John Harbaugh says season ‘begins now’ for 8-5 Ravens: ‘We want to play our best football right now’ Dec 11, 2024
With four weeks remaining in the 2024 season, the Baltimore Ravens have yet to play their best football.
“This is the season; it kind of begins now,” coach John Harbaugh said Monday, via the team’s official website. “The season is important to determine the important outcomes for the rest of the way – that’s what we’re focused on. We’ll be focusing on this game, putting everything we’ve got into it, and then we’ll go from there.”
Coming out of the bye, the 8-5 Ravens are two games behind the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC North race. Baltimore sits in the No. 5 seed, ahead of the 8-5 Los Angeles Chargers and 8-5 Denver Broncos in the AFC wild-card pecking order.
It’s been a roller-coaster season for Baltimore, who opened the year 0-2 after a close loss to K.C. and a collapse versus the Raiders. Then, Harbaugh’s club won five straight before see-sawing wins and losses much of the past month.
Wins over the Broncos and Chargers over that span give the Ravens an edge in the playoff race. Despite sitting with a similar record, Baltimore has a 97 percent chance to make the postseason, per Next Gen Stats probabilities.
The key for Harbaugh is getting his club to play its best ball into the postseason.
“Everything that has to do with the next four weeks and past, that is what we’re looking at, in terms of finding ways to make plays, score points [and] get stops,” Harbaugh said. “All of the different things we can do to keep people off-balanced, create problems for our opponents, put our players in the position to make plays — those are the things that we’re trying to find [and] turn over every stone along those lines and see what we can come up with, and that’s what we did.”
The Ravens face the two-win Giants on Sunday before the schedule ramps up with a massive division matchup against the Steelers in Week 16, a Christmas Day bout with the AFC South-leading Texans, and a rematch against the Browns in Week 18 (Baltimore lost to Cleveland in Week 8).
Harbaugh isn’t concerned with playoff probabilities. His aim is for Baltimore to handle business on Sunday in New York to set themselves up for the stretch run.
“We want to play our best football right now — that’s what we’re really focusing on doing,” Harbaugh said. “Everything else is just a sideshow; everything else is just a distraction. None of it is important.
“What’s important is our football. The football. Getting the football right, playing our best football that we’re capable of playing, everybody locked in for that — that’s really what it’s all about. Nothing else matters; everything else is just static.”
