Ravens head coach John Harbaugh held his season-ending press conference on Friday and the first question had to do with the team’s offensive approach against the Chiefs in their 17-10 loss in the AFC Championship Game.
The team’s running backs only ran the ball six times in the game and they only had 16 rushing attempts as a team, which has led to a fair amount of criticism of their game plan last Sunday. On Friday, Harbaugh noted that the team had RPOs and other plays that could be runs or passes depending on how the Chiefs lined up and that Kansas City’s early offensive success limited their time of possession while forcing them to play from behind.
While that provides some explanation for the approach, Harbaugh went on to say that “sometimes you need to be willing to get big and run the ball” because the way things played out is “not going to win an AFC Championship Game.”
“When you look at the way the game played out, you can understand it from a football perspective but once you get through all that you come back — You want to run the ball against the Chiefs,” Harbaugh said. “There’s no doubt about it and we did want to run the ball against the Chiefs. We weren’t able get to it.”
The Ravens will have a lot of time to figure out how to come up with a better plan for future games and they’ll need to do that in order to make it where they want to go next season.
