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Just seven days ago, Derrick Mason confronted Joe Flacco during the Ravens' win over the Panthers, grabbed his quarterback's facemask, and the two men had to be separated during a sideline scuffle.
Today, Flacco targeted Mason a team-high 13 times, over three times more than any other Ravens wide receiver, and the two connected eight times for 87 yards and a touchdown.
So, will Anquan Boldin or T.J. Houshmandzadeh be having a similarly intense chat with Flacco this week as they try and earn a few more receptions next Sunday against the Steelers?
"That was not really a chat, it was more of him yelling at me," Flacco said with a laugh. "[He was saying], 'What were you doing, Joe? I was wide open.' I don't know if they want that. I don't know if that's a good matchup for them. Me vs. them? I think I might have to handle them a little bit.
"We'll see. Anquan and those guys are going to want the ball, so I'm sure they might think about that if you let them know."
Mason led the charge for the Ravens in the first half, making seven of his eight grabs in the first two quarters, including a 10-yard touchdown catch with 37 seconds left in the half.
Flacco looked his way 11 times in the half, prompting plenty of press box jokes about how the quarterback and wide receiver must have hugged it out and put the altercation behind them.
Mason wasn't really in the mood to joke about the incident after the game.
"What happened, happened. We move on," Mason said. "We're grown men. That's my guy, he'll always be my guy. We're in the business of winning football games. That's all that matters. We might have a dispute one week and then the next week [we've] got to get back to business as usual, be it him, myself or [Boldin], and win football games.
"Ya'll act like Joe and I don't talk to each other. We smile, we talk. Even after what happened, we still talked and smiled. We move on. We're bigger than that stuff. We got a job to do and that's win football games. It was over with and today it showed."
Mason said that the Buccaneers played a lot of off-coverage on him and gave a bunch of one-on-one looks, which gave him room to operate along the sidelines.
His longest reception of the game was for just 15 yards, but he says was able to rack up a number of catches because the Bucs weren't playing him tight at the line of scrimmage and bumping him off his routes.
"We knew they weren't going to get in our face, but they showed a little bit more off-[coverage] than usual, but that's because, I believe, we have the ability to get down field," Mason said. "And we've thrown some deep passes against teams, so they wanted to try to take away the deep pass and they gave up a lot of things underneath. We just took what they gave us and kept moving."
"We've got so many guys that are able to catch the ball that defenses just have to try to pick and choose what they're going to stop. And they were playing me one-on-one or either off-coverage a lot, so Joe looked my way today."
