Joe Flacco did not appreciate the comments Ray Lewis made on Monday night about the Baltimore Ravens lacking leadership. During the Monday Night Football pregame show on ESPN, Lewis indicated strong leadership in the locker room could have prevented the party bus incident during which Jacoby Jones was allegedly hit with a bottle by a stripper.
“When you think about the Baltimore Ravens and the transition that they went through, they’re missing leadership right now,” Lewis said. “When you have an incident like that, the first thing a leader is going to do is find some way to dissolve everything that’s going on and actually dissolve it before it comes to that type of head or even gets to that point.”
After winning a Super Bowl MVP back in February and signing a six-year, $120 million contract during the offseason, Flacco feels his team does not have a leadership void.
“It is what it is. Ray knows better than that,” Flacco said Wednesday, per Jeff Zrebiec of the Baltimore Sun. “Things happen. I think we’re usually a pretty good team with stuff like that. If you look around the league, there are probably a lot of leadership problems then. Like I said, Ray knows better.”
In fact, Flacco implied that the incident wasn’t even all that serious.
“When you get the information of what happened, it is what it is,” he said. “You laugh about it kind of. It’s funny, some of the things that we deal with. I don’t really have too many comments on it because they’d all be taken the wrong way and out of context. It’s not really an issue.”
Jones — or someone else — was reportedly “bleeding everywhere” after the scrum broke out. That sounds a bit more serious than Flacco is making it out to be, but I agree that the fight had nothing to do with leadership in the locker room. We can’t point to a lack of leadership every time a player gets popped for a DUI or fails a drug test. We’re talking about adults.
As for Lewis, Flacco was asked if he thought it was ironic that his former teammate’s comments came a day after he was inducted into the Ravens Ring of Honor.
“Ray is one of them (the media) for a couple of minutes a week now,” Flacco said. “It is what it is.”
Lewis was overly dramatic as a player, and ESPN expects him to be the same as an analyst. He’s off to a pretty solid start.
