With the goal of getting healthy, Harbaugh sat a group of veterans and starters in the Cincinnati game with dual purposes – to rest and keep assets like Joe Flacco, Matt Birk, Terrell Suggs, Haloti Ngata, and Ray Rice healthy, but also to see what Tyrod Taylor, Gino Gradkowski, Josh Bynes, Bernard Pierce and other younger players looked like playing at full speed against a playoff-caliber team.
Harbaugh especially wanted to see more of Pierce from a strategic standpoint: “I think the world of Bernard,” Harbaugh said. “I think the world of our rookies. We have a lot of good players there. Bernard has some skills, and the fact that if you have a one-two punch in there at running back, it sure helps you. It changes the pace a little bit, and it gives Ray [Rice] a chance to breathe. It’s going to make Ray better in the fourth quarter of the game or in the fourth quarter of the season. That’s something that is going to be really valuable for us going forward.”
The biggest wild card – and he was big – was veteran left tackle Bryant McKinnie, who was inserted in to play with the patch work “B team” in Cincinnati in the hopes that he’d show he could be the player they needed him to be in January. With Jah Reid suffering a toe injury, McKinnie was the next man up after spending most of the season on the end of the bench and, some believed, in Harbaugh’s doghouse.
Bryant Douglas McKinnie, born September 23, 1979, in Woodbury, New Jersey, is a bit of a gentle giant. His hometown is just seven miles from Joe Flacco’s hometown of Audubon, just south down North Broad Street. Their high school alma maters compete frequently. Soft-spoken, and almost quiet in his delivery, he spent most of the season at his locker in the corner waiting for his number to be called. He wasn’t fully healthy, and the Ravens coaches didn’t feel like he was in shape.
More than anything, McKinnie was accustomed to playing and starting. It’s all he’d ever known because he was a blue-chip player his entire professional career. He attended two years of junior college at Lackawanna College in Scranton, Pennsylvania. where he gained 70 pounds and moved from the defensive line to offensive tackle. He was discovered by the University of Miami and recruited to Coral Gables in 1999 and redshirted. He spent two years with the Hurricanes and never surrendered a sack, winning the Outland Trophy in 2001. He played both years with Ed Reed in Miami and roomed with NFL star tight end Jeremy Shockey in college.
In the 2002 draft, he was one of five first round players selected from The U, including Shockey (14th), Phillip Buchanon (17th), Ed Reed (24th) and Mike Rumph (27th). But of all of the stars from Miami, McKinnie was the prize. He was the 7th overall pick of the Minnesota Vikings, chosen to be their starting left tackle.
McKinnie always battled weight issues, but represented a towering, terrorizing figure for pass rushers throughout his career. He was the classic guy who played well on Sunday but didn’t necessarily practice well on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. At one point in Minnesota, he was thrown off the Pro Bowl roster for not reporting to practices in Hawaii.
But it was hard to argue with the results the Ravens got in 2011 from McKinnie, who was cut from the Vikings earlier that summer when his weight reportedly ballooned to nearly 400 pounds. He was implicated in the Vikings’ famous “Love Boat” cruise and had a few minor skirmishes with the law in Minnesota and Miami, but proved to be reliable on the field during his first season with the Ravens.
McKinnie first arrived from Minnesota in September of the previous season after being a camp cut in the summer of 2011. He had just days before the season opener to learn schemes and get to know teammates. He had less than a week to prepare to start against the Pittsburgh Steelers but nearly singlehandedly helped Flacco win the game with protection against James Harrison and LaMarr Woodley as the Ravens laid a 35-7 woodshed ass-kicking on their rival to start the season.
And he was still on the field protecting Flacco at the AFC Championship Game in New England some 18 games later. He had never missed a start in 164 games as a left tackle in the NFL and been elected to two Pro Bowls. He felt like he was reliable.
