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| Pittsburgh Steelers |
This year, the over/under is 256, which is the total number of regular-season contests. The number of them that will actually be played due to the ongoing lockout remains to be seen.
There have been regular-season games canceled due to work stoppages before.
In 1982, a 16-game slate was reduced to nine per team due to a strike, and a seeded, 16-team Super Bowl tournament was set up to decide the champion. Five years later, the Week Three schedule was canceled and Weeks Four, Five and Six were played with replacement players before the union’s strike collapsed.
Bloodied but unbowed, the league released the 2011 schedule Tuesday night. For the Ravens, here are its highlights, based on the assumption that a full season is going to be played:
- For the fourth time in team history, but the first time since 2003, the Ravens will play the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week One. The last time the Steelers came to Baltimore for the opener, it was the first regular-season game in what is now M&T Bank Stadium in 1998. The Steeler home game hasn’t been played in September since 2004. Also, the season series with the Steelers will be concluded before December for the first time in six years.
- The Ravens had opened on the road in eight of the last 12 seasons, but a home opener was made more feasible by the fact that the Orioles are in Toronto on the NFL’s first Sunday (Sept. 11).
- Baltimore will play a team-record five national-TV primetime games, three of them on the road (Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, San Diego) and two at home (New York Jets, San Francisco 49ers). The Ravens played four such games in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2010.
- The Ravens avoided the usually-suicidal three-game road trip; the team hasn’t had one of those scheduled since 2000, even though Hurricane Ike forced a three-game road skein in 2008. Baltimore will play at Tennessee and St. Louis back-to-back in September and at Pittsburgh and Seattle in consecutive weeks in November.
- For a second straight year, the Ravens will play the Cincinnati Bengals to close the regular season, but the game will be at Paul Brown Stadium this time around. This will be the third consecutive year the regular season will end in January and the seventh time in team history.
- A scheduling first: the Ravens’ two games against the Cleveland Browns are both in December and will take place just three weeks apart. The second is a Christmas Eve home game -- another first -- but the Ravens did play at Pittsburgh on Christmas Eve, 2006, registering a 31-7 win.
- October has usually been the Ravens’ most difficult month, but this year, the team has three of four October games at home, along with the bye week. Last year, the Ravens posted a winning October (3-1) on their way to logging winning records in each of the four principal months of the season for the first time in franchise lore. However, the Ravens are still a subpar 24-33 in October.
- The Ravens will play on Thanksgiving for the first time in team history when they host the 49ers in the Harbaugh brother coaching bowl, the first time siblings will be coaching against each other in an NFL game. In 1965, the Baltimore Colts played a tie game in Detroit, but no locally-based NFL team had played on that holiday before or since.
- Due to the Ravens’ heavy national-TV schedule, only five games could possibly be affected by the NBC late-season “flex” scheduling plan.
- Here on Ravens Report, our attempt to predict the schedule back on April 9 didn’t turn out too badly. We called the Steelers’ early visit here, the Arizona game in its exact Week Eight spot and the late timing of the Indianapolis Colts’ visit.
- The Ravens’ preseason schedule was finalized, and it appears with the regular-season slate at the end of this article below.
SCHEDULE IS AFC’S EASIEST
With only five games against 2010 playoff teams (Pittsburgh twice, Seattle, Indianapolis, New York Jets), the Ravens’ schedule ranks as the AFC’s easiest and the second-softest leaguewide, bottomed out only by that of the Arizona Cardinals.
With the schedule formula that dictates rotating between opposing divisions, the Ravens made the playoffs in 2010 playing the league’s 12th-toughest itinerary. The year before that, they took on the fifth-easiest slate.
But with teams’ fortunes rising and falling rather quickly due to league-wide parity, it’s important to note that the Ravens posted the better record against the tougher schedule (12-4 last year) than they did against the supposedly-easier set of opponents (9-7 in 2009).
BYE WEEK FACTS
As for the Ravens' bye week, it will fall on Week Five (Sunday, October 9), the first time that has happened since 2003. It also fell on that same week in 1998.
In 2002, 2005 and 2008, the Ravens had a week off after just two games, but in the latter case, it was a forced bye due to Hurricane Ike’s devastation in Houston, where the Ravens were scheduled to play.
The bye is also surrounded by two home games, which has been a surprisingly common phenomenon in Ravens history. It also took place in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2008 and last year.
Within the AFC North, Pittsburgh will have its bye in Week 11 (Nov. 20) with Cincinnati taking the week off in Week Seven (Oct. 23) and Cleveland idled on the same day as Baltimore.
For the first time in recent memory, the Ravens will not play any team coming off its bye. Last year, Baltimore took on New England and Buffalo in back-to-back weeks when both teams were rested, and in 2009, the Ravens played three consecutive teams after their bye weeks and went 2-1 against Denver, Cleveland and Cincinnati.
COLD WEATHER NOTES
Last year, we forecasted the Ravens playing in mostly-ideal weather conditions, and that prognostication came true for the most part.
Gametime temperatures ranged from 26 to 78 degrees with wind-chill factors in the teens figuring in only two games: the December game in Cleveland and the wild-card contest in Kansas City. The Ravens also played two games under closed-roof conditions, at Houston and Atlanta.
This year, Baltimore should have another mostly-warm season.
It will play under yet another dome in St. Louis -- even though it has never won there in four visits covering two regular- and two preseason games -- and in warm-weather cities such as Jacksonville and San Diego, the latter game in December.
The only real chances the team has of playing in colder weather could come at home when the Ravens play Indianapolis and Cleveland, or the road games at Seattle (Nov. 13) and Cleveland (Dec. 4).
SCHEDULE FORMULA EXPLAINED
The schedule follows the same formula that was revamped after the 2002 realignment, using a system that pre-determines 14 of any given team’s 16 opponents years in advance. This formula effectively eliminates the “first-place schedule” and “last-place schedule” designations, even though many observers still believe they exist.
The schedule formula has several main points of emphasis (with Ravens opponents in parentheses):
- Each team will play six games against teams in its own division, two home and two away (Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh).
- Each team will play two home and two away games against four teams in a division within its own conference (AFC South: Jacksonville and Tennessee away, Houston and Indianapolis at home).
- Each team will play two home and two away games against four teams in a division in the opposite conference (NFC West: St. Louis and Seattle away, Arizona and San Francisco at home).
- Each team will play one home and one away game against teams that finished in the same position it did. Those two teams will be from divisions within their own conference that the given team isn’t already playing in its entirety. These games have become known as “placement games.” (San Diego away, New York Jets at home)
The last time the Ravens played the NFC West, they went 3-1 against them, losing only to Seattle. That took place in 2007, a year that saw the Ravens go 2-10 against everyone else.
The most recent instance that Baltimore took on the entire AFC South was 2008. The Ravens split those four games, losing to Tennessee and Indianapolis while beating Jacksonville and Houston.
Other AFC division pairings in 2011 will line up this way: the AFC East will play the AFC West and NFC East, the AFC South will play the AFC North and NFC South, and the AFC West will take on the AFC East and NFC North.
In the NFC, the East will play the NFC West and AFC East. The NFC North takes on the NFC South and AFC West, the NFC South plays the NFC North and AFC South and the NFC West goes up against the NFC East and AFC North.
Baltimore Ravens 2011 schedule
Sept. 11 vs. Pittsburgh
Sept. 18 at Tennessee
Sept. 25 at St. Louis
Oct. 2 vs. New York Jets
Oct. 9 BYE
Oct. 16 vs. Houston
Oct. 24 at Jacksonville
Oct. 30 vs. Arizona
Nov. 6 at Pittsburgh
Nov. 13 at Seattle
Nov. 20 vs. Cincinnati
Nov. 24 vs. San Francisco
Dec. 4 at Cleveland
Dec. 11 vs. Indianapolis
Dec. 18 at San Diego
Dec. 24 vs. Cleveland
Jan. 1 at Cincinnati
