Even by the standards of his lineage, John Harbaugh was impressively manic Sunday night in the afterglow of the Ravens' huge AFC North victory over the Steelers. The coach held his postgame news conference with a bloody chin and at one point directly addressed the camera as if "Mean" Gene Okerlund were standing next to him at Wrestlemania.
The whole thing was off-kilter in a beautiful way.
On Wednesday, we might have learned part of the reason why Harbaugh was so amped up by a win that -- obvious ramifications of the rivalry aside -- was a regular-season game in early November.
Before Baltimore's game-winning, 92-yard drive late in the fourth quarter, the Jumbotron at Heinz Field flashed an image comparing the stats of Ben Roethlisberger and Joe Flacco while the Lynyrd Skynyrd song "What's Your Name" blared from the public-address system. The chorus of the 1977 hit begins with, "What's your name, little girl?"
That angered Harbaugh, who was bothered enough by the presumed insinuation that his QB was female that he later pulled aside a Baltimore Sun reporter to point it out.
This seems like a leap in logic by Harbaugh, but beyond that, we find it incredible that he processed this during the biggest moment of his team's season. When asked about Skynyrd-gate, Flacco was amusingly clueless.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," the quarterback told The Sun, genuinely confused. "They were playing a song?"
Classic Flacco. As for the choice of music by Heinz Field personnel, eh. If you really wanted to go for the jugular, why not go with Beck's "Loser"? We could've had a Harbaugh head explosion on our hands.
