The Minnesota Vikings had a major issue with false starts in their Week 10 loss to the Baltimore Ravens, but John Harbaugh says any talk of his team engaging in shady antics before the ball was snapped is nonsense.
The Vikings committed eight false start penalties in their 27-19 loss to the Ravens on Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minn. When asked about the issue after the game, Vikings running back Aaron Jones suggested Ravens players were making sounds to simulate Minnesota’s snap count.
Jones described the alleged antics as “playing a little game.”
“They’re making move calls up front, so sometimes it sounds like it could be J.J. (McCarthy) saying ‘hut.’ They’re making move calls and you see them stem. So they’re trying to get them to jump, as well,” Jones said, via Carter Bahns of CBS Sports.
Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell disagreed with Jones and blamed his team’s offense. No other players accused the Ravens of using disconcerting signals, which is prohibited by NFL rules.
Jones’ comments were enough to make Harbaugh go back and check the film. The Ravens coach told reporters on Monday that he did not see anything from his players that should have influenced the Vikings to jump.
“If you stem, you make a move call. You’re allowed to say ‘move,'” Harbaugh explained. “You’re not allowed to say ‘set’ or ‘hut’ or anything else or a cadence, which we never have done.
“But then I watched all of them, and none of them did we stem. Not one did we move. … They were doing a lot of on-two, trying to draw us offsides. And then they were doing some shifts where they could uncover man/zone and try to see what we were in. They jumped a few times when they were doing that to try to get to their alerts and their change of plays. So, like Coach O’Connell said, it wasn’t anything we were doing.”
The accusation from Jones sounded similar to something we heard after the Atlanta Falcons lost a close game to the New England Patriots in Week 9. The Falcons accused the Patriots of clapping in order to simulate the snap late in the game, which the Patriots won 24-23. One video showed that a player did clap, but it did not seem like anything that was done deliberately or should have confused the offense.
In addition to the false start penalties, the Vikings also turned the ball over three times. They lost the game because of mistakes, which is why O’Connell wanted nothing to do with blaming his opponent.
