Mounting obstacles nearly are overcome
Obsessing over what the Ravens aren’t denigrates who they are
The Ravens lost their third straight game Sunday, and each has come down to the wire and a crucial 2-point conversion attempt. But during a 31-30 loss to the Packers that put the Ravens (8-6) in the middle of a playoff battle in the AFC, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Here are five things we learned from the loss in Baltimore.
This was a day to appreciate what the Ravens are instead of obsessing over what they are not.
Is it possible to be proud of a loss in a zero-sum league such as the NFL?
Again, the postgame debate will center on John Harbaugh’s decision to go for two points when Justin Tucker could have kicked a game-tying extra point with 42 seconds left. We’ll get to that. But is it the most important point after the Ravens again came within a breath of beating a favored opponent, coming off a week in which they were hammered by COVID-19 on top of an injury to their most essential player, Lamar Jackson?
Or is this the time to admire what they are instead of obsessing over what they are not?
After three straight losses and weekly dips in their chances to make the playoffs, the Ravens have reached their fill of gritty, doomed performances. But it’s difficult to look at them any other way given an injury toll that now includes Jackson and a spate of COVID-19 positives that carved their roster even closer to the bone.
There are so many ways to sum up the hollowed-out state of this team, which held the AFC’s No. 1 seed just three weeks ago.
Every player on the Ravens’ Sunday list of inactives — Jackson, defensive end Calais Campbell, right tackle Patrick Mekari, left guard Ben Powers and fullback Patrick Ricard — was a starter. Not one player in the offensive or defensive backfields was a projected starter when the team showed up for training camp. As if their outlook was not bleak enough, the Ravens lost another cornerback, Tavon Young, to a concussion in the second quar
ter.
Aaron Rodgers, an inner-circle Hall of Fame quarterback, played about as efficiently as you might expect against this collection of misfit toys. At age 38, Rodgers still spins throws that make you shake your head, exploiting the slightest creases in coverage with his touch and velocity. He completed 23 of 31 passes for 268 yards and three touchdowns with no turnovers — ordinary by his standards, extraordinary by those of most quarterbacks.
The Ravens, however, did not roll over quietly in the face of these daunting odds. They moved the ball efficiently with Tyler Huntley at quarterback and went to halftime tied with the NFC’s best. They kept coming, cobbling together an 11-play touchdown drive after Rodgers had built a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter. The Ravens finally managed a defensive stand, punctuated by a stuff and a sack from second-year tackle Justin Madubuike. Huntley drove them 49 yards for another touchdown, setting up that tantalizing 2-point attempt.
What more could we really ask from a team that would have been picked to finish in the dregs of the AFC if it had begun the season with this collection of starters?
Our judgments of the Ravens’ season, whenever it ends, will involve more complex calculations. But on this day, given the opponent and the unrelenting personnel blows, they answered with quite an effort.
Here we are again with the 2-point debate in which John Harbaugh made the right call with the wrong result.
Harbaugh gave no quarter after the game in explaining his decision to go for two. He felt the Ravens had a better chance to win by taking the lead at that moment than by trading possessions with Rodgers in overtime. With 42 seconds left on the clock, they might not have gotten to overtime anyway, but that’s a different discussion.
Harbaugh is an aggressive coach by nature, and though he will not say so publicly, he understands his team is operating at a talent deficit right now. If he sees a chance to cut a corner for a win that would give the Ravens’ playoff chances a significant boost, he’s going to take it.
“To me, in both of those cases, that gave us the best chance to win,” he said of his pair of 2-point calls from the past three games. “Because we didn’t win doesn’t make it not true.”
There’s no sense asking your coach to become a different person. The Ravens stay in these games in part because they are animated by Harbaugh’s unrelenting drive to squeeze the most out of each moment. This might sound like hokum, but look at his results over the years. He has rarely lost his grip on a season.
His decision to go for two made sense, in context. But the play the Ravens called did not work and did not come as close as the one offensive coordinator Greg Roman dialed up two weeks earlier in Pittsburgh. Huntley rolled to his right, with his target, Andrews, setting up against cornerback Eric Stokes just inside the near pylon. Huntley saw his tight end open for an instant, but his motion drew safety Darnell Savage toward Andrews, and Savage deflected the pass. Marquise Brown appeared open in the back of the end zone, but Harbaugh and Huntley indicated that Andrews was always the target.
“He made a good decision,” Harbaugh said. “He had a chance to get Mark, and I think that safety got out there and got a fingertip on it.”
Perhaps this was too obvious a play for the situation, robbing Huntley of the ability to seek another target or run it in himself. Even if he had spotted Brown, he would have needed to throw against his body to reach him. The Ravens have converted two 2-point conversions in eight tries this season, one of the worst rates in the league.
Regardless, players seemed in no mood to reexamine the decision afterward. “I told coach that I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Andrews said. “I think people that second-guess that are wrong.”
Tyler Huntley got the Ravens moving again with quick-read efficiency
The Ravens drove 75 yards on 14 plays to start the game and stood on the cusp of scoring a first-quarter touchdown for the first time since Week 6. Three consecutive times, Huntley dropped back and probed for an open receiver in the end zone. Three consecutive times, he could not find the right connection.
It was the kind of disappointing sequence that might have rattled a quarterback making his second NFL start against the best team in the NFC. But the man known as “Snoop” does not crumble easily. He did not as a high school star, trading touchdowns with Jackson on the fields of South Florida. He did not as he tugged the Ravens backup job away from Trace McSorley, practice rep by practice rep.
The next time he got the ball, he completed four straight passes, the last of those to a diving Andrews in the end zone. He was even better the drive after that, leading the Ravens 73 yards on 11 plays and finding Andrews in traffic for a 9-yard touchdown. The offense looked the best it had in six weeks.
Huntley does not have Jackson’s bewitching talent as a scrambler, but he brought a pleasing simplicity to the operation, making swift reads and throwing accurately. Though he attempted just two passes beyond 20 yards in the game, the Ravens converted seven of 13 third downs and scored on five of eight possessions. Huntley’s refusal to despair when the Ravens fell behind by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter was particularly noteworthy.
He did not seem to consider that the Ravens might be cooked. Instead, he went right back to nicking the Green Bay defense 3, 5 and 6 yards at a time, galloping into free ground (73 yards on 13 carries) when he could not locate a receiver. The Packers never did figure out the former undrafted free agent.
“I thought today, he took another step forward, just in terms of handling himself, operating on time in rhythm, taking off and running at the right time, accurate throws, all of those things,” Harbaugh said. “He took a big step.”
This is not an argument to start Huntley over Jackson if Jackson is ready to go in Cincinnati the day after Christmas. That would be a foundation-shaking decision involving the most important Raven since Ray Lewis. But we came into this season assuming the Ravens needed to be all Lamar, all the time to have a chance. Huntley has put the lie to that notion over the last month. The greater football world has learned what the Ravens did in training camp: this guy can play.
Not since John Mackey has Baltimore witnessed an all-around tight end the quality of Mark Andrews
Mackey was the prototype in his era, demonstrating the awesome catch-andrun potential of a receiver built like a linebacker. He gave the 1960s Colts an element no one could counter.
The 6-foot-5, 256-pound Andrews will have to stack multiple Pro Bowl seasons before we speak of him in the same breath, but he’s closing his fourth season in bravura fashion. A week after he caught 11 passes on 11 targets in Cleveland, Andrews leapt, dashed and rumbled to 10 catches on 13 targets for 136 yards and two touchdowns against the Packers. One scoring grab came on a headlong dive, the other after a fight in traffic. Andrews was the dominant passcatcher on the field in a game that featured Davante Adams.
Shannon Sharpe and Todd Heap made Pro Bowls playing tight end for the Ravens, but Andrews, through 14 games, already has more receptions, yards and touchdowns than either of them accumulated in a single season in Baltimore. And lest we forget, he’s no longer the finesse player he was projected to be coming out of Oklahoma. He carries the fourth best run-blocking grade among all tight ends, according to Pro Football Focus.
It’s one of the true delights in sports to watch a great player come into his own. This is that time for Andrews.
A win over the Packers would have been a huge boost, but the life-or-death games still lie ahead
The Ravens could have raised their playoff odds considerably with an upset of the Packers, but this was still not a must for them. Going into the weekend, Pro Football Focus said they would have an 86% chance to get in with a win and a 55% chance with a loss.
Once it became clear they probably would not have Jackson at quarterback and that COVID-19 would leave them with a last-game-of-the-preseason secondary, it had to occur to them that the Packers game was no stage for a life-or-death stand.
They fought to the end. They usually do. But they knew on some level that their fate would be decided not by the Packers but by two remaining divisional games — Sunday at Cincinnati and Jan. 9 at home against the Steelers. The Ravens won’t be favored against the Bengals, who hammered them in Baltimore. And the Week 18 finale, likely Ben Roethlisberger’s final regular-season game, could feature volatile emotions.
But the Ravens will at least hope to field a healthier team and take their chances against an AFC North that has turned out to be more mediocre than any of us predicted in September.
After the game, Andrews said his mind was already on the Bengals, who beat the Denver Broncos to join the Ravens at 8-6.
“There’s a sense of urgency,” he said. “This is a big game, a divisional game. We’re tied. So, if we can win this one, it’s going to look good.”