The Baltimore Ravens are the Best Team in Football

The 2012 Baltimore Ravens are the best team, from top to bottom, in the NFL this year.  That includes ownership.  Look at what they've accomplished the last four years.  Advancing to the divisional round for three years in a row is the NFL equivalent of finishing in 5th place.  Last year they fell in the AFC championship game, attaining the bronze.  No other football team has been able to accomplish that.  The closest may be the New York Giants, who just recently won the Superbowl, but they spent 3 years rebuilding and missing the playoffs before that.  No team is more a model of consistency than the Baltimore Ravens, and it starts with great leadership.

Steve Bisciotti is a dream NFL owner.  A hometown guy who actually cares about his team winning more than his own greed and fame.  And I'm personally excited to have the team led by a Seagull alumni.  He and Coach John Harbaugh handled the Billy Cundiff situation perfectly.

I'm positive the top executives and the coaching staff would have liked to have seen him gone immediately.  He was coming off a poor year after signing a large contract.  He didn't have a long history with the team like Matt Stover.  He was just a bad memory and the scapegoat of a failed championship run.  Cutting ties with him would have immediately helped sever his connection to the season.  The hope being that his name would stop appearing in the paper, he wouldn't be in any interviews, and most importantly by the time next training camp rolled around he would be a distant memory.  That would have made the fans happy.

But what would it have said to the players?  Both the young and the old guys.  I believe as a leader you want to put pressure on your guys, in fact you have to, but there is a certain psychology involved.  You don't want to go too far.  Cutting him right away says to the young guys that it's do or die.  That if you screw up just once you're done.  Off the team the next day, no paycheck, you're done.  That's too much for a lot of young players to handle.

On the other side how would the veterans see that move?  We all know how temperamental Ed Reed gets.  Would he say good, good riddance, or would he view it as a disloyal act to cut a player for one mistake?

By letting Cundiff come back into camp and compete for his job was the right move because it showed everyone a lot of strong leadership qualities, most especially patience and loyalty.  I think we've seen how the players have responded to that throughout the preseason and into their phenomenal domination of the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday Night Football.