Friday funny time. With the Pittsburgh Steelers on a bye this week, we have no choice but to pay closer attention to the other teams in the AFC North this week.
Cleveland Browns safety Ray Ventrone said on Friday that he doesn\’t want to be the guy to stir the pot, but went on to accuse the Baltimore Ravens of playing dirty in the Browns loss to the Ravens Thursday night.
According to the Associated Press, Ventrone claims that the Ravens offensive players played dirty and the regular referees, who were working their first game back since the lockout ended, missed it.
“I know that they were playing dirty on offense,” Ventrone said Friday via the AP report. “Watch the film, man. There was some dirty stuff going on.”
Ventrone would say specifically what that dirty stuff was, only that the Ravens got away with some “extracurricular stuff” as he called it.
Perhaps my favorite quote by Ventrone was him not wanting to be the guy to stir the pot. “I don\’t want to get into specifics just \’cause I don\’t want to be the guy to stir the pot,” Ventrone said.
Athletes really do say the darnedest things sometimes and it appears that Ventrone suffers mostly from the sour grape syndrome following the loss. I have re-watched the game myself today and everything looked pretty normal to me outside of Browns return man Joshua Cribbs getting knocked out cold on a return early in the game.
Ventrone has been around the game since 2005 and he certainly knows better than to make a claim like this, without saying specifically what the extracurricular stuff indeed was. Perhaps somebody was giving somebody the business at the bottom of the pile, but that has been going on for eons.
Although the Browns safety claims not to want to be the guy to stir the point, he should be informed that he just did.
It should be fun to see these two teams play again later in the season.
In somewhat related news, Ravens safety Ed Reed was fined $21,000 for his hit on New England Patriots wide receiver Deion Branch in the third quarter of the Ravens\’ 31-30 victory last Sunday.
