I’m not sure there’s a pair of teams in sports with more fitting colors to suit the brutality of the games they play against one another than the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens. It’s the color of bruises. As former Steelers CB Ike Taylor said, you spend days in the ice bath after those games.
For a variety of reasons, including changes in how games are officiated, Ravens-Steelers games aren’t quite so black and blue anymore. Certainly not in the heyday of the rivalry, in the era when players had rules informally named after them to reduce the physicality of the sport.
Hall of Fame Ravens LB Ray Lewis even had a rule named after him—only it was a rule the Steelers had. Former RB Rashard Mendenhall explained exactly what that meant on the Raw Room podcast, and what its purpose was.
“We had the Ray Lewis Rule. The Ray Rule”, he recalled. “And it was, at the RB position, no matter where I went with the ball, what I did, we just wanted to make sure that Ray Lewis didn’t make the tackle. That was the way we played Baltimore”.
Why? Because nobody in the game had a bigger personality than he did. Nobody in the game so embodied and drove the energy of their team than Ray Lewis. And frankly, it was pretty annoying for his opponents, especially dancing after a hit, or as Mendenhall put it, “doing his little Ray shit”. He would know better than most, having had his bones crunched by Lewis.
And so, the rule was in place. Not to stop him from dancing and being annoying, but to stop him from having a reason to dance and be annoying. To stop him from setting the tone of the game and dictating the course of action.
“Whoever makes this tackle, we don’t care who it is, just make sure it’s not Ray”, Mendenhall said of the rule. “Make sure he’s not getting up doing the whole celebration. When he looks at his team to call the huddle and all of that, we don’t want him to be confident, feeling like he’s having a good game”.
Now, he doesn’t really go into detail about how formal this was. Did the coaches, did head coach Mike Tomlin, communicate this idea to them? Was this just something in the running back room, the guys who would most often be danced over?
Mendenhall did acknowledge going out of his way to avoid Lewis. “I’m turning sideways, I’m jumping out of holes just making sure Ray don’t get the tackle so he gets off the ground frustrated”, he said, in the hope of taking the air out of the defense.
So, did it work? Well, it’s hard to say. The Ravens and Steelers tended to split their season series more often than not. And Lewis rarely had fewer than six tackles in those games, with double digits not being uncommon.
And I’m sure the Ray Lewis Rule is not unique. Just as defenses game plan to minimize a player on offense, offenses plan to avoid defenders. The Steelers had an Aaron Donald Rule, effectively, the purpose of which in the words of RB Najee Harris was to “run away from that motherfucker”.
