{"id":811616,"date":"2024-12-11T22:11:53","date_gmt":"2024-12-12T04:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/11\/john-harbaugh-says-season-begins-now-for-8-5-ravens-we-want-to-play-our-best-football-right-now-dec-11-2024\/"},"modified":"2024-12-11T22:11:53","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T04:11:53","slug":"john-harbaugh-says-season-begins-now-for-8-5-ravens-we-want-to-play-our-best-football-right-now-dec-11-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/11\/john-harbaugh-says-season-begins-now-for-8-5-ravens-we-want-to-play-our-best-football-right-now-dec-11-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"John Harbaugh says season &#8216;begins now&#8217; for 8-5 Ravens: &#8216;We want to play our best football right now&#8217;                          Dec 11, 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Football <\/p>\n<div data-require=\"modules\/smoothScroller\">\n<div>\n<p>With four weeks remaining in the 2024 season, the Baltimore Ravens have yet to play their best football.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is the season; it kind of begins now,&#8221; coach John Harbaugh said Monday, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baltimoreravens.com\/news\/john-harbaugh-ravens-season-begins-now-week-15-after-bye\" target=\"_blank\">via the team\u2019s official website.<\/a> &#8220;The season is important to determine the important outcomes for the rest of the way &#8211;\u202fthat&#8217;s what we&#8217;re focused on. We&#8217;ll be focusing on this game, putting everything we&#8217;ve got into it, and then we&#8217;ll go from there.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Coming out of the bye, the 8-5 Ravens are two games behind the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC North race. Baltimore <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfl.com\/standings\/playoff-picture\">sits in the No. 5 seed<\/a>, ahead of the 8-5 Los Angeles Chargers and 8-5 Denver Broncos in the AFC wild-card pecking order.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been a roller-coaster season for Baltimore, who opened the year 0-2 after a close loss to K.C. and a collapse versus the Raiders. Then, Harbaugh&#8217;s club won five straight before see-sawing wins and losses much of the past month.<\/p>\n<p>Wins over the Broncos and Chargers over that span give the Ravens an edge in the playoff race. Despite sitting with a similar record, Baltimore has a 97 percent chance to make the postseason, per Next Gen Stats probabilities.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div>\n<p>The key for Harbaugh is getting his club to play its best ball into the postseason.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Everything that has to do with the next four weeks and past, that is what we&#8217;re looking at, in terms of finding ways to make plays, score points [and] get stops,&#8221; Harbaugh said. &#8220;All of the different things we can do to keep people off-balanced, create problems for our opponents, put our players in the position to make plays &#8212; those are the things that we&#8217;re trying to find [and] turn over every stone along those lines and see what we can come up with, and that&#8217;s what we did.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Ravens <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfl.com\/ways-to-watch\/by-week\/reg-15#ravens-at-giants-2024-reg-15\">face<\/a> the two-win Giants on Sunday before the schedule ramps up with a massive division matchup against the Steelers in Week 16, a Christmas Day bout with the AFC South-leading Texans, and a rematch against the Browns in Week 18 (Baltimore lost to Cleveland in Week 8).<\/p>\n<p>Harbaugh isn&#8217;t concerned with playoff probabilities. His aim is for Baltimore to handle business on Sunday in New York to set themselves up for the stretch run.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We want to play our best football right now &#8212; that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re really focusing on doing,&#8221; Harbaugh said. &#8220;Everything else is just a sideshow; everything else is just a distraction. None of it is important.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s important is our football. The football. Getting the football right, playing our best football that we&#8217;re capable of playing, everybody locked in for that &#8212; that&#8217;s really what it&#8217;s all about. Nothing else matters; everything else is just static.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nfl.com\/news\/john-harbaugh-says-season-begins-now-ravens-play-our-best-football\" class=\"button purchase\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Read More<\/a> Yuri Noren<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With four weeks remaining in the 2024 season, the Baltimore Ravens have yet to play their best football. &#8220;This is the season; it kind of begins now,&#8221; coach John Harbaugh said Monday, via the team\u2019s official website. &#8220;The season is important to determine the important outcomes for the rest of the way &#8211;\u202fthat&#8217;s what we&#8217;re<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":811617,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3790,28512,795],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-811616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","category-harbaugh","category-season"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}