The Ravens were nothing short of phenomenal in Sunday’s 38-3 win at Cincinnati, emphatically dunking on any mention of a potential repeat of Week 17 three years ago.
Baltimore ran for a franchise-record 404 yards — the fourth most in an NFL game since 1950 and the second most since the 1970 merger — for its fifth straight win to close the regular season. Rookie J.K. Dobbins rushed for a career-high 160 yards and a 72-yard touchdown, the longest play of the season for the Ravens. It was such a brutal beating on the ground that Baltimore very well could have started throwing the ball rather than running to try to avoid running up the score against the hapless Bengals. Of course, Lamar Jackson also threw three touchdown passes — including beauties to Miles Boykin and Marquise Brown — while the defense forced six three-and-outs and two turnovers in just 43 snaps, a light workload for a group at less than full strength.
It was total domination as the Ravens punched their ticket to the playoffs for the third straight year. But it brings us back to the same question we’ll have asked for 365 days by the time the Ravens kick off shortly after 1 p.m. next Sunday, completing a long and thankless journey with adversity of which no one could have dreamed 12 months ago.
What about January?
That’s not to be dismissive of what John Harbaugh’s team has accomplished over the last month. That the Ravens have won five straight games, scored 34 or more points in four of them, and rushed for at least 230 yards in four of the five is why we’re even talking about them being in the playoffs, let alone pondering a Super Bowl run. Even with a less than imposing schedule, there was so little margin for error down the stretch.
No, this may not be 2019, but that isn’t a bad thing as the 11-5 Ravens try to exorcise the demons of the last two postseason losses, this time as a wild-card team playing on the road.
“Last year, we were rolling into the playoffs — very different situation,” said safety Chuck Clark, who had one of two Baltimore interceptions on Sunday. “And I feel like this year, we definitely had to work, we had to earn it and go get it. But since that second Steelers game that we had, we knew that every game was a playoff game. It wasn’t playoffs, but we knew the magnitude of each game.”
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With the Ravens looking more like their 2019 selves, the pressure does ramp up this week after they feasted on three losing teams to close the regular season. But if you were to write a script for a redemption tour, there’s no better starting opponent than the Tennessee Titans, the team that broke their hearts in a stunning upset loss last January. That defeat served as “the hard truth” the Ravens have carried with them for an entire calendar year, which included the humbling home loss to Super Bowl champion Kansas City in September, the nightmare 1-4 stretch after the bye, and the COVID-19 outbreak that threatened to derail the season.
Jackson tried to downplay the appeal of getting another shot at the Titans a couple hours before Tennessee clinched the AFC South championship with a last-second win at Houston to set up the January rematch. The fifth playoff meeting between these old AFC Central rivals will take place in Nashville with it being fascinating to note that the road team prevailed in each of the first four.
“It’s not about them. It’s about us,” said Jackson, who became the first quarterback in NFL history to rush for 1,000 yards in multiple seasons on Sunday. “It really doesn’t matter who we play. We’re going to go in there with the same mentality. Just focus on our assignment and just try to come out with a ‘W.’”
Jackson isn’t wrong, but the Ravens have to be hungry for revenge, especially with Tennessee being the only team to have beaten them twice on their home field over the last two seasons. After coming so far this last month, the Ravens don’t need to be told that anything short of a victory next Sunday will leave this season feeling like a failure.
The reigning NFL MVP and the offense are playing their best football of the year while the defense is getting healthy after allowing only three points and a season-low 195 yards on Sunday. In fact, the Ravens won’t even be a true underdog as several sports books have them favored over the Titans, who registered a come-from-behind overtime win in Baltimore in late November.
After entering last year’s postseason as the NFL’s best team with all the expectations in the world, the Ravens now look to be loose, nearly as dangerous, and more battle-tested from a season that didn’t go nearly as smoothly as 2019.
“Hard times don’t last, and the best thing about it is it doesn’t break you — it makes you,” said cornerback Marcus Peters, who had a pick in his first action since Week 14. “It’s making us come together as a team even more.”
After Sunday’s dominance, we’re about to see if overcoming those hard times will lead to a different ending for the Ravens this time around.
