RAVE REVIEWS

Honoring Lamar Jackson’s brilliance, Marcus Peters’ celebrations and more No. 17 Maryland making bad habit of slow starts

At his season-ending news conference on Jan. 17, John Harbaugh called this Ravens team the best regular-season team it could’ve been. Yes, they’d fallen short in a stunning AFC divisional-round loss to the Tennessee Titans. But for so long, they’d been so good and so memorable. In 2019, the Ravens won a franchise-record 14 games, including a franchise-record 12 straight. They minted an NFL superstar in quarterback Lamar Jackson. They had 13 players named to the Pro Bowl. They blew out teams, skated by a few others and flew in to the playoffs as Super Bowl favorites.

Because of where its season ended, this Ravens team will not be regarded as one of the franchise’s most hallowed. But it certainly left an impression. As the Ravens turn their focus to 2020, here’s a set of superlatives to remember this season by:

PRO BOWL

COLLEGE PARK — It’s a bad habit the Maryland men’s basketball team can’t seem to break.

The 17th-ranked Terps apparently need about 20 minutes to warm up for a game, which would be just fine if it wasn’t after tipoff.

Even against a very beatable team such as Northwestern last Tuesday, they fell behind 10-0 and left the floor at intermission trailing by 14, which would have been a prescription for another frustrating road loss had they been playing one of the dozen or so solid teams in the Big Ten.

None of this is breaking news to

Terps fans, who have seen this movie too many times, but they know better than to start browsing their streaming services at halftime because there’s probably a comeback brewing in the locker room.

Coach Mark Turgeon would certainly rather see his team fly out of the gate the way it did in that early season tournament final against Marquette. That early-December win boosted the Terps to No. 3 in the AP Top 25, which was the high-water mark of their season.

But they opened Big Ten play a week later and trailed then-unranked Illinois by 14 points at halftime before staging a furious rally and winning on a fourpoint burst by Anthony Cowen Jr. in the final 20 seconds.

With the Northwestern comeback, they became the first Power 5 team to rebound twice in the same season from a halftime deficit of 14 points or more in a non-tournament conference game