Ravens Give Titans Short End of Stick

If you’re down, and troubled, and need a helping hand, and you’re a football team in the AFC Central, and especially if you’re the Tennessee Titans, this is the last place you want to be.

Unfortunately for the 0-2 Titans, they had no choice. Coach Jeff Fisher said they’d be OK if they brought along a big stick, but it looked more like a big hankie they were waving in the face of the Ravens, who plowed them under, 26-7, Sunday.

Now the Titans are 0-3. Said Raven Coach Brian Billick, helpfully: “They need to bring a bigger stick next time.”

The mouthy Ravens and their cocky coach are your basic, all-purpose NFL nightmare. Not only can they rock your world, they’ll rub it in until the last TV truck leaves.

“We’ll see what type character they [the Titans] have,” said tight end Shannon Sharpe. “You can’t be any worse than 0-3 after three games so we’ll see what they’re made of. Everybody knows how great they were last year when they were 7-0 and 8-1. Everybody knows how they are front-running.

“I was a little disappointed. [Titan All-Pro defensive end Jevon] Kearse plays on the right side in front of [All-Pro Raven tackle] Jonathan Ogden, so they flipped him around in front of [Raven tackle] Sammy Williams. So that lets me know right there how they perceive us.

“ I wouldn’t back down from a challenge. If I’m a Z receiver and their best corner is on the right side, hey, don’t move me to X, I want to go against him.

“They moved [Kearse] in front of Sammy Williams and Sammy whupped his butt. And then they moved him back in front of J.O. and J.O. whupped his butt. He was just going back and forth getting his butt whupped.”

In real life, it was almost that bad, too.

The Ravens, who won a Super Bowl with an offense that consisted almost entirely of journeyman Trent Dilfer handing off to rookie Jamal Lewis, have since lost Lewis by accident and Dilfer on purpose. Elvis Grbac now hands off to 33-year-old Terry Allen, but, unlike Dilfer, is often trusted to try other plays, including ones with forward passes.

So it was a bad sign for the Titans--whose defense is, or used to be, rated on a par with the Ravens’--when Allen got six yards up the middle on Baltimore’s first play, and seven on the second.

Two complete passes, a 35-yard pass interference penalty and two more Allen runs, the last going nine yards into the end zone, and it was 7-0.

Allen wound up with 108 yards, which, the Ravens announced, was his 22nd 100-yard game, but his first in a while.

Then there was the Titan offense, basically Eddie George. With twin tree stumps, 340-pound Tony Siragusa and 330-pound Sam Adams, at tackle, and All-Pro middle linebacker Ray Lewis behind them, the Ravens are difficult to impossible to run on. In George’s first nine carries, he got six yards, by which time the Ravens had outgained the Titans, 224-37, and led, 17-0.

George hasn’t gained 100 yards in a game this season and Sunday he didn’t come close. He had 26 in 13 carries when he left with a sprained ankle in the third quarter.

It was 20-0 before the Titans scored ... when Donald Mitchell blocked a punt and ran it in.

The Titans then surprised the Ravens with an onside kick, recovered and marched to a third-and-one at the Baltimore 37. Quarterback Steve McNair pitched to halfback Mike Green running right, and Green floated an option pass in the direction of Kevin Dyson downfield. By the time it came down, Raven safety Rod Woodson had zoomed over and intercepted it.

The Ravens then marched 82 yards in 10 plays, the last eight of them runs, and that was that.

“We kinda got our butts kicked today,” said Fisher. “I just told the team that. It’s the first time ... I didn’t think this would happen. I thought we’d come in, I thought we’d play hard, I thought we’d make a game of it and we did not....

“We lost last week to Jacksonville, too, so that was a division game. When someone tells me we’re eliminated from winning the division it’ll be a contributing factor, but right now, we’ve not been eliminated, nor am I gonna start the off-season tomorrow.”

A year ago, the Titans were favorites, going into the AFC playoffs seeded No. 1. The Ravens were considered one-dimensional upstarts, but they became the first team to beat Tennessee in its new Adelphia Coliseum, then went back in the playoffs and used two blocked kicks to beat them again.

Now, the Ravens aren’t upstarts any more.

“Now, looks like I don’t have to hear how they outgained us, rushed the ball more than we did in the playoff game, how they threw the ball better and didn’t have any turnovers,” Sharpe said.

“We have respect for those guys ... but we don’t like ‘em and they don’t like us. But I just hate the fact that everybody says Jeff Fisher is such a great guy. Brian is egotistical, anal, obsessive-compulsive. But one thing, he’s consistent, he’s that every day and we love playing for the guy. He epitomizes who we are. You look at our team, to a man, we all have egos. We’re all conceited and our head coach is probably more so than all of us.”

That’s saying something, too, but the Titans weren’t calling for any rematches on their way out of town, especially not here.