Browns cornerback says Anquan Boldin is "obviously a good player, but I didn't play up to my ability, not even close."
UPDATED: 10:10 p.m.
Browns cornerback Eric Wright is trailing badly as the Ravens' Anquan Boldin grabs his third touchdown pass of Sunday's game against the Browns in Baltimore.BALTIMORE, Md. -- Admitting he had "a horrible day," Browns cornerback Eric Wright pinned the entire 24-17 loss to the Ravens on himself because of the three touchdowns he surrendered to Anquan Boldin.
"I let my team down," said Wright. "This loss -- I'll definitely take that especially defensively because if you take away even just one of those plays, we win the game. It's as simple as that."
A source said something was definitely wrong with Wright both physically and mentally, but he wasn’t about to reveal it or use it as an excuse.
"I didn't feel like myself at all and I didn't play like myself," Wright added. "(Boldin is) a good player, but I don't think it's anything that he did that I wasn't expecting, or anything special that he did. He's obviously a good player, but I just didn't play up to my ability, not even close.
"It's just unfortunate, just because you have 10 other guys on the field that are doing their jobs and really depending on me to be a certain type of player and I wasn't that player by a longshot today."
Wright gave up TD passes of eight, 12 and 27 yards to Boldin -- although the second appeared to be a miscommunication between him and rookie safety T.J. Ward. Overall, the three-time Pro Bowl receiver caught eight passes for 142 yards.
"Mentally we have to be at a certain place in order to play the game," he said. "You try to get there as best as you can. I just never settled in. I never got to where I needed to be."
Wright said he wasn't sick. If there was something off the field distracting him, he didn't let on. He also refused to blame it on not getting backside help or the lack of a pass rush.
"We'll look at the tape, but for the most part, it's just me not doing what I'm supposed to do," he said.
On Boldin's final TD, a 27-yarder on a post route in the fourth quarter, the Browns sent the house and Wright was left alone in coverage.
"You know you're not going to see any help," said Wright. "When they send a lot of people, you expect them to get pressure, but on the opposite end of that you have to guard your man as tight as possible to give them the opportunity to get to the quarterback. Anytime you turn somebody loose as open as I let him get -- I mean basically wide open -- you can't really expect the pressure to get there."
Said Boldin: "They put [Wright] in some positions where it was single coverage. That's one of the matchups we felt we could take advantage of."
The carnage began in the first quarter, when Joe Flacco lobbed an eight-yard pass to Boldin over Wright's head on a post. On the next drive, Wright gave up a 14-yarder to Boldin and then Boldin was left wide open vs. zone coverage for a 27-yarder. He capped the drive with a 14-yard TD catch on the right side of the end zone, where Ward and Wright blew their assignments.
"I hold a lot of responsibility for the defense and for this team and guys expect me to play at a certain level," said Wright, who said he was given encouragement on the sideline. "Everybody was behind me and everybody had my back and was trying to continue to motivate me."
Browns coach Eric Mangini blamed Wright's performance, in part, on no pressure on Flacco, "but that being said, we have to hold up on the back end as well. We tried multiple things, we tried man, we tried zone, we tried blitzing, we tried doubling, none of them really worked that well."
Boldin could've had a fourth TD with 5:38 remaining, but Ward broke up the pass in the end zone. Late in the fourth quarter, when they needed a third-down conversion, Flacco saw Wright on T.J. Houshmanzadeh and flipped him a short pass for a first down.
"I know how it feels," said cornerback Sheldon Brown. "I've given up a walk-off overtime touchdown -- the game ended on your behalf. But it's how you respond to it. If you don't recover from it, you're not a good player. The sign of a champion is to come back, work your butt off and play better the next game."
Brown said Wright never had a horrible game before "and that's probably why it seems so overwhelming. Once you're in a funk, it's hard to get out of it. You have to run into a wall or something to get the cobwebs out. But I've seen Eric play really well against great receivers before and he will again."
With rookie cornerback Joe Haden waiting in the wings for a starting job, Wright didn't do anything to help himself.
"It's just one game," Wright said. "But you can't have games like that."