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Count Joe Flacco among those that don't understand why rookie safety Matt Elam called Calvin Johnson "pretty old" earlier this week.
Speaking to Detroit reporters on a conference call, Flacco was asked what he thought of the former Florida safety's comments.
"You just look at him and smile and kind of shake your head and say, ‘What are you doing?'" Flacco said. "I don't think whatever he said was that bad. It wasn't like really trash talking or anything from what I have heard. I don't really know what he said. Like I said, you just kind of look at him and say, ‘Dude, what are you thinking? It's Calvin Johnson, man.' It's kind of just funny that he put himself in a situation like that."
That's true. Why further fuel someone's fire?
He wasn't the only member of the Ravens to chime in on the matter. Here's what John Harbaugh and Jimmy Smith had to say on it.
Harbaugh: "I don't appreciate it. It doesn't help us. You get a guy like Calvin Johnson all fired up, that's really not the idea. It's Monday Night Football. They've deemed it a playoff game for them, and they're going to be pretty juiced up. I'm sure the crowd is going to be fired up, and the team is going to be fired up, as they should be - as will we. I don't think they needed that to get fired up. But we didn't need to give it to them, either."
Smith: "Honestly, it doesn't bother me. Would you think that Calvin Johnson is not going to come to a Monday night game on national television and not play his best game anyway, because a rookie said something? I doubt it. It's poster board stuff. You can look at it as much as you want. To Matt Elam ... He's 22 years old; he's a rookie. [Johnson's age of] 28 years old? [Elam] thinks I'm old, and I'm 25. To him, he meant [his remarks] as a veteran, ‘Get a hat on him; hit him a lot.' If they're going to take it as, ‘That's poster board [material]; we're going to take it even harder now,' then they don't have the right mentality coming to play a Monday night game anyway."