There are injuries hovering around this game. It’s not an abundance of black and blue anymore, especially for the Ravens, a healed team that’s only seen Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs on the field at the same time for a handful of games this year. For the Patriots there’s the matter of Rob Gronkowski, and how his absence effects their offense.
In that sense, the subtractions (Gronk for New England, Lardarius Webb for Baltimore) are a wash, which re-focuses this game to where the central talking point belongs: the rivalry. This should be the kind of close, brutal football that’s expected of a championship Sunday.
For evidence of that, we only need to look back at recent history. Of the last six meetings between these two teams in both the playoffs and regular season, the margin of victory in five of them has been less than a touchdown. Taking that further, four of the six games were won by a field goal or less. Even when we include the glaring exception (Baltimore’s 33-14 Wildcard Weekend win in 2010), the cumulative score throughout the six games is still 164-129.
With the immensity of the offseason movement in the NFL by both players and coaches, I don’t usually give long-term win-loss records of that nature much value, but those spreads are difficult to ignore. Tomorrow likely won’t deviate from history, or at least not much, as we won’t see a blowout despite what Madden 13 would have you believe.
But unless the Ravens can continue passing deep, and passing deep often, another trend will continue too. Throughout the nine-game history of this series, the Ravens have won only twice.
The surface layer of numbers begin to tell the story of how Baltimore can win this game. Or lose it again.
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