Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh concedes defeat of AFC championship game – NFL News
Baltimore Ravens' coach, John Harbaugh, has refused to accept the scoreboard errors as an excuse to their loss of the American Football Conference (AFC) championship to the New England Patriots on Sunday, January 22, 2012.
Speaking for the first time since the weekend game, the coach conceded their defeat to the Patriots and said that the score errors should not be used as justification to their rout in the championship.
The team lost the game with the final score of 20 to 23 points and are yet to soak in the belief that they are done with another opportunity to reach the Super Bowl.
There was some figure pointing at the scoreboard of the Gillette Stadium, which had shown third down when it was fourth down and linking the error to failed faulty kick by their kicker, Billy Cundiff.
Harbaugh refuted the impression that the error had anything to do with Cundiff kick's pushing wide left and missing of an opportunity for a field goal. It cost the Ravens entire game.
"We knew what the down and distance were on our last series," Harbaugh said Wednesday, according to the team's official website.
"The scoreboard was not a factor for us. Any suggestion that the wrong down information was a deliberate effort to affect the outcome of the game is nonsense."
Almost similar views were voiced by Ravens’ safety, Bernard Pollard, who just like his head coach, did not believe in attributing the scoreboard mistakes to their loss of the game to the Patriots.
"The team was confused, but when you look at the wide picture, we had a timeout, and the time was ticking down (so) we should have called a timeout," Pollard said. "But you can't turn back the hands of time, and we were sent home packing."
The player was of the view that there was some sort of confusion created by those mistakes but they should not be blamed for the Ravens loss on the weekend.
Almost all of the Ravens players had fought hard in the closely fought game and in spite of coming closer to winning on more than one occasions, they failed in capitalising on all those opportunities.
At the end, the loss of the game ended their 2011 National Football League (NFL) run and a majority of their players expressed of their sheer amount of disappointment of not playing Super Bowl event yet again.
This had led to a number of theories around the defeat.
The scoreboard error was the latest of all to be presented as a reason of their loss.
The controversial possession of the ball by their wide receiver, Lee Evans, was another post-match discussion topic.
Irrespective to the controversy, it is for the first time that the team’s head coach has conceded the defeat.
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