Before Sunday night’s thrashing in San Diego, Baltimore looked like as good a bet as anyone to emerge as the AFC’s Super Bowl team. But the Ravens sure didn’t look like a championship team on Sunday night.
“Championship teams don’t take a step back,” Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs said afterward, via CSNBaltimore.com. “It’s a reality check. You don’t show up to play in a big game like this, you get your ass whipped.”
The Ravens are now half a game behind the Steelers, who play the 49ers tonight, in the AFC North. That means Baltimore has gone from having a good chance at winning home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs to now having a good chance at a wild card. That’s the difference between needing to win twice at home to get to the Super Bowl and needing to win three times on the road to get to the Super Bowl.
“We’re in hell now, but we have a vacation home in hell,” Suggs said.
Suggs said it wasn’t that the Ravens were unprepared. It was just that they didn’t execute.
“I’m disappointed,” Suggs said, “because our coaches prepared us for this. We knew they were going to try to light up the scoreboard. But we came out and played like that. It’s just disappointing.”
On a wild Sunday in the NFL, there may not have been a more disappointing team than the Ravens.