Matt Prater hit a 27-yard field goal in the first quarter and Manning orchestrated an 11-play, 78-yard drive that ended with a Jacob Hester 1-yard run to give the Broncos a 10-0 lead late in the second quarter. With 2:09 remaining in the half, the Ravens got the ball on the 20 and went into their no huddle and shotgun offense. Flacco hit Jacoby Jones on a deep pass down the right side for a 43-yard gain and suddenly the Ravens were driving. Ray Rice ran for three and then 11 yards, and Flacco hit Pitta and then Torrey Smith at the 4. The Ravens were on the verge of pulling within a field goal with 30 seconds left and three timeouts in their pocket.
Four plays. Four yards. If Flacco could push the offense into the end zone, the game would be 10-7 at the half and the Ravens would have momentum moving to the second half. The bad taste of the poor play in the first 30 minutes would be wiped away. It would be a 30-minute game.
Instead, Flacco faded back to throw and targeted Anquan Boldin on the left side near the pylon. He threw the ball into the flat and defensive back Chris Harris read it, stepped in front and never broke stride, picking the ball out of the air and sprinting down the north side line on a 98-yard touchdown “Pick Six” giving Denver a 17-0 lead and sending the Ravens into the locker room deflated.
Flacco sprinted the entire 100 yards after Harris and clipped him at the 5-yard line as he fell forward into the end zone. It was a Charlie Brown moment for Flacco, the low point of his season. He was a vision of abject defeat, face down at the other end of the field.
“I made a mistake,” Flacco said. “There’s no other way to put that. I wanted to throw the fade and he came down into the flat the guy undercut and picked it and went the whole way. It was a mistake on my part. Our defense was playing really well, as much as we weren’t playing well at first and we still had that chance to put points on the board. That could’ve changed the game. It was a 14-point swing. That really hurt us.”
The game got out of hand quickly in the second half after a Justin Tucker 45-yard field goal as Manning threw a 51-yard bomb to Eric Decker for a touchdown over Cary Williams that had Ed Reed throwing his helmet on the side line in disgust.
The final score, 34-17, was not indicative of how lopsided the game was when it was 31-3 at the end of the third quarter. Flacco threw a pair of fourth quarter touchdown passes to Dennis Pitta of 31 and 61 yards, which padded an otherwise dismal day where he was 20-for-40 for 254 yards.
Bernard Pierce and Torrey Smith suffered concussions during the game. Marshal Yanda, Bernard Pollard, and Ed Dickson were all missing due to injuries. Terrell Suggs came in and out of the game and was ineffective. Ray Lewis was still a few weeks away. And Jameel McClain and Lardarius Webb were long gone. The injuries piled up.
Harbaugh said the Ravens suffered from “self-inflicted issues.” The unusually boisterous Baltimore crowd booed the Ravens before departing early. The same ugly offense from the road games somehow had now turned up at home.
“That to me is painful,” Harbaugh said of the boos from the home fans in purple. “There’s no question about it. It stings, but rightfully so. That’s the way that we had played. We had done things that you just can’t do if you want to win a football game against a good team, and we did it in the most inopportune times. We did it early – the first drive – and we did it right around halftime. Those are the two situations where you really don’t want those things to happen more than any other situation. We deserved it. We’ve got to go earn those cheers. That’s up to us.”
Once again for Harbaugh and the Ravens it came back to handling adversity. This was clearly the heart of a storm of adversity. For nearly five years they’d had incredible success. They’d made the playoffs every year. They had won playoff games every year. Now, after seemingly scuffling to a 9-2 start with a myriad of good fortune, these last three weeks would provide a huge psychological hurdle for all of them.
“This has been difficult,” Harbaugh admitted. “It’s been challenging. But to me, any adversity, any challenge presents an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for our guys to demonstrate – for all of us – to establish who we are [and] what we’re about. It’s a little easier when things are going well for people to see the good, for people to be in a good place. It’s a little tougher when things get tough. [There’s] the old saying, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ We’ve got some tough guys, mentally-tough guys, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we respond to it.”
As much as Harbaugh had been schooled on downside management from Bisciotti, it was the upside he used in the postgame. “The most important thing to understand is that – and our guys understand this – every goal that we have, starting with our first goal, which is to win the AFC North, is in front of us,” he said “It’s still there, and every dream that we have, which is the ultimate dream, is still available to us. And that’s what you keep in mind. It’s a tough league for tough guys, and you have to find a way to put it behind you, improve, address the issues, own them and move on. That’s what we plan on doing. That’s really the message. It’s going to be the message now. It’s going to be the message next week. It’s going to be the message going forward.”
It was what you expected the head coach to say. And he was right.
But after losing three in a row and given the way the team was playing in all three phases of the game, it was hard to imagine a happy ending in Baltimore if this Broncos loss was fresh in your memory.
With two games left on the schedule, the Ravens still needed just one win to qualify for the playoffs. The other Manning, Eli, the one with two Super Bowl titles, was coming to Baltimore for Christmas weekend. And it didn’t help that the defending World Champion New York Giants had their backs to the wall as well. After that, there was a trip to Cincinnati to face the upstart Bengals, who were battling for a playoff berth to end the 2012 season.
One win. The Ravens only needed one win to qualify for the tournament. Just one win.
With a three-game losing streak, an embattled quarterback, a new offensive coordinator, an injured legend, and an offensive line in a state of flux, the Baltimore Ravens marched toward Christmas with a lot of holiday soul searching on their plates.
Harbaugh was asked if Flacco was pressing too hard. His answer was succinct: “I hope everybody is pressing. I really do. I hope we are all pressing. I hope we are all doing everything we can do to get a little bit better. Where the line is between that and overdoing it, I don’t know. We are all going to press. I’m for pressing.”
Flacco knew people were asking questions about him. He knew the focus would rightfully be on him after a mistake so egregious that even he couldn’t explain it. And he knew that the guy who wanted to turn the $90 million contract into the $100 million contract would need to be a leader in order for the Ravens to rebound and have any hopes in January.
“It tests our leadership,” Flacco said. “It tests our toughness. We believe we have a tight locker room. It’s gonna test that. We’re a 9-5 football team, and it feels like we’re 0-14 right now. That’s just the feeling you have right after a game like this. It’s going to test a lot of things. It’s going to test a lot of things in us, as guys. We believe we’re pretty stand up guys, tough guys – guys with character. We’re going to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror when this is all said and done and we’re going to be able to say we are those type of guys or we’re not those type of guys.
“And, you know, I believe that we are. And you’re going to be able to see that over the next six or seven weeks – however long we have left.”
