Ravens Recap

I know I am a week late with this, but I wanted to submit a Ravens recap for the 2008 season. I was on a cruise in Mexico and watched the game on the boat, and I was unable to write about it until now.

I held up on blogging about the Ravens because I know that a) none of my friends really care about Baltimore and b) I didn’t want to get too excited and jinx their chances of getting to the Super Bowl.

Now that the Steelers won and they are the favorites against the awesome Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl this Sunday, I can now reflect on what an awesome year it was.

The Ravens started out the season with almost zero expectations just having fired their head coach and former BYU tight end Brian Billick. Billick led the Ravens to a Super Bowl title after the 2000 season and bought himself a long tenure as the head coach.

The Ravens got a new owner after the 2003 season (the year I interned with the team in public relations) after Art Modell had owned the team since the 1960s. The new owner wanted his own coach to put his imprint on the team since Brian Billick was Modell’s coach that brought him a championship.

The Ravens tried to hire offensive “guru” Jason Garrett from the Dallas Cowboys after all of their success in 2007. Garrett declined the offer from the Ravens and they hired an unknown special teams coordinator from the Philadelphia Eagles named John Harbaugh.

Harbaugh had been shadowed by his brother Jim Harbaugh, who actually was the starting quarterback for the Ravens in the late 1990s. Their father, Jack, was a longtime college coach; so he came from a football family.

Then the Ravens gave up on 1st-round draft pick Kyle Boller (a rookie during with my year with the team in 2003) and they drafted another unknown in Div. II quarterback Joe Flacco from the University of Delaware.

So there you have it, going into the season with and unknown rookie head coach and unknown rookie QB in Joe Flacco. The Ravens weren’t even planning on starting Flacco this year, but Boller got hurt in the pre-season, then former Heisman trophy winner Troy Smith got really sick with tonsillitis and he missed the first month of the season, so Flacco was the starter by default.

But after a decent start, the Ravens caught fire. They won every game they should have, and only lost to a few solid teams that were clearly better than them (Giants, Colts, Titans and Steelers twice). They ended up as the last wild card team in the playoffs just barely beating the New England Patriots in a tie-breaker to get in.

Baltimore beat the Dolphins in Miami in the 1st round then went into Tennessee in the 2nd round. The mighty Titans were the number one seed, but looked vulnerable the last month of the season. The Ravens won an amazing game where they were outplayed, but had just enough breaks to be one game away from the Super Bowl.

They traveled to a cold Pittsburgh stadium after playing 17 straight weeks in a row (the Ravens lost their bye this year because of a scheduling hiccup after a hurricane in Houston). They fought hard, but injuries had taken their toll, and Pittsburgh was the better team that day. The Steelers led the entire game and after going into the 4th quarter down 16-7, the Ravens scored again to get the score 16-14. They forced Pittsburgh to punt, but on the punt, a scrub on the team pushed a Steelers player after they were out of bounds and they started that drive on the 10-yard line instead of the 40-yard line.

The Steelers superstar safety Troy Long-haired Dude intercepted a pass on third down, and the game was over.

It was a great season, and felt a lot like the Jazz two years ago when they caught a couple of breaks to make it to the Western Conference Finals, but in the end the better team won. Arghhh! The frustration of rooting for the little guys who almost could!

I hope one year it’ll all pay off.

P.S. The cruise was good. I think I needed that time to recover from the loss.