The Baltimore Ravens were able to come back on the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 10 and pick up a key divisional win. They won by the final score of 35-34, escaping after a Cincinnati two-point conversion failed to take the lead late.
Baltimore looked like they were finished after going down 21-7 midway through the third quarter. The Bengals were driving and looking to put the game away, but Ravens cornerback Marlon Humphrey forced an extremely timely fumble, which head coach John Harbaugh called a “momentum changer”.
“It was definitely a momentum changer. We talk a lot about momentum. When you don’t have it, you have to find a way to get it, and when you get it, you have to try to find a way to build on it and extend it. That’s the real thing. Marlon [Humphrey]’s play there was big, but offensively, we just couldn’t get started. We had way too many first-play-of-the-drive problems. Whether we didn’t execute great, or whether we had pre-snap penalties that brought it back – those kinds of things were just not good, and we couldn’t get started. When you can’t get started, then it’s hard to get anything going, because you don’t have enough plays to do it.”
It’s unclear how the game would have turned out without Humphrey’s big play, but it represented a massive turning point in the contest. The offense found their spark after the play, and never looked back en route to picking up their seventh victory of the season.