OWINGS MILLS, Md. — It has become, in recent years, a new-age Super Bowl Sunday ritual: After the TV commercials are dissected, after the halftime show is lauded or panned, once the game is over and the confetti is falling, fans are left to wonder: “How did that team win it?”
The out-of-nowhere team has come to be the dominant force in football’s grandest game. The Baltimore Ravens have a chance to continue the trend next Sunday. If they beat the San Francisco 49ers in New Orleans, the Ravens will become the sixth Super Bowl champion in the past eight years to have played a first-round game in the NFL playoffs en route to its title.
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That means winning the Super Bowl without the benefit of being a first or second seed in the AFC or NFC playoffs, without having an opening-round bye leading directly to a home game in a conference semifinal. It means winning four postseason games instead of the three victories required of a top-two seed. It means not being considered a favorite when the playoffs begin.
And all of that, according to Ravens Coach John Harbaugh, can be a fine way to go about it.
“There are advantages in that path,” Harbaugh said last week. “There are advantages in both paths. Just assuming when you get the bye that that’s necessarily a plus is not necessarily true.”
Players and coaches talk about the sense of urgency that carries over into the playoffs after playing meaningful games down the stretch in the regular season, rather than being able to coast late in the regular season with a playoff spot ensured and then needing to find a way to reclaim the necessary intensity when the games matter again. They speak about staying in the groove of playing on a weekly basis instead of having a bye weekend off and then having to turn the switch back on.
Those factors indeed may be part of the narrative that has enabled the Ravens to reach this game after being seeded fourth in the six-team AFC playoff field. They were part of the narrative for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2005 season, the Indianapolis Colts in 2006, the New York Giants in the 2007 season, the Green Bay Packers two years ago and the Giants last season — all of whom won first-round playoff games on their way to Super Bowl triumphs. The Steelers and Packers did so as No. 6 seeds for the playoffs. The 2007 Giants were a fifth seed.
But that is where the Ravens’ story parts ways with those of some of their predecessors. The lesson of the postseason success of some of those unlikely Super Bowl winners was that it paid to be the team on the rise entering the playoffs; for them, the NFL postseason wasn’t about which team was the best but which team was the hottest. Last season’s Giants, for instance, began their postseason run after beating the New York Jets and Dallas Cowboys in their final two games of the regular season just to get into the playoffs.
These Ravens, however, were making no one feel good about their play late in the regular season. They lost four of their final five regular season games.
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