The New England Patriots’ substitutions on Saturday night were legal, according to the NFL, even though Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh objected and called them a “substitution trick.”

A spokesman for the NFL told ESPN’s Chris Mortensen on Sunday that the substitutions were legal from a formation and reporting standpoint.

After his team’s 35-31 loss in the AFC divisional playoff game, Harbaugh said the Patriots’ substitutions in the third quarter were “clearly deception” that he hoped the league would examine.

New England ran three plays that declared a receiver as ineligible. The confusion helped the Patriots to a touchdown that made it 28-21. Near the end of the drive, after the third trick move, the Baltimore coach was hit with a penalty after charging down the sideline and yelling at the officials.

“It’s a substitution type or a trick type of a thing,” Harbaugh said after the loss. “So they don’t give you the opportunity, they don’t give you the chance to make the proper substitutions and things like that.

“It’s not something that anybody’s ever done before. The league will look at that type of thing and I’m sure that they’ll make some adjustments and things like that.”

Harbaugh said the officials “didn’t understand what was going on.”

“We wanted an opportunity to be able to ID who the eligible players were,” Harbaugh said. “What (the Patriots) were doing was they announce the ineligible player and then Tom (Brady) would take them to the line right away and snap the ball before we had a chance to figure out who was lined up where. That was the deception part of it. It was clearly deception.

“So the officials told me after that they would give us the opportunity to do that, which they probably should’ve done during that series but they didn’t really understand what was happening. That’s why I had to take the penalty, to get their attention so they would understand what was going on because they didn’t understand what was going on. … That’s why guys were open, because we didn’t ID where the eligible receivers were at.”

Patriots coach Bill Belichick explained the strategy, which featured four offensive linemen on the field and had either running back Shane Vereen or tight end Michael Hoomanawanui lined up as ineligible.

“It’s a play that we thought would work,” Belichick said. “We ran it three times, a couple different looks. We had six eligible receivers on the field, but only five were eligible. The one who was ineligible reported that he was ineligible. No different than on the punt team or a situation like that.”