‘Our defense has got to step up’
Ravens could be looking at a 4-and-done season soon Harbaugh says 0-2 team’s potential will be clear soon
Maybe it should be some consolation that the difference between the Ravens’ being 2-0 instead of 0-2 can be traced to one key play in the season opener against the Denver Broncos and one near-miss in Sunday’s galling last-minute loss to the Oakland Raiders.
In that context, it’s possible to see a way out of the mess they’ve gotten themselves into, but there’s really no way to sugarcoat this predicament. The Ravens, as you probably have read a few times since Derek Carr carved up their rebuilt secondary, are winless after two weeks for the first time in the John Harbaugh era, and the probability of them
Every Ravens player dissected the film on their five-hour flight home from Oakland, Calif. Coach John Harbaugh and his staff studied it again Monday morning.
But by the afternoon, less than 24 hours after their stunning 37-33 loss to the Oakland Raiders, the Ravens had forced themselves to look ahead. That’s the NFL, even when you’ve begun the season 0-2 and raised serious doubts about your playoff chances.
“We’re going to have to deal with it and work from this position we’re in,” Harbaugh said to start his Monday news conference at the team’s training complex in Owings Mills. “You have to go forward. We have every opportunity to accomplish what we need to accomplish. We just have to get better.”
making the playoffs, based on historical precedent, is about 12 percent.
Factor in that they now must turn their attention to the undefeated Cincinnati Bengals, who torched the Raiders a week ago in Oakland, then play the high-scoring Steelers on the road just four days afterward, and it’s fair to wonder whether their entire season could come unraveled by midnight Oct. 1.
Admittedly, that’s a pretty dreary outlook, but it’s hard to think glass-half-full when the entire narrative surrounding this team was turned on its head by a second-year quarterback with a sore throwing hand.
If you recall, the big concern after the loss in Denver was the overall ineffectiveness of the offensive unit, though quarterback Joe Flacco almost overcame the disastrous interception that revived the Broncos and helped reverse what could have been a dramatically uplifting road victory.
The defense got high marks for holding Peyton Manning in check, and there was a collective sigh of relief after Jimmy Smith and the secondary turned in a solid all-around performance that seemed to bode well for Sunday’s matchup with the supposedly hapless Raiders.
So if Flacco and the offense had struggled again in Oakland and the defense again had done what everyone expected it to do, it would be much easier to rationalize the loss and, presumably, much easier to figure out how to turn this supposed Super Bowl contender back in the right direction.
Instead, the stark reality is this: Flacco had a great day against a Raiders secondary that also gave up 33 points to the Bengals last week, while the Ravens defense looked almost helpless against an offense that could not do much of anything against Cincinnati. The 37 points Carr and Co. put up were the most by the Raiders since Week15 of the 2010 season.
In other words, there’s no guarantee the offense has been fixed and there’s no way to know which defense will greet Andy Dalton on Sunday at M&T Bank Stadium.
It’s tempting to speculate that things would have been different had Terrell Suggs not blown another Achilles tendon a week ago and been lost for the season, and there’s some logic there. Sunday’s game was decided in the final minute by a quarterback who was sacked just once, so it’s OK to believe Suggs might have kept Carr from getting so comfortable throwing the ball.
There had been some debate during the buildup to Week 2 as to whether the loss of Suggs would affect the Ravens more from an emotional standpoint or a competitive one, considering he is nearing the end of his great career. It appeared Sunday that the answer was both, but, to be fair, both sides of that question are unquantifiable. And anyway, what difference does it make at this point?
The Ravens certainly missed him, as they did the last time he was out for an extended period, but they have a history of overcoming similar adversity, and they appear to have the depth at his position to do that this year.
They’ll have to do that, and a lot more, if they want to save a season that was jeopardized the day the NFL released the regular-season schedule. The Ravens were dealt a grueling early slate that started with the two road games they just lost and includes three more road stops in the next five weeks, including the Thursday night game at Heinz Field on Oct. 1. Aferward is another set of back-to-back weekends out West against a formidable Arizona Cardinals team and another potential Bay Area trap game against the San Francisco 49ers. Nice. It’s probably fair to speculate that if the Ravens don’t win three of those five games, their chances of making the playoffs for the seventh time in Harbaugh’s eight seasons as coach will be a lot less than 12 percent.