Roquan Smith came sprinting over to congratulate cornerback Daryl Worley, who had just broken up an end-zone pass intended for All-Pro receiver Ja’Marr Chase. Before he got to Worley, Smith gave a healthy shoulder bump to Chase as they passed each other.
Kyle Hamilton at one point picked up and tossed Chase to the ground, prompting a celebration from several Ravens. Earlier in the game, Chuck Clark hammered Tyler Boyd on the sideline and they fell to the turf in the Ravens’ bench area. In the third quarter, Worley thumped Tee Higgins on a play that left both players shaken up and Smith celebrating the hit by Worley.
Dirty play? Or just hard-nosed, physical, AFC North football in January?
That seems to depend on whom you ask.
After the Bengals’ 27-16 victory in the regular-season finale last week, the Bengals were incensed by what they perceived to be dirty, after-the-play cheap shots doled out by the Ravens.
As you might imagine, the Ravens disagreed.
“I studied the game really closely, obviously,” head coach John Harbaugh said the next day. “Anybody can, and it’s clear our players played a clean game, as they always do. Millions of fans watched the game as well, and they saw the same thing. So I would just say let them be the judges. … I don’t get into that with other teams, nor about other teams — never have, never will.”
The Bengals dished some out as well. At one point, Bengals lineman Jackson Carman blocked Ravens linebacker Tyus Bowser clear off the field and into the Ravens’ bench area well after the play, sparking a tussle.
Now after all the chirping of last week, the teams go right back at it on Sunday, Jan. 15, in an AFC wild-card round game at 8:15 p.m. The third-seeded Bengals (12-4) won the AFC North for the second straight year, while the Ravens (10-7) ended as the No. 6 seed.
Asked whether he thought any play crossed the line last week, Smith smiled and said, “See you Sunday night.”
Indeed, as the teams prepare to play back-to-back games, with the season on the line for both, it’s clear that this rivalry has heated up significantly with the Bengals’ rise to the top echelon of the AFC.
“Without a doubt,” veteran defensive lineman Calais Campbell said.
That might have started on New Year’s Eve 2017, when Andy Dalton hit Boyd with a 49-yard touchdown pass with 44 seconds left to shock the Ravens 31-27 and essentially knock the Ravens out of the playoffs with a minute left in the season.
In 2020, second-year Bengals head coach Zac Taylor infuriated the Ravens, especially former defensive coordinator Don “Wink” Martindale, when the Bengals kicked a field goal in the final minute of a 27-3 Ravens rout to deny the Ravens a shutout. In the season finale that year, the Ravens steamrolled the Bengals to the tune of 404 rushing yards in a 38-3 drubbing.
The Bengals remembered those games. They also seemed motivated by former Martindale’s assessment of Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow.
The Bengals pulled away to a 41-17 win in Baltimore last season, and the rematch two months later in Cincinnati came a week after the Ravens had played the Green Bay Packers. Speaking before that second Bengals game, Martindale said, “Aaron Rodgers is a Hall of Fame quarterback, and I don’t think we’re ready to buy a gold jacket for Joe.”
Facing a short-handed Ravens defense that started backups of backups in the secondary, Burrow shredded the Ravens’ defense, throwing for 525 yards, the most ever by a Ravens opponent and the fourth-highest total in NFL history.
The Ravens were not at all pleased when Burrow, with a 20-point lead, aired out a 52-yard bomb to running back Joe Mixon with two minutes left in a 41-21 Bengals win. After the game, Burrow implied that Martindale’s comment was on his mind.
The Ravens’ rivalry with the Pittsburgh Steelers was long been defined by its villains; Ray Lewis, Terrell Suggs, Hines Ward and Ben Roethlisberger raised the ire of the opposing fan base to a furor. This Bengals-Ravens rivalry seems to have two villains crystallizing rapidly in Smith, reviled in Cincinnati this week for perceived dirty play, and Burrow, the brash, cigar-smoking quarterback with swagger and the results to back it up.
Smith signed a five-year extension this week, and the Bengals are expected to open the vault to retain Burrow. The villains aren’t going anywhere, and both teams appear primed to stay relevant in the typically ferocious AFC North. This rivalry figures to only get more intense.
For now, though, the focus turns to Sunday and whatever unsettled scores both teams think they have.
“We’ll see Sunday night,” linebacker Patrick Queen said. “If there’s smoke, there’s smoke. We’re not running from anybody. If you feel like people were doing things dirty, you weren’t at the same time? … Whoever has beef with each other, they have beef with each other. At the end of the day, we’re going out there to play a football game. We’re not trying to do anything extra, but we have a job to do.”
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox