Willis McGahee spent most of the Ravens' 2008 season on his own personal lost patrol. He endured a series of mishaps, some of them of his own making, some not. In the end, he said this week, he learned one thing: "Basically, don't come in with a hard head. That's about it. Don't do that."
Hard-head McGahee arrived for coach John Harbaugh's first Ravens training camp out of shape, needing knee surgery and losing ground. The injuries quickly piled up. Eye, ribs, ankle, concussion, stinger and finally the big one in Pittsburgh - the helmet-to-helmet hit by the Steelers' Ryan Clark that sent him to the hospital.
When McGahee wasn't injured, he was staggered by self-inflicted wounds. There was the radio interview in December when he sounded like a selfish player. There was the subsequent interview, the week before the playoffs, when he declined to back off those statements.
If 2008 was a lost patrol, 2009 is a rescue mission.
Nine months after he was carried off the field on a stretcher, McGahee is back on the team by his own recognizance, a new man, cracking jokes in the locker room, enjoying the sporting life again. Most importantly, he is scoring touchdowns and running to daylight.
He isn't the starting running back for the Ravens, but for the first two weeks of the season he was the man. His two rushing touchdowns in the opener helped topple the Kansas City Chiefs. Two more rushing TDs on Sunday helped the Ravens survive the San Diego Chargers.
The turnabout started, appropriately enough, where the trouble began a year ago: his offseason commitment.
"I think Willis had a great attitude when he came in," Harbaugh said Wednesday. "He's worked hard. I told him I wanted him here for every offseason workout. I was disappointed he wasn't here for every day in the offseason, though he was here for most of them. He obviously worked really hard to get himself in shape. He made every practice in training camp, and it's showing up in how he's playing. He played really well against the Chargers, played well against the Chiefs."
When McGahee, who turns 28 in October, took inventory of his 2008 season (career lows of 671 rushing yards on 170 carries in eight starts), he saw he had no choice but to go with the flow. He knew he had to accept his reduced role in the backfield and make the best of it.
"It was just me going back to looking at everything that happened to me the last couple of years," McGahee said. "It was just about the things I was saying; they'd get all tangled up and twisted. ... It was time for a change."
