good play call and I caught it. It was a really cool moment to get in the end zone and break that streak.”

The touchdown, which Billick celebrated by pumping his arms into the air, also broke the ice. The Ravens offense got into the end zone again less than eight minutes later and then a little more than four minutes after that with Sharpe catching two touchdown passes from Dilfer. They pummeled the Bengals, 27-7, at Paul Brown Stadium and that’s where the Super Bowl run officially began.

In four November victories, the Ravens averaged just more than 30 points and just less than 420 yards per game. Lewis had over 90 yards rushing for seven consecutive games and was on his way to a 1,300-yard rookie rushing season. Sharpe was making plays. Dilfer didn’t completely eliminate the turnovers, but his presence and leadership had a galvanizing effect on the offense.

“Trent was mega conservative, but it worked for him and it worked for what we had,” Ismail said. “At the end of the day, you got Ray Lewis and Rod Woodson on the other side of the field, along with other studs across the board, and they were having a historic year. You learned just to shut your mouth and enjoy the ride.”

Driving for the potential tie-breaking score versus the Titans in Week 11, Dilfer was intercepted by Perry Phenix, who returned it 87 yards for a touchdown and a 23-17 Tennessee lead with 2:30 to go. Dilfer returned to the offensive huddle and told his teammates that they were going to drive the length of the field and score.

The Ravens did just that and Dilfer hit Patrick Johnson for the game-winning 2-yard touchdown pass with 25 seconds to play. It was the Titans’ first defeat at Adelphia Stadium and it foreshadowed what would happen two months later when the teams met in the postseason.

“Trent was just the perfect guy for that football team and the style of football that we were playing,” Stokley said. “He just had a way of rallying the guys and making us all believe we were going to find a way to win, no matter what the situation was. He didn’t have an ego. It wasn’t about passing yards or numbers. It was all about going out there and finding ways to win football games.”

Still, Stokley wondered if the way the Ravens were playing was sustainable, even as they ran off wins in their final seven games to finish the regular season at 12-4. Ismail had the same concerns, estimating that the team had two good passing practices the entire time Dilfer was at the helm and one of them was Super Bowl week. Ismail remembers one Friday practice in particular where Dilfer struggled so badly that Billick yelled to offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh that he didn’t want to see another passing play for the rest of the practice.

Yet, on game days, Dilfer, who was playing through myriad injuries, and the Ravens offense made it work.

“It went to handing it off right and handing it off left and I do agree that I wouldn’t have been able to do that. I’m going to pick it up and throw it and we really didn’t have the personnel to do that,” Banks said. “Most of my success came from throwing outside. I don’t know if we would have won a Super Bowl, but I wouldn’t have been audibling to a run, I know that.”

The Ravens followed the formula all the way through the playoffs. Dilfer threw only 14 passes in an easy opening-round win against Denver with the defense holding the Broncos to 177 total yards and three points. The following week, the Ravens broke a fourth-quarter tie with the Titans by scoring on a 90-yard blocked field goal and a Ray Lewis interception return. In the AFC Championship Game, Siragusa knocked out Oakland Raiders quarterback Rich Gannon and the Ravens got all the offense they’d need in a 16-3 win on Sharpe’s 96-yard touchdown.

Super Bowl XXXV felt more like a Ravens’ coronation. They predicted to everybody all week that they’d dominate the Giants. Marvin Lewis told the offense that it would need only 10 points to win and he was right. The only touchdown the Giants scored was on a kickoff return. Dilfer completed only 12 passing attempts, including a 38-yard touchdown to Stokley, and the Ravens punted 10 times in the game. However, they scored on an interception return and a kickoff return. It wasn’t a pretty performance, but it was a vintage 2000 Ravens performance.

“Whether it was the scoring drought we had in October, the 11 ensuing games, the road warriors that we had to be during the playoffs, that team just fed off each other and removed the egos,” Billick said. “We had a generationally dominant defense. We were second in the league in rushing, led the league in turnovers. That was the formula we bought into. For some of the offensive guys, that’s not personally the most gratifying, because you’re not going to put up the numbers you want to advance your career or get the next contract. But it didn’t matter. It was all about the drive to a Super Bowl. It was a special time. I’m sure everybody feels the same way.”

Ismail, who dealt with a knee injury, called the season “the best hardest” year of his life. It obviously wasn’t easy on Banks either and he has one particular lament.

“Trent, when he was my backup, he was the consummate pro. He made sure that any breakdowns I wanted, he had them to me by Monday morning, two days ahead of time. He was definitely a hard worker for me as my backup, but when the roles got reversed, I did not help him at all. That was not mature of me,” Banks said. “It’s one of the few regrets I have. I always considered myself a good teammate. The quarterback room was always a good room for me. That being said, there’s some ebbs and flows to that position and at that point in time, I was not mature enough to handle those peaks and valleys.”

Banks and Dilfer departed the organization not long after the Super Bowl. The Ravens held the crux of their championship team together for one more year, but a divisional-round playoff loss to the Steelers the following season spurred a significant rebuild.

As the years have gone by, fewer and fewer teams have even tried to win as the 2000 Ravens did. It’s now a different game, driven by dynamic offenses and with rules making playing defense even harder.

Mahomes and Brady, the two opposing quarterbacks in Sunday’s Super Bowl LIV, ranked second and third respectively in the NFL in passing yards during the regular season and the Chiefs and the Buccaneers ranked first and seventh in yards per game, and sixth and third in points per game.

But to many of the 2000 Ravens, what the league has become has only made what that accomplished 20 years ago feel even more special and unique.

“Being an announcer on Fox for 13 years, I saw things changing. Everything is about scoring and how do we get better ratings and how do we treat quarterbacks better than everybody else on the field,” Siragusa said. “We didn’t score a touchdown in five games and we ended up winning two of them, but it was exciting. Most of the teams now, other than the Ravens who still have the same mentality, they’re putting a lot of the money into the offense because the rules make it an offensive game. Our goal in 2000 was to hold a team under 17 and we’d win the game. But the whole mentality in the league has completely changed.”

(Top photo: Elsa / Allsport)