Wind, rain, tough defense and lots of hard feelings. Two teams with an extreme dislike for each other never stopped pounding it out Saturday.
The difference: Baltimore forced three turnovers and never gave away the ball, as the Ravens advanced to the AFC championship game on Matt Stover’s 43-yard field goal with 53 seconds remaining for a 13-10 victory over the Tennessee Titans.
Led by Joe Flacco, the first rookie quarterback to win two playoff games, the Ravens (13-5) will play at Pittsburgh or San Diego next week for the right to go to the Super Bowl.
The Steelers (12-4) and Chargers (9-8) play Sunday at Pittsburgh.
In the NFC, Arizona (10-7) was at Carolina (12-4) on Saturday night, while Philadelphia (10-6-1) is at the New York Giants (12-4) on Sunday.
Baltimore’s postseason run looks eerily similar to when it won the championship after the 2000 season. Back then, it also was a wild card and also won in Tennessee on the way to the title.
league’s best record this season.
It was so rugged that the highlight-reel play was All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis’ explosive second-quarter hit on Titans fullback Ahmard Hall near the sideline. The nasty words never stopped flowing. But the Ravens backed it up with just enough points, climaxed by the winning kick from the 40-year-old Stover, the last member of the Ravens who played when the franchise was in Cleveland.
Tennessee, a plus-14 in turnover margin while winning the AFC South, wasted a half-dozen scoring opportunities with errors. The Titans’ ground game suffered after rookie running back Chris Johnson left with his right ankle wrapped late in the first half.
Flacco finished 11-of-22 for 161 yards and a touchdown to Derrick Mason. Tennessee’s Kerry Collins was 26-of-42 for 281 yards and an interception.
Eagles-Giants
New York and Philadelphia aren’t only playing for a trip to the NFC title game. This one is personal.
Play a team in your own division three times in a season, and things get that way. Add in the 95-mile trek up or down the New Jersey Turnpike and the fact that Sunday’s game will be the eighth between the teams in the last three seasons, and this rivalry can get downright nasty.
The NFC semifinal at Giants Stadium matches the defending Super Bowl champions against the team that many think will be the 2009 version of the Giants.
mes during the last three seasons, only two have been decided by more than 10 points, with the largest margin being 14.
The two games this season were decided by a combined 11 points. New York won 36-31 in Philadelphia and the Eagles returned the favor at Giants Stadium 20-14 on Dec. 7.
Chargers-Steelers
The Chargers’ travels to Pittsburgh are filled with curiosities, a remarkable run of odd games, unexpected results and strange scores, comebacks that succeeded and game plans that failed.
There was the AFC championship game where the Chargers drew motivation from a dance video. The first and only NFL tournament. And the latest oddity, the only 11-10 score in NFL history earlier this season.
In a city where they’ve never won during the regular season or lost during the postseason, the Chargers are hoping the surprise element kicks in again during their AFC divisional playoff game Sunday.
Going back to the chilly East Coast and going against the NFL’s top-ranked defense probably don’t seem as daunting now that the Chargers, against long odds, are averaging 34.4 points during a five-game winning streak. The latest surprise was their 23-17 overtime decision last weekend over Indianapolis, which had won nine in a row.
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh hopes quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is healed from his concussion.
He was injured in a game that meant nothing, a 31-0 rout of Cleveland on Dec. 28, and experienced headaches for nearly a week. Roethlisberger played possibly the worst game of his career, throwing four interceptions in Oakland in 2006, the last time he returned from a concussion.
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