NBC Sports’ Mike Florio said the 49ers were going to “kick the s— out of” the Ravens on Christmas night.
The Ravens took that personally, used it as motivation, and kept the receipts. After Baltimore’s 33-19 win in San Francisco, Lamar Jackson and Ravens players brought it up.
We’re in the NFL. We play ball. Not to take away from that team, but you can’t just discredit us. We’re grown men. We have to feed our families,” said Jackson, who turned in an MVP-level performance with nearly 300 total yards.
“[Mike Florio] can have his opinion, but don’t just talk like that. That’s disrespectful. That’s very disrespectful. Not to take away from the 49ers at all, because they’re great all across the board, but we’re going to come to play as well. Our record [isn’t a] fluke. We play ball, and we showed that.”
Florio did say in his prediction, “I’m sorry, I know that’s disrespectful to the Ravens but let’s be realistic.”
“We’re respectful to our opponents. Our opponents are respectful to us,” Jackson continued. “But a guy who’s not even playing against us [and] just coming out and being disrespectful, I guess he wanted more views on his little channel. We’re going to leave it at that.”
Everybody was writing us off before we even had a chance to play. We knew what we were capable of, and everybody counted us out. [They] didn’t expect us to even hold up,” said linebacker Patrick Queen, who had a third quarter interception and seven tackles.
“Everybody was saying we were going to get blown out by double digits or whatever. So we just had to come out and play our style of ball. We all understood the assignment.”
