OWINGS MILLS – Ravens coach John Harbaugh admitted he wasn’t happy with the pace of the offense during the fourth quarter of Monday’s loss at New England.
Trailing 30-20 with just over six minutes to play, the Ravens burned more than four minutes off the clock on a drive that ended with a Justin Tucker field goal. Afterward, the Ravens tried an onside kick, but the Patriots recovered and the Ravens never got the ball back and lost, 30-23.
Twitter was blowing up with people urging the Ravens to pick up the pace during their final drive. Well, Harbaugh was also frustrated the Ravens didn’t score faster and run plays more quickly, and that was not the first time it has happened this season.
“We were in a two-score game there, that’s something we have addressed the last couple of days at length,” Harbaugh said. “We didn’t do a great job of that at all. I don’t know if it was the environment. That’s part of it, probably. Communication wasn’t as good as it needed to be. We just didn’t move as quickly as we needed to in the end."
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“We chart everything out - we were slow on every single play on that drive…It’s about getting a touchdown right there. Heck if we’re not going to get a touchdown, we might as well kick a field goal with four minutes left, and we’d have four minutes to get the ball back. That was disappointing. That’s not something we did a good job of.
“We have to be way better in that situation in terms of moving quickly. Really, we need to do that in all of our two-minute situations. That’s something that we need to improve on, and that’s going back about a year-and-half. We’ll keep working on that.”
Quarterback Joe Flacco said the entire offense was to blame.
“If you are going to settle for a field goal, do it in two minutes,” Flacco said. “Do it in a minute and a half. It is a collective effort – coaches, offensive lineman, receivers, myself. Sometimes the circumstances are difficult. Guys are running from all over the place, their defense is walking around, things like that. But it is a collective effort, it starts with me.”
But for the Ravens to have a better hurry-up offense, it needs to get fixed.
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