The defending Super Bowl champion facing off with the best team of the 2019 regular season.
Patrick Mahomes facing off with Lamar Jackson on Monday Night Football.
It doesn’t get any better than this in the regular season, let alone in Week 3. Well, it would if there were more than 250 in attendance at M&T Bank Stadium, but that’s another story.
There are two inconvenient truths about the Ravens over this remarkable 22-3 run in the regular season since Jackson replaced Joe Flacco in the second half of the 2018 campaign. Baltimore is 0-2 against Kansas City and 0-2 in the playoffs over that time. We know the Ravens can’t do anything about the latter blemish for three more months, so potentially beating the Chiefs feels like a coming-of-age opportunity more important than it should be for a September encounter.
“We get that people are going to hype this game up. But let’s not forget that it’s only Week 3 of football,” Pro Bowl cornerback Marcus Peters said. “We’re still going out there trying to ultimately tighten up our tools, so we can get into the playoffs and start moving forward. For us, it’s just one game at a time.
“We have a big opponent coming up here. We were hoping last year that we could see them in the AFC Championship, but things like that just fall the wrong way. We get the opportunity to play them this year, and we just have to take advantage of it.”
It’s time to go on the record as these AFC heavyweights meet for the third straight season and the 10th time in the all-time regular-season series. Kansas City holds a 6-3 advantage, has won each of the last three meetings, and owns a 4-1 record at M&T Bank Stadium, meaning the Ravens will be aiming to buck a few trends. That being said, Baltimore has won 12 consecutive prime-time home games, the longest active streak in the NFL.
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Below are five predictions for Monday night:
1. Peters will pick off his former Kansas City teammate. Most attention will be on the quarterbacks and the offenses for obvious reasons, but Peters might be the most convincing piece of evidence why the Ravens could finally get over the hump against the Chiefs. As noted below, the Baltimore defense stands up as the NFL’s best since Eric DeCosta acquired the three-time Pro Bowl corner last October, and the Ravens were relying on the cornerback trio of Marlon Humphrey, Brandon Carr, and Maurice Canady when these teams last met a year ago. As was the case two years ago when the Rams and Chiefs squared off in one of the greatest Monday night games ever, Peters will use his terrific football intellect and instincts to pick off Mahomes, this one setting up a great scoring chance.
Ravens defense since trading for Marcus Peters (Week 7 of 2019):
13.7 PPG (1st)
276.5 YPG (1st)
1.3 points/drive (1st)
18% takeaways/drive (1st)
16 TD allowed (1st)
1.1 TD/Int (1st)
72.7 Pass rtg (1st)
80.1 Def effic (1st)— Paul Hembekides (@PaulHembo) September 24, 2020
2. Clyde Edwards-Helaire and J.K. Dobbins will each produce 100 total yards and a touchdown. In the last two meetings, Chiefs running backs caught 18 passes for 151 yards as an effective counter to Baltimore’s heavy blitzing, but Edwards-Helaire gives them the potential game-changing talent at the position they’ve lacked since the release of Kareem Hunt. Meanwhile, Chiefs linebackers have been poor in open space so far this season and allowed six receptions for 104 receiving yards to Chargers running backs last week. Jackson and the Ravens haven’t yet tapped into the ability Dobbins flashed as a receiver out of the backfield this summer, but he was wide open a couple of times against Houston, making this one feel like a possibility for the second-round rookie to break out.
83. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce will catch a touchdown and go over 100 yards receiving. Prior to the Tavon Young injury, I would have anticipated Jimmy Smith traveling with Kelce for large stretches of the game in his hybrid defensive back role. That may still happen, but Wink Martindale will now be counting on third-year cornerback Anthony Averett to play extensive snaps with Humphrey expected to move inside to the slot. Andy Reid is as good as any play caller at exploiting the weaker points of a defense, which could force the Ravens’ hand in how they try to cover Kansas City’s weapons at every level. Baltimore is in better shape at inside linebacker than early last season, but covering an All-Pro talent like Kelce is a different kind of test that Patrick Queen and Malik Harrison have yet to face.
4. Matthew Judon will continue his success against Kansas City with 1 1/2 sacks and four quarterback hits. The pass rush came alive in the second half last week, but how it fared against Mahomes the last two years was a good indicator of how those games went. Two years ago, the defense registered three sacks and hit him 15 times in the process of holding the Chiefs to a respectable 24 points in regulation. Last season, the Ravens sacked Mahomes once and hit him eight times in a 33-28 loss that wasn’t as competitive from a defensive standpoint. Judon shined in both meetings with a combined two sacks and nine quarterback hits. It’s been a quiet statistical start for Judon — who dropped into coverage quite a bit in Week 1 — but the Ravens need their “franchise” player to come up big to keep Mahomes from really burning blitzes as he’s prone to do.
5. The last two NFL MVPs will put on the show everyone wants to see, but the Chiefs will sneak out of town with a 30-27 win. I considered flipping a coin as betting against either Jackson or Mahomes feels foolish at this point even with the Ravens looking like the better overall team through the first two weeks of the new season. Many have perceived the Chiefs’ uneven overtime win in Los Angeles last week as a sign of greater vulnerability this year, but it’s typically unwise to draw strong conclusions from divisional games as the 5-11 Chargers played Kansas City tough twice last season. A normal home-field advantage with 71,000 fans having an entire weekend to get pumped up would have prompted me to take the Ravens with little hesitation, but I’ll give the slightest edge to the defending champs in a more neutral setting because of the recent shuffling in the Baltimore secondary and an interior offensive line I don’t quite trust enough yet to operate at the near-perfect level required to outlast the high-scoring Chiefs. Aside from last year’s Week 17 that was a glorified exhibition game, I haven’t picked against the Ravens since last October. If they win this one, I have no clue when I’ll pick my preseason Super Bowl champion to lose again.
