Just before the final play of the Super Bowl, with the Ravens about to kick to the 49ers, Joe Flacco walked up and down the Baltimore sideline offering a strange suggestion to his teammates: If 49ers return man Ted Ginn breaks free, they should run off the sideline to tackle him.
That didn’t happen (and if it had, the referee would have awarded the 49ers a game-winning touchdown), but Flacco was asked about it at his press conference on Monday, and he said talking to teammates like that was just his way of burning off nervous energy.
“I saw that people were kind of geting a little mad at me for that,” Flacco said, via the Baltimore Sun. “There was four seconds left in the game, and that was probably the only time all year that I was really, really nervous. I thought it was a pretty funny thing to kind of get my mind off of the fact that there is a possibility that he could run this thing back. I’m sure if I did do that, I’m sure that they could probably give the guy a touchdown.”
Although teammate Anquan Boldin says Flacco was serious, Flacco says he wasn’t.
“Yeah, not really serious,” Flacco said. “They all looked at me like I was crazy. I told the linemen and they kind of backed up for a second like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But, hey, it was just all in good fun, kind of to distract my mind a little bit.”
It wouldn’t have been so fun if one of Flacco’s teammates had taken him seriously and committed a penalty that would have given the 49ers the Super Bowl.