The Ravens open the season in Denver on Sunday afternoon and they won’t be back in Baltimore for the first round of monday morning quarterbacking.
They’ll fly to California instead to prepare for their Week Two game in Oakland, a routine they’ll repeat in Weeks Six and Seven when they face the 49ers and Cardinals on the road in consecutive weeks. They also play in Pittsburgh on a Thursday night in Week Four, which makes for five road games in the first seven weeks of the year.
Ravens coach John Harbaugh said it is “certainly” a challenging slate, but added that every team has challenges over the course of the season and found some emphatic words to express that the Ravens can’t let their particular set stop them from succeeding.
“Our enemies are looking very favorably upon our challenges and they’re hoping our challenges will bring us down,” Harbaugh said, via ESPN.com. “We have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
The Ravens’ enemies probably don’t look so favorably upon the four-week stretch immediately following the game against Arizona. Harbaugh and company will have three straight home games with a bye worked in, which is a pretty nice way to set up for the stretch run.