When I heard that Brian Billick had written a book, I was pretty stoked. Finally, I thought, we'll get the inside story on his surprising dismissal by the Ravens, his up-and-down relationship with team owner Steve Bisciotti, that strange Super Bowl news conference during which he chastised the media for its treatment of Ray Lewis ... and a lot of the other behind-the-purple-curtain stuff that we've all been wondering about since he was fired after the 2007 season.
So, when the publisher sent The Baltimore Sun an advance copy of the manuscript - titled "More Than a Game: The Glorious Present and Uncertain Future of the NFL" - I waded right in.
I'll give Billick this much: He delivers an interesting take on the state of the sport and - in the early chapters - a primer on what it's really like to be an NFL head coach. He brings along some additional wisdom from the guys he coached for and against, including Bill Walsh, Tony Dungy and Bill Cowher. And he proves that even a super-focused NFL coach is capable of seeing beyond his own horizon.
In the course of the 250 or so pages, he travels across the football spectrum, explaining the Cover 2 defense in one chapter and the intricacies of the NFL Network's various cable and satellite deals in another.
What he doesn't do is what most readers in Ravenland probably will wish he had. He does not dish on the Ravens' front office and Bisciotti. He has very little to say about the dynamic players who helped him win a Super Bowl. There is the occasional rationale for the way he handled a certain situation - the ill-fated attempt to develop Kyle Boller into a franchise quarterback comes to mind - but the book is really not about the Ravens.
It's more about Billick's expanding his image as a major player on the NFL scene, which should be helpful in his new career as a television analyst and won't be hurtful to any future opportunity to coach another NFL team.
I don't know if he was consciously playing it safe for future employment reasons, but it wouldn't surprise me. I mean, I've seen the guy punt on fourth-and-short inside the 35-yard line. What I do know is that Billick is not interested in fading out of the NFL picture, and this book lets him project himself more as a football statesman than as just somebody manning the Telestrator in the broadcast booth.
