BALTIMORE — As Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson fielded questions, Roquan Smith sat about 5 yards to his left, the perennially upbeat middle linebacker slouched in his chair. The emotional leader of this Ravens team, Smith bided his time by gazing at the floor, even occasionally shutting his eyes.
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Jackson described himself and his teammates as angry. Smith, who fought back tears during most of his question-and-answer session, looked more heartbroken than mad.
The Ravens had responded just about all season. Armed with the presumptive league MVP and arguably the game’s best defense, and in front of a raucous home crowd dying to celebrate the first AFC Championship Game in Baltimore since 1971, this should have been their night.
Even with their previous recent playoff failures, this team felt different. The quarterback acted and sounded different. Yet, one game away from the Super Bowl, the Ravens melted down in a 17-10 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs at M&T Bank Stadium that should stick in this franchise’s craw for quite a while.
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“I just think it’s not getting the job done and just knowing our potential and the guys that you have in the locker room,” Smith said. “We all put so much on the line just like anyone else and just let ourselves down in that position. It sucks. Just knowing how close we were to what we really wanted. But at the end of the day, it is what it is and it just has to add more fuel to you. That’s how I’m taking it, so that’s what it’s going to be. It definitely sucks. It hurts.”
This loss wasn’t about the brilliant Patrick Mahomes overmatching the Ravens defense or the battle-tested and clutch Chiefs finding a way to win a close game late. That would have felt far more acceptable than how the Ravens’ season ended early Sunday evening.
Mahomes certainly made his plays, particularly in the game’s first 20 minutes, and showed again why he’s the NFL’s best player. However, this game was more about a Ravens team that wilted on the big stage and picked an awful night to lose its identity and do things it hadn’t done in months.
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The Ravens were mistake-prone, undisciplined and slow to adjust. They turned the ball over three times, two of them deep in Chiefs territory and one just outside the end zone. Kansas City had zero turnovers against a defense that had more takeaways than any team in the NFL in the regular season. The Ravens committed eight penalties for 95 yards, and five were of the 15-yard variety. The Chiefs had just three penalties for 30 yards, and two came on back-to-back second-quarter snaps.
One team acted like it was playing in its sixth straight AFC championship and this was old hat. The other performed like it hadn’t been there before.
“It’s playoffs, obviously, and the team that shows up continues playing,” inside linebacker Patrick Queen said. “That’s just something that we didn’t do well enough today.”
It’s the Chiefs who are continuing to play, and they’ll face the San Francisco 49ers, who came back to defeat the Detroit Lions in the NFC championship, in Super Bowl LVIII in two weeks. It will remarkably be Andy Reid’s Chiefs’ fourth Super Bowl appearance in the past five years. The Ravens, meanwhile, now face a lengthy offseason of regret that should resonate with players in every part of their locker room — and John Harbaugh and his coaching staff, too.
“We had a couple opportunities to score down there. We didn’t get the touchdowns,” Harbaugh said. “It was really a defensive struggle if you step back and look at the whole game. They were able to score the points, and we weren’t.”
Nobody in a quiet Ravens locker room was pointing fingers. That’s not been this team’s way. However, after allowing the Chiefs to march downfield and score touchdowns on their first two drives, Baltimore held Kansas City to just a field goal over the game’s final 40-plus minutes. The Chiefs didn’t score after halftime. That should have been good enough.
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Yet, four times in the second half, Jackson started a drive where had the Ravens scored, it would have been a one-possession game and the crowd could have become a factor. The first two ended in punts. The third one was halted when rookie receiver Zay Flowers had the ball punched out by L’Jarius Sneed just outside the end zone. A touchdown would have made it a 17-14 game with nearly the entire fourth quarter remaining.
What a play by Sneed to prevent the TD 🔥
📺: #KCvsBAL on CBS
📱: Stream on #NFLPlus https://t.co/IIZbdmhqNS pic.twitter.com/bFvdrGRl3I— NFL (@NFL) January 28, 2024
“We all make mistakes,” Jackson said. “It’s his first season. It’s my first time in this situation. It’s his first time in this situation. We’re going to bounce back. Nobody played the game perfect.”
On Baltimore’s next possession, it was Jackson’s turn to make a costly miscue. The Ravens had a second-and-10 on the Chiefs’ 25-yard line when Jackson tried to force the ball into triple coverage in the end zone. The underthrown pass was picked off by Deon Bush.
The Ravens finally made it a one-score game on Justin Tucker’s 43-yard field goal with 2:34 to play, but the offense never got the ball back. Mahomes put Baltimore away with a 32-yard completion to Marquez Valdes-Scantling, allowing Kansas City to kneel out the final two minutes.
“It’s crazy. We had some opportunities out there. We’ve just got to take advantage of them,” Jackson said. “Can’t turn the ball over, fumble, interception, stuff like that. That gave them opportunities to put points on the board and win the game. We’ve just got to finish, and we didn’t do a good job of finishing. The defense did a wonderful job and held a great offense to 17 points. We scored one touchdown, and that’s not like us. That was early on in the year. No excuses, though.”
Jackson spinning out of a Leo Chenal sack and finding Flowers for a 30-yard touchdown in the first quarter seemed to hint at a potentially big day for the quarterback. Instead, Jackson had one of his poorest performances of the season. He finished 20-of-37 for 272 yards, one touchdown, one interception and a fumble. He ran for 54 yards and caught a deflection of his own pass for a 13-yard gain.
LAMAR FREAKIN' JACKSON.
📺: #KCvsBAL on CBS
📱: Stream on #NFLPlus https://t.co/IIZbdmhqNS pic.twitter.com/mZGuyakLrX— NFL (@NFL) January 28, 2024
But there were too many instances where Jackson made bad decisions, whether that was holding on to the ball too long and being reluctant to run or targeting the wrong receiver. He overthrew quite a few receivers, too. At the very least, Jackson’s performance will mar what will likely be an MVP season and regurgitate the questions about his playoff form.
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“Honestly, what hurts me the most is that I wanted to get him the recognition that he deserves,” Queen said. “It’s a team sport, it’s a team effort, but that guy was the main guy I was playing for, honestly. So much stuff he gets that he doesn’t deserve. This was his opportunity to be able to write some of that stuff off and move on to the next thing. That’s why it hurts because you want to see people like that, teammates that you love and care about, get what they’re supposed to get, and that didn’t happen today.”
Jackson, though, got little help, which seems to be a trend in the Ravens’ playoff failures. There were a couple of drops. The offensive line missed some assignments. Offensive coordinator Todd Monken curiously made no effort to establish the run game against a team that struggles to stop it. The Ravens rushed just 16 times for 81 yards in a game where they never trailed by more than 10.
Their top two running backs, Gus Edwards and Justice Hill, combined for just six carries for a team that led the league in rushing during the regular season.
“It was that kind of a game, I’d say,” Harbaugh said when asked about the team’s lack of rush attempts. “That’s the way it worked out.”
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Flowers showed frustration after the drive where he was called for taunting and fumbled by striking the bench, opening up a cut on his hand. Jackson showed it by spiking his helmet on the sideline after his fourth-quarter interception.
The Ravens trudged off the field shortly after 6 p.m. Sunday knowing they let a major opportunity slip away. This team was believed to be above this.
Instead, it succumbed to a similar fate as the 2006 team, which lost to Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts 15-6, despite not allowing an offensive touchdown. It succumbed to a similar fate as the 2019 team, too, which was ushered out of the playoffs by the Tennessee Titans in the divisional round. The Ravens made too many mistakes, lost the battle at the line of scrimmage and curiously forgot about their league-leading run game.
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Let the soul-searching begin.
“When you just think about how hard it is to make it back to this position knowing all the adversity, the obstacles that you have to go through to get to this point, it sucks,” Smith said. “It’s tough because there’s a lot of things that have to go your way in order for you to get here. And for us busting our tails day in and day out since OTAs with the coaches, with each other having the attendance we had, and just like knowing how each and every person cared about one another, it sucks.”
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(Photo of Lamar Jackson and Zay Flowers: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
