"This preseason game against LA was a snapshot of how he's going to conduct the game," said Golden of Flacco's nine of 10 effort against the Rams with a sparkling 129 passer rating. "He'll make good decisions with the ball. He's not going to force it. If he has to go to his check down, he will and take positive yards and put them in the right run play and get them in the right protection. Those are all the things that he can do, and Joe still throws a great deep ball, and we're aware of that. Obviously, that's part of our game planning."
The Football Gods keep it going. When Flacco made his debut on Sept. 7, 2008, in Baltimore, it was Paul Brown's 100th birthday. If you ask Paul's son, Bengals president Mike Brown, those Ravens are the true Browns because they moved from Cleveland.
On the Baltimore sideline that day was the 12-year-old son of one of those guys who played for both the Browns and Ravens. Orlando Brown Jr. Now the Bengals left tackle.
And, as it turns out, the 6-8, 340-pound Brown has become a mentor to Stewart while supplying a daily lesson on just how big and good NFL tackles are. One of Stewart's first assignments is massive Browns left tackle Dawand Jones, a 6-8, 374-pounder. Stewart has been dealing with size all summer because when he flips sides, the mammoth 6-8, 345-pound Amarius Mims waits.
"Orlando, Mims. Not that it's been a struggle for me. But it's been a battle," Stewart said. "And that's the NFL. A battle. There aren't a lot of Div. II tackles in the NFL."
Flacco's debut is a classic case of the mystery of NFL openers. You just never know.
John Thornton, starting his sixth and last season that day as the Bengals' linch-pin defensive tackle, never thought the game would go like it did. A 17-10 Ravens win. Not with a rookie quarterback from Delaware. Not with John Harbaugh making his debut as Ravens head coach. Not with the Bengals coming off an '07 sweep of Baltimore, where quarterback Carson Palmer had a combined passer rating of 192.
"You just didn't think it's a game we could lose with all we had going for us," Thornton says now. "But in those first games, it's the first time guys are playing 60 snaps and it's the first time coaches are showing what they're using. I know we probably didn't blitz much at all in the preseason with Zim, but I'm sure that changed when the season started, and you're getting used to it as you go. And we didn't know Flacco or Harbaugh."