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State of Ravens both blessing and curse as Super Bowl still eludes them

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OWINGS MILLS, Md. — There were no significant developments from the Ravens’ season-ending press conference on Wednesday.

General manager Eric DeCosta and head coach John Harbaugh weren’t going to label the 2024 season a failure despite it being the latest campaign to feel all too incomplete. Disappointment is inevitable when you have a multi-time NFL MVP at quarterback and nine other Pro Bowl selections and don’t get back to the AFC championship game, let alone advance to the Super Bowl.

But we also know only one of 32 teams is going to be happy in a couple weeks. And all but a couple teams around the NFL would love to have Baltimore’s perceived problems.

“Perspective over 29 seasons, and we’ve had 27 seasons like this,” DeCosta said. “I’m very proud of the team this year. It was a successful season. I’m not going to sit up here and say it wasn’t a successful season. It was in just about every way of looking at it, but I’m disappointed and John is disappointed. We’re all disappointed. Our team is disappointed.

“We had higher aspirations, and we didn’t achieve those aspirations and goals.”

In the aftermath of the 27-25 loss to Buffalo in the divisional round, fans are justifiably frustrated — even angry. It’s natural to want to “fix” something.

But what? Taking a sledgehammer to something more likely requiring a scalpel at most isn’t wise.

The Ravens lost because of three turnovers — two of them extremely costly — and Mark Andrews’ drop of a 2-point conversion with 1:33 to play. This was a team that set a franchise low with just 11 turnovers and Andrews had three drops for the entire regular season, so it’s not as though these were chronic problems. Sure, one could question a play call here or there Sunday night, but obsessing over too much else smells of peddling preconceived notions more than anything all that significant about this game.

We can certainly recognize Andrews having the worst game of his life and being a disappointing postseason performer over the years. But if your first instinct is to jettison the three-time Pro Bowl selection while also believing he’ll fetch a good haul in a trade, perhaps a longer memory is in order before deciding to pull the trigger on a deal. And you better make sure it’s OK with your superstar quarterback, who earlier this month called Andrews his “security blanket” and referred to their connection as “peanut butter and jelly.”

What about Lamar Jackson?

As he’s about to become the seventh three-time MVP in NFL history, his postseason performance continues to hold back an otherwise extraordinary legacy. His strong second half and brilliant final drive against the Bills were further evidence of his improvement in January the last couple years, but Jackson himself bemoaned his first-half turnovers and the role they played in putting the Ravens behind.

It wasn’t good enough.

The reality is Jackson is going to be held to a higher standard than all his contemporaries not named Patrick Mahomes because of his regular-season superiority and accolades. Still, the only other active quarterbacks to have won a single Super Bowl — Joe Flacco, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, and Matthew Stafford — are 36 or older, which speaks to the vice grip Mahomes and Kansas City have enjoyed since Tom Brady’s retirement.

You just have to hope the improvement Jackson has shown the last two Januaries — while still not all the way there — leads to an eventual breakthrough.

That brings us to Harbaugh, who’s become an increasingly polarizing figure for an impatient fan base.

Like any head coach, Harbaugh has imperfections and isn’t beyond fair criticism such as the pass-heavy offensive game plan in last year’s AFC title game, but much of it is drowned out by nonsensical takes that would have you believe Baltimore has won so consistently all these years in spite of its incompetent head coach. If reading those words offend you, then you might be part of the problem. Making a change at head coach would be the aforementioned sledgehammer scenario unless you’re somehow trading for Andy Reid or maybe Sean McVay.

The mistakes of Andrews and Jackson on Sunday night weren’t coaching issues when such stars didn’t do those things all season. And while it’s correct to note that bad losses to Las Vegas and Cleveland in the first half of the season proved to be a difference in Sunday’s game being played in Buffalo rather than Baltimore, the problems in the secondary that were the primary culprit in those defeats were addressed and remedied over the course of the season, which is a credit to the coaching staff.

Had the Ravens laid an egg and lost to a listless and inferior Pittsburgh team in the wild-card round, all bets would have been off regarding Harbaugh or anyone else, but falling to the No. 2 seed on the road isn’t the same offense even if you believed the Ravens to be the better team. The same goes for losing to the eventual champion Chiefs last January — as painful as that was and still is today.

“More so during the playoffs than anything, [games] need to be as positive-centric as possible,” Harbaugh said. “You can’t really afford too many negative plays because they can make a difference. If you look at our team this year and for the past 17 years, you don’t see us getting blown out. You don’t see us falling apart. You’re either in a game or in the season. You always see us fighting back. I think that is the real measuring stick — not the narrative that, ‘You can’t do this; you can’t do that.’

“You keep striving forward to stack those games together and put three or four really good games together — error-free games together — and go ahead and win a Super Bowl. And when you do that, it’s really a great accomplishment. We’re capable of doing that. We put ourselves into position to do that, and we’ll keep striving for that.”

The Ravens will keep striving because that’s their only choice. It’s both a blessing because of who they are and a curse because of what they’ve been unable to do in this era.

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Of course, there’s work for DeCosta to do this offseason, ranging from addressing the uncertainty with the left side of the line and adding another safety to pondering the seemingly annual edge rusher question. But there are no fatal flaws on this team other than finding a way to sustain its regular-season might deeper into January.

It’s definitely frustrating with no easy answer.

But they’ll try again next year, knowing a healthy Jackson all but guarantees having a really good chance.

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