Brian Billick just posted an extraordinary article on NFL.com:
http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d...winning-titles ("Dilfer aside, elite quarterbacks essential to winning titles", Jan. 26).
Billick in this article tries to justify his firing Dilfer using the usual reasons we've all heard a hundred times, Dilfer was not "elite", Billick wanted to "upgrade the quarterback position" and so on. Nothing new there.
What
is new and
very important is the bolded part of the following passage from Billick's article:
It's obvious reading this that Billick is blaming
Dilfer for the
"five game span in which we lost three of those five games."
There's just one slight problem with Billick's theory - Dilfer was installed as starting quarterback after the previous QB had lost the three games and gone 5-3. Dilfer lost his first game, his only Ravens loss, then went on his 11 game winning streak, outscoring opponents 288-90, with only one game decided by less than 10 points.
It wasn't Dilfer at all who
"failed to score an offensive touchdown in a five game span" - that was the prior starting quarterback (Banks)! But if you read the sentence carefully, Billick is saying he did what he had to do to replace a quarterback who lost three out of five games. That's
not Dilfer!
There are only two possibilities, and both are nearly unbelievable:
(A) Billick is
intentionally lying about Dilfer to the NFL.com audience, most of whom are not at all familiar with the 2000 season or exactly what Dilfer did. Billick figures he can get away with it, since non-Ravens fans don't know the truth and most Ravens fans don't seem to care.
(B) Billick
actually believes that Dilfer went five games without an offensive touchdown and lost three games.
If
(A) is true, then Billick is just a liar, trying to slander Dilfer in order to bolster his own standing. But really, why would Billick do that? It doesn't make much sense to embellish the Dilfer firing like that - he could just have criticized Dilfer's ability directly - non-Ravens fans don't know anything about Dilfer, and most Ravens fans already agree Dilfer was not "elite."
So it doesn't make much sense for Billick to lie.
But if Billick is
not lying, then Billick thought Dilfer had lost those games. Option
(A) is false, so option
(B) must be true. Billick actually believes it was Dilfer, not Banks, who lost the three games and went five games without a TD. And that, more than anything else, might
finally explain the real reason Billick fired Dilfer in 2001.
What if Billick, after a busy season with a busy lifestyle, maybe drinking a bit too much celebratory champagne, got confused and literally
forgot that Dilfer had only been the starter since game 9 of the season? What if Billick thought Dilfer was so poor offensively because Billick was blaming Dilfer for losses in games that Dilfer didn't play in at all? It sounds absurd, but, as Holmes said, when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Billick has no reason to lie, so he should believe he is telling the truth - which means he believes Dilfer, not Banks, lost those games.
It's amazing to think that everything the Ravens and Dilfer went through since the firing could have been due just to a confused head coach - but the words are in black and white: Billick wrote them, not me.
[Every time I mention Dilfer, I get a chorus of people saying he's not relevant, etc. But this post
is obviously relevant because the Billick article just came out a few days ago, on a widely read site. And Billick gives extraordinary new insight into why Dilfer was fired - a reason that had never before appeared in print. So this post and the Billick article are absolutely relevant to the Ravens.]