Ray Lewis will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday night after a stellar 17-year career with the Ravens that included two Super Bowl titles, a Super Bowl MVP, 13 Pro Bowls, two NFL Defensive Player of the Year awards, a spot on the NFL 2000s All-Decade Team and wide consideration as the best middle linebacker of his generation.

And to hear Lewis tell it, his football talents were so transcendent that they doubled as a crime-prevention tool.

"When I played, crime went lower in Baltimore," Lewis told reporters Friday, via ESPN.com's Jamison Hensley. "It's like, nobody needs to be mad now. It's like everybody wants to be happy and celebrate."

Lewis' comments were part of an extended session that also included these nuggets:

Lewis, who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with the stabbing deaths of two men in 2000 and wrote about the murder trial in a 2015 autobiography, has previously spoken about the relationship between football and crime. In 2011, after the owners had locked out the players, Lewis predicted an uptick in crime if the lockout lasted into the regular season.

"Do this research if we don't have a season -- watch how much evil, which we call crime, watch how much crime picks up, if you take away our game," Lewis told ESPN's Sal Paolantonio at the time, via Pro Football Talk. "There's too many people that live through us, people live through us. Yeah, walk in the streets, the way I walk the streets, and I'm not talking about the people you see all the time."

Asked why crime would increase, Lewis said, "There's nothing else to do, Sal."

The lockout ended in late July 2011.

And while violent crimes in Baltimore spiked in recent years, the rate is similar to the violent crime rates the city experienced in 2002-05 when Lewis was in his prime, according to city-data.com.