Safety Bernard Pollard isn’t simply done talking about the Ravens. He’s done talking to the Ravens. Well, at least some of them.
Pollard tells 105.7 The Fan in Baltimore that he won’t be attending Baltimore’s post-Super Bowl visit to the White House.
“I’m not gonna be there,” Pollard said. “I gotta sit this one out, man. I actually have a vacation with my family and then I’m coming back to get [my ring]. If I didn’t have a vacation, I wouldn’t come in anyway.”
So what’s the problem?
“It’s not my teammates,” Pollard said. “It’s not my teammates at all. I would celebrate with them any time, any day of the week I would celebrate with them. But at the end of the day, I know what happened, I know what took place. . . . I’m sorry, I just don’t want to be in the room with certain people.”
Pollard didn’t name the “certain people” with whom he doesn’t want to share space. But he heaped praise on G.M. Ozzie Newsome and owner Steve Bisciotti, so it’s apparently not them.
“Ozzie is great,” Pollard said. “Ozzie is amazing. I love Ozzie, man, he gave me an opportunity. Mr. Bisciotti. It’s just one of those things where they made some moves, they cleaned house, Ozzie put together a really, really good defense as we see on paper right now.”
Pollard still seems to be particularly troubled by the situation that has been characterized in the media as “practically a mutiny,” along with its potential link to his release.
“I’m just a player where you ask me my opinion, I’m gonna tell you,” Pollard said. “And for you to get upset or whatever afterwards, you know, you asked me. That’s that. . . . We were just asked our opinion about something. And we let the coach know our opinion. . . . It was us as players. . . . We were asked, the floor was open. And we responded, and let the coaches know how we felt, and that’s how it has to be as a football team. We can’t walk around on eggshells as a football team.”
Though Pollard didn’t specifically mention coach John Harbaugh, it’s likely that he’s one of the people against whom Pollard holds a grudge.
Then again, Harbaugh and the Ravens ultimately may be in the right. Pollard will never admit -- indeed, he may not even realize -- that he was out of line or over the top in anything he said or did while with the Ravens. Still, Pollard has a reputation for being outspoken, for complaining, and for drawing too much attention to himself.
“Three teams in how many years,” one source said in the wake of Pollard’s release. “Soon four. What does that tell you?”
The Ravens surely didn’t expect Pollard’s habit of complaining to suddenly change once he was released. Still, if he can manage not to complain his way off the roster in Tennessee until 2014, it’ll be well worth the price of admission to see the Ravens and Titans get together in Baltimore.