When the Ravens started losing players to injuries in the offseason, many people lowered their expectations for what to expect from the team this season and that bar didn’t go up much when players kept going down for the year once the season got underway.
The Ravens played down to those expectations early in the year, going 4-5 and showing little offensive aptitude over the first half of the regular season. Things have gone in a better direction since then, however.
They’ve won four of their last five to push themselves into the thick of the Wild Card race and they’ve put up an average of 31 points a game in the process. That turnaround led coach John Harbaugh to discuss his team’s resiliency this week.
“I do appreciate the character of our team and the resilience of our team and the mental toughness and the focus and the ability to get right at the task at hand and push aside the stuff that is not important and get right at what is important and deal with adversity when it happens, with the different injuries,” Harbaugh said, via ESPN.com. “You are right; it is all around the league. Every team deals with it to one degree or another. We dealt with it quite a bit early and then middle of season. Our guys handled it, and they kept fighting through it. The reports of our demise, I guess, were greatly exaggerated.”
The Bills are currently ahead of the Ravens for the final playoff spot because of the strength of victory tiebreaker, but the teams will have four common opponents after the Ravens play the Colts on Sunday. If they win that game, they’ll move ahead of the Bills even if the Bills beat the Patriots and they’d just need a home win over the Bengals in Week 17 to sew up a playoff spot that seemed highly unlikely in the middle of November.
