During Sunday night’s loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh was hit with plenty of criticism for his horrible clock management at the end of the game that cost the team precious seconds due to his refusal to call timeouts. But even after the game, he thinks it was the right call.
During his postgame press conference, John Harbaugh said he thinks he “played it right” by not using the timeouts.
“I think the thing that killed us was the holding penalty, which knocked us back,” Harbaugh said in his press conference according to Pro Football Talk. “The idea was, ‘We’ve got time.’ We want to keep those timeouts to throw the ball. So, we tried to pop a run there; we’re going to call a timeout after that. Then, we still have run-pass options.
“[W]e wanted to score without giving the ball back. We think we’re going to be in the red zone; we think it’s going to be just a certain number of plays and it’s going to work right down to the end of the game. Rather than maybe you score with 30-35 seconds, [and] you give them a chance to go kick a field goal at the end.
“So, I think we played it right. It didn’t work out in the sense that after, we had incomplete passes, so you’re not going to have a chance to call them [timeouts]. If you complete the passes, you get the ball back in the red zone, [and] you call the timeouts. So, from an elementary level, you could say, ‘They should have called the timeouts,’ but we had the timeouts worked out right.”
Whether it was due to the timeouts or not, the Ravens ultimately lost the game.
