“You know the history,” Ravens linebacker C.J. Mosley told me, a half hour after the final gun at M&T Bank Stadium. “The past few years, the defense has been on the field.”
Mosley isn’t lying. And while that fact—that a proud Baltimore defense failed the team in December the last two seasons—didn’t get a lot of play during the lead-up to Week 17, it gnawed at the veterans of that proud unit.
And with everything to play for on the final Sunday of 2018, it looked like it was happening again.