Updated / Saturday, 9 Jan 2021 13: 08
The Baltimore Ravens’ define defensive agenda in Sunday’s Wild Card matchup against the Tennessee Titans will be ready to boil down to a unique purpose – stop Derrick Henry.
The main rusher sooner or later of the regular season by a remarkable margin, the Titans’ ferocious working encourage earned a self-discipline in the NFL’s 2,000-yard club, an elite team of proper eight working backs to scandalous that threshold in one season, and offers probably the excellent possibility to Baltimore’s submit-season ambitions.
“It’s the excellent dispute every play. Let’s originate no mistake about it – he’s the correct working encourage in football,” Baltimore defensive coordinator Don Martindale quick journalists this week.
“We comprehend it. He knows it. We’re proper on the point of droop for the dispute ahead on Sunday.”
The Titans ended the Baltimore Ravens’ play-off shuffle a year previously in a 28-12 shock AFC Divisional game upset over the intently favoured number one seed, wherein Henry ran for 195 yards and even tossed a three-yard touchdown pass in an impressed little bit of purple zone trickery.
With a top-10 rushing defence that allowed a median of 18.9 aspects per game this season, the 11-5 Ravens hope no longer to repeat historical past in Tennessee on Sunday, and attend their quick-footed, 2019 league MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson clinch his first-ever play-off bewitch.
“They’re some of the tip teams for a reason,” said head coach John Harbaugh, who has heaped reward on Titans’ quarterback Ryan Tannehill’s play-action abilities as successfully.
“It’s basically important with a notion to shuffle the ball in the purple zone, after which the capability to develop performs is de facto serious, which, pointless to mutter, (Tannehill) can attain very successfully.”
The pale Dolphins quarterback is coming off of a prolific, 3,819-yard season – one of his strongest but – with seven interceptions and 33 touchdowns.
“They attain a exact job of intelligent spherical and getting start on the prolonged play and poke. Obviously, (Tannehill) retains the ball a host of times down at some stage in the 10-yard line,” Harbaugh quick journalists.
“So, all of this stuff are why they’re so exact. It’s going to be up to us to bewitch a possess a examine to accumulate them stopped.”
