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- Covered Eagles for USA Today
- Covered the Ravens for Baltimore Times
- Played college football at Cheyney University
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Tennessee Titans faced the ultimate test when they took on the Baltimore Ravens’ high-powered offense led by MVP front-runner Lamar Jackson in the divisional round of the playoffs Saturday. They did what few other teams could: They passed.
It wouldn’t be right to say the Titans stopped Jackson, because he accounted for 508 yards of total offense. The significant accomplishment was minimizing the explosive plays that Jackson has made a habit of creating that lead to touchdowns.
“They weren’t doing anything spectacular out there — nothing we’ve never seen before,” Jackson said.
How did Titans defensive coordinator Dean Pees frustrate the Ravens’ offense and help punch the Titans’ ticket to the AFC Championship Game?
Force Jackson to move laterally
The Titans wanted to make Jackson run from sideline to sideline rather than get upfield and pick up chunks of yards. They collapsed the interior and rushed with discipline on the outside to minimize escape lanes for Jackson.
“We saw when he [Jackson] gained yards he was getting them between the hashes and the numbers. We defended from number to number and made him go laterally. There weren’t big plays,” coach Mike Vrabel said after the game.
Safety
“They forced us out of our comfort zone a little bit,” Ravens receiver Miles Boykin said. “We really haven’t played a lot from behind. We got down by two touchdowns, and it was kind of hard for us to fight back into the game and stick to our play.” Roman used the rushing attack to generate explosive plays on the ground and in the air via play-action passes during the regular season. The Ravens ran the ball only 29 times on Saturday with some coming from Jackson scrambling. That’s a far cry from the Baltimore attack that averaged 206 rushing yards per game and 37.1 attempts, both league highs. The early lead made Roman’s playcalling one dimensional and allowed Pees to focus on stopping the pass by using packages that featured more defensive backs. A critical moment came early in the game, when Byard intercepted a Jackson pass that bounced off the hands of Ravens tight end Mark Andrews, which set up Jonnu Smith’s fantastic one-handed touchdown reception to give Tennessee a 7-0 lead. The Titans forced three turnovers, including an interception by Vaccaro and a sack-strip by Casey. “It was beautiful,” Casey said. “They made a check on the front line, and I kind of knew a pass was coming. I had been beating these guys all day. Coach said, ‘We need a turnover,’ to make sure we kept the lead, and I was able to execute.” The Titans dominated the trenches throughout the game, especially on fourth down. Baltimore finished the regular season as the NFL’s No. 1 fourth-down offense, having converted 17 of their 24 attempts (70.8%) — including 8-for-8 on fourth-and-1 attempts. On Saturday, the Ravens went 0-for-4 converting fourth downs, including two fourth-and-1 plays. “They like, submarined and kind of took our legs out, and we could not get any movement on the line of scrimmage,” guard
The Titans go from facing the likely 2019 MVP in Jackson to preparing for the 2018 MVP in Mahomes of the
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BALTIMORE — John Harbaugh was standing in the back of his Baltimore Ravens locker room, trying to assess the damage around him, when an awful thought suddenly hit him from the blind side.
“What am I going to do tomorrow?” he blurted out.
He was wearing a purple, short-sleeve T-shirt and a boyish expression of confusion and dismay.
“I’m not watching those games,” he said of Sunday’s divisional matchups in Kansas City and Green Bay. “There’s no way. That’s not even an option.”
Sports can be so downright heartbreaking, so impossibly cruel. A good football man refuses to watch two good football games because, well, the whole thing can really cut you in half.
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Six years ago, after watching his son Peyton and the Broncos get pounded in Super Bowl XLVIII by the Seahawks in his son Eli’s stadium, Archie Manning stood outside the losers’ locker room and told a reporter, “That’s why I hate football.” Yep, a father whose sons had three Super Bowl MVP trophies between them decided he despised the sport that tormented him on that dreadful night in New Jersey.
The Ravens had intimate knowledge of that feeling Saturday night. They had the best player of 2019, the best coach of 2019 and the best roster of 2019 heading into their first game of 2020. Who could fathom that they would go to bed at night knowing that they would spend the rest of their lives trying and failing to explain this magical season that wasn’t?
“You don’t ever expect to get into a car crash until you get in a car crash,” linebacker Matthew Judon said. “And I feel like that’s what it is.”
The No. 6 seed Tennessee Titans physically overwhelmed the top-seeded Ravens in their 28-12 divisional playoff win, leaving the M&T Bank Stadium crowd in a funereal state. The last time the proud football fans of this proud football town absorbed a gut punch such as this, an owner named Robert Irsay had the Colts franchise loaded into 15 Mayflower moving vans in the dead of a March 1984 night for a getaway trip to Indianapolis.
These Ravens were 14-2 and winners of a dozen in a row. Lamar Jackson didn’t just dominate the league in his first full season as a starter. He dramatically altered the calculus of the sport, inspiring forecasts of a new age of athlete at the quarterback position.
The Titans had just beaten Tom Brady, the greatest of them all, on his own turf, but they were a 9-7 afterthought in the regular season and appeared to employ a number of defenders who were likely to zig whenever Jackson zagged.
But even with the kind of point guard (Jackson) and fast-breaking playmakers who would have surely won any best-of-seven basketball series, the Ravens were victimized by the NFL’s best-of-one format. They hadn’t played all-out since Dec. 22 against Cleveland, and the rust and the rest conspired against them and allowed for one of the most stunning postseason results in recent memory.
Jackson threw for 365 yards and ran for 143 more, but for once, his numbers told a big, fat lie. There was some serious garbage-time padding in the box score. Ryan Tannehill threw for only 88 yards and ran for only 13, but he passed for two touchdowns (Jackson passed for one while trailing 28-6 in the fourth) and ran for the one score that effectively sealed the upset (Jackson ran for none). Jackson led the league with 36 touchdown passes, yet he threw for the same amount of scores against Tennessee that Derrick Henry threw against Baltimore.
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The league’s best player and certain MVP was twice picked off and twice stuffed on fourth-and-short rushing attempts. Jackson picked the worst possible time to have a rough night at the office, and hey, that’s life. The layoff killed his team, and so did Henry (195 rushing yards) and a Tennessee defensive front that reduced Baltimore’s offensive line to a shadow of what it had been all season.
Jackson’s fourth-down incompletion with 4:27 left sent scores of fans toward the parking lots and compelled the quarterback to angrily unbutton his chin strap while Tennessee’s dynamic young coach, Mike Vrabel, raised his arms to the sky. Suddenly, the 2019 Titans looked like the 2011 Giants, the only team to win a Super Bowl after going 9-7.
The Ravens? They will learn from this like they learned from Jackson’s first playoff defeat, by the Chargers last season. For a source of inspiration, they could consider a game that involved a local school, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which in 2018 fielded a 16th-seeded NCAA tournament basketball team that destroyed the top-seeded Virginia Cavaliers. Harbaugh was reminded of that game Saturday. He was reminded that the Cavaliers rebounded the next year to win the whole thing.
“Yeah, we could do that,” he said.
Earlier, as he was leaving the podium at his postgame news conference, the coach stopped and hugged his quarterback. “This is our beginning, right?” Harbaugh told Jackson as he patted his back. “This is our beginning.”
Jackson later cut through the locker room with a white towel wrapped around his neck, embracing teammates and others in his path. As he approached his stall, the quarterback took the towel and threw it into the locker manned by his backup, Robert Griffin III. Harbaugh followed soon after, hugging players and thanking them for everything they had given him since training camp.
“I can’t be upset,” the losing coach said after making his rounds. “Every single day, they gave us everything they had. It really was the best we could be. We just played like s— today.”
NFL PrimeTime continues this postseason with extended highlights and analysis following the conclusion of each day’s playoff games. Watch on ESPN+
Because of that, Harbaugh won’t bother watching Texans-Chiefs or Seahawks-Packers. Maybe he will hit some golf balls on Sunday, or maybe he will shoot baskets with his teenage daughter, Alison, who has committed to play lacrosse at Notre Dame.
The sun will come up for the Harbaughs and for Jackson and for all of Baltimore. Because it always does eventually. But without question, the pain of this night is something these 14-3 Ravens will take to their graves.
Life isn’t fair. Neither is sports.
With cornerbacks Mackensie Alexander and Mike Hughes on injured reserve, the Minnesota Vikings worked out Terence Newman, their former nickel/cornerback coach and player, league sources told ESPN’s Adam Schefter and Field Yates on Saturday.
The 41-year-old Newman worked out for the team this week, and the Vikings considered signing him before promoting cornerback Nate Meadors from their practice squad.
Newman, who is close to Vikings coach Mike Zimmer, played 15 NFL seasons before he became an assistant coach with Minnesota.
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Had he signed, Newman could have played in the NFC divisional playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers on Saturday.
Newman, who retired as a player just prior to the 2018 season, played for Zimmer on three teams (Dallas 2003-06, Cincinnati 2012-13 and Minnesota 2015-17) and appeared in 221 career games with 205 starts.
Before his retirement, Newman led the league with the most career interceptions (42) among active players.
EAGAN, Minn. — Seven years later, Dr. Cindra Kamphoff’s star pupil is still turning to one of her strategies to move past a costly mistake — this time in the NFL playoffs.
Few knew what Minnesota Vikings receiver Adam Thielen was doing when he made a motion with his hand like he was flushing a toilet after fumbling early in a wild-card playoff game against the New Orleans Saints on Sunday.
But Kamphoff, a mental performance coach, did because she taught him and the rest of the Minnesota State Mankato football team during Thielen’s senior season in 2012 about “flushing the toilet,” or letting go of mistakes.
Here’s proof for the doubters. Flush it! @Mentally_Strong #MavNation pic.twitter.com/73TQPASq4B
— Darius Clare (@D_clare47) January 6, 2020
“One component of mental toughness is the ability to live and let go,” Kamphoff told ESPN. “We’ve got to learn and burn. You have to learn from the mistake quickly and then we have to burn it, we have to let it go. That’s the heart of it. The reason we want to do that is to remain in the present moment because the past play we can’t do anything about, we can’t change it. All we can do is reset for the next play.
“Adam is one person I use as an example in other work that I do with teams and individuals as someone who can move on quickly, but that’s also a skill that you can practice; it’s not something that you have innate in you. The best athletes can move on very quickly so they can get back to present.”
The “flush” helped Thielen move on and turn in his second-highest receiving total of the season, recording seven catches for 129 yards, including a 43-yarder that set up the Vikings to beat the Saints in overtime and advance to play the
0:55 Courtney Cronin says the Vikings don’t anticipate an ankle injury keeping Adam Thielen out against the 49ers but are monitoring it closely.
The mental preparedness Thielen has gleaned from his work with Kamphoff in college and during his time with the Vikings helped him through one of the toughest challenges he has faced as a professional.
His streak of playing in 87 consecutive games ended in Week 8 when he sat out with a hamstring injury. Thielen admits to returning too early in a Week 9 game against the Kansas City Chiefs, setting himself back further when he re-injured his hamstring in the first quarter. The next six weeks taught Thielen a lesson in overcoming the mental strain associated with an injury he’d never dealt with.
“It’s taken a lot for him,” Vikings rookie wide receiver Bisi Johnson said. “I’ve seen him struggle through it emotionally, but it’s also a testament to us as a wide receiver group because he has put his trust in us. Maybe he rushed back the first time but after that it was like, ‘Yo, I just need to take my rest time, get right and let the other guys do everything else.’ We took care of business and he took care of business how he needed to, getting treatment, things like that.”
NFL PrimeTime continues this postseason with extended highlights and analysis following the conclusion of each day’s playoff games. Watch on ESPN+
Days after his breakout performance in New Orleans, Thielen suffered another setback in practice after a cut to his left ankle required stitches. He is listed as questionable for Saturday’s game in San Francisco, but sources told ESPN the injury isn’t expected to sideline him, although the team is monitoring the injury closely.
Moving past this obstacle requires Thielen to hit the flush valve yet again. The tactic he gleaned from a tiny toilet has him mentally prepared to cross the next hurdle as he aims to help lead the Vikings back to the NFC Championship Game with what he hopes is another standout performance.
“It’s the same thing as a competitor with anything whether it be a play, an injury, a distraction,” Thielen said. “You just put it behind you, you take the situation for what it is and you control what you control and the people that do that the best are usually the more successful team, person, individual, what have you.”