What happens when a rivalry dies?
Does it cease once the hate dissolves into perfunctory pleasantries? Does it cede back into the schedule like any other game once the history that first gave the series meaning grows distant? Does it dull the moment when one team fails to maintain its competitive edge?
We may soon find out.
Should the heavily favored Ravens wallop the Patriots as expected Sunday night, it will have been four long years since the Pats beat them. It could be two more seasons before Bill Belichick and Co. get their next shot. Based on the NFL’s current standings, the Patriots are unlikely to play Baltimore until 2022.
Therefore, Sunday’s stakes contain more than the Pats’ dying playoff hopes and their professional pride. If they lose, those will sink and take one of the NFL’s fiercest, fading rivalries with them.
Over the past decade, no team has consistently pushed the Patriots quite like Baltimore. Correction: punched the Patriots quite like Baltimore.
“The thing that sticks out to me above all else is when you play the Baltimore Ravens, they’re gonna come in and try to hit you square in the mouth,” Pats captain Matthew Slater said Friday. “And if you’re not ready, they’re gonna keep hitting you in the mouth. And you’ll never recover.”
At its height, the rivalry exuded the essence of football. Sixty minutes of strategic violence orchestrated by sideline generals armed with Super Bowl rings and fearless rosters fighting for postseason survival.
When Patriots center David Andrews, a Georgia native, thinks of the rivalry, the memories he summons first aren’t the two games he’s played against the Ravens. They’re of games he watched from afar in college and high school without rooting interest; drawn only by his visceral connection to a sport featuring two of its best teams.
“Man, tough, physical,” Andrews said this week. “Feels like I’ve watched a lot of these games growing up.”
In fact, he did. From 2010-2015, the Pats and Ravens met seven times. Four battles were fought in the playoffs. They split those wars, 2-2.
Since Belichick began transforming the Patriots into an all-time powerhouse in 2000, Baltimore is the only team to have defeated the Pats twice in the playoffs as a road team. Those knockout blows reverberated throughout the league, proof the Patriots could be made to bleed, even in their own house.
Though soon enough, revenge belonged to Belichick, who scored a 35-31 win in a divisional-round classic, the most memorable game in the rivalry’s history.
Since then, the Pats are 1-1 against the Ravens. In 2016, a Monday night kickoff at Gillette Stadium represented a rare test on the Patriots’ regular-season slate of cupcakes. If they passed, they would be recognized as the rightful Super Bowl favorite. Eventually, they dispatched Baltimore, 30-23, having surviving a late comeback bid from a 20-point deficit in the third quarter.
Even as underdogs, the Ravens validated them.
A year ago, the Patriots were forced to return the favor. Under a primetime spotlight, Baltimore shattered their perfect 8-0 season start with a dominant performance that cemented the team’s status as an AFC contender. For the Pats, it was the first domino of disappointment to fall in a doomed season.
Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson later won MVP, a celebration of the franchise’s completed evolution and his bright future.
This week, Jackson and new Patriots quarterback Cam Newton created headlines by trading verbal bouquets; a far cry from the barbs Tom Brady and Terrell Suggs used to spit at one another. Of course, the Patriots and Ravens will still trade blows Sunday, as they always have.
But until then, they’ll pass the time by showering one another with compliments.
“To me this organization does everything the right way,” Slater said. “Starting in the front office, and then on down to the coaching staff and the players. When you think about the way that football, in my mind, should be played — with physicality, with toughness, with commitment to each other and commitment to the process — I think Baltimore does that as well as anyone over the last several decades.”
The scars Slater wears from past battles with Baltimore are rare in the Pats’ locker room. Only veterans like him, safety Devin McCourty and a few others can attest to what the series once meant, how it felt. The gravity of Sunday’s game, aside from its immediate implications, must be said aloud now, instead of being implicitly understood.
“You know every time you play them, it’s a big game,” McCourty said. “They’re a hard-nosed team that’s going to come in and fight to the last play. It’s just going to be a tough football game.”
How tough? Slater said what separates clashes with the Ravens from other games is how feels the next morning. Beaten, pained, almost broken.
“But that’s a good thing,” Slater clarified. “That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
Inevitably, as in all facets of life, what’s supposed to be yields to what actually is. The reality of Sunday’s situation is two franchises trending in opposite directions will hit pause to play football in an empty stadium on national TV. The result is unlikely to alter either’s course.
But a close Patriots win would stoke the fires of memory and rivalry; simultaneously providing a reminder of what was and what could be again.
