The breakout Ravens at Titans will feature something the NFL Posteason hasn’t seen in 32 years

You don’t often see the top two NFL racer teams facing each other in qualifiers, but that’s exactly what will happen on Sunday in Nashville when Tennessee hosts Baltimore in a wild card game.

In an era when nearly every NFL team loves to throw the ball, the Crows And the Titans They’ve gone against the tide and their throwback strategy means we’ll have post-season scarcity: This week’s match will mark the first time in nearly 32 years that the two NFL’s top competitors have faced each other in a playoff.

The last time this happened was in January 1989 when it was Bengals And the 49ers Met at Super Bowl XXIII. In that game, the Bengals beat the Bengals who ranked first overall in the Rush in 1988 by a narrow margin, as the Bengals beat NFL’s best player on their team that year in Boomer Esiason, yet they managed to achieve the average. 169.4 yards per game on land. As for the 49 players, their ground attack averaged 157.6 yards per match despite Joe Montana being below center.

Neither team came close to their season average with 49 players totaling 111 flowing yards while the Bengals finished 106 yards in the San Francisco 20-16 Super Bowl win.

The Ravens-Titans would mark the fourth time the two contesting teams met in the post-season period since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. Alongside Super Bowl XXIII, there was also the 1972 AFC Championship that featured an unbeaten match. Dolphins A team (211.4 yards per match during the season) climbs up against Steelers (180 yards per game). The other meeting came in the 1970’s division tour between Cowboys (164.3) and black (151.9)

In the previous three encounters, the team that led the NFL in sprints has achieved 2-1 with wins by the Dolphins (21-17) and the Cowboys (5-0). Also, that’s not a typo, the Cowboys won the playoff game 5-0.

This year, Baltimore will enter post-season after winning the regular season racing title. The Ravens averaged 191.9 yards per game on the ground this year, leading the NFL by more than 20 yards. The only team that came close to matching them was the Titans, who finished second overall with an average of 168.1 yards per game (no other team in the NFL even averaged 150 yards). Not only did they rank first and second in rush this year, they were also two of the three NFL teams that called in more runs than passes playing in 2020 (The Patriots The other was).

Although they were the first two teams in the racing arenas, there was a stark difference in how they got there. The Titans are a one-man show while the crows are a much more blunted by commission. The Ravens had three players who finished the year with a lunge of over 700 yards, including Lamar JacksonWho finished the season with 1,005.

As for the titans, Derek Henry He finished the season at 2,027 yards, the fifth-highest gross in NFL history. Henry could go on to make history on Sunday: if he hits the 150 mark, he’ll draw with Terrell Davis for most matches in playoff history with at least 150 yards.

The game of running will be important to both teams, but it will probably be somewhat more important to the Titans because they have gone 2-3 this year in matches where they defeated their opponent and 9-2 when they had more yards rushing. As for the crows, they went 3-2 when they knocked out quickly and 8-3 when they had more yards on the ground than their opponent.

This match will be the third time that these two teams have faced each other over the past 12 months. Not only did the two teams win both games, but they outperformed the Ravens every time.