Samari Rolle called what the Ravens were facing going into yesterday's game "pressure." He wasn't wrong.
That was an ugly game at M&T Bank Stadium yesterday, between two ugly teams. But it was a win, and the Ravens will never downplay this one. The alternative would have been infinitely uglier.
A loss was not an option, especially not after last week, the game America was still talking about yesterday and surely is still talking about today, as it sees "Baltimore" in the NFL roundup.
The Ravens had to do more than beat Cleveland at home and avoid 1-4. They had to change the topic. They had to define themselves as something other than a team out of control.
They may have spent much of the time in the locker room rehashing the disgrace in Detroit - but better to do that than to be discussing another loss, and the real possibility that the season was lost for good.
The Detroit game was only brought up for comparison's sake. Thus, the observation by Rolle: "There was a lot of pressure on us to come out and perform the way we could, and act civilized on the field."
One couldn't be separated from the other. Staying composed and beating the Browns were not mutually exclusive goals; they had to stay composed in order to beat the Browns. If it wasn't quite clear before, it was clear after last week: No matter whom they play, the Ravens' margin for error is paper-thin. Poise has to be a constant, not a variable.
In the face of the penalties and turnovers and bad breaks, the Ravens might still have beaten a weak, Joey Harrington-led team had they kept their heads. They kept their heads this week, and they beat ... well, a weak, incompetent, unsure Browns team that left onlookers wondering how on Earth they came in at 2-2 and ahead of the Ravens in the AFC North standings.
But the Ravens got out of the cellar, are no longer stuck on one win, and now have a win with more cachet than the one over the quarterback-less New York Jets.
Plus, nobody got thrown out. That may be setting the bar low, but at least they managed that. Even as the defensive players waved their arms and pumped their fists, they kept it fairly controlled. That might be why they made more big plays. You sure can't rule it out.
Afterward, besides milking their us-against-them angle to the limit, the Ravens talked about getting something positive out of one of the franchise's worst weeks since the team moved from Cleveland. "I think all things aside," said Derrick Mason, "we learned from last week. Good teams learn from the mistakes they make, and that's what we did."
