A Brutal Loss

Pass-catchers report game 1

The sudden, complete reversal of fortune was just a gut punch.

The recent game this most reminds me of is the 2022 home game vs Miami, game 2 of that season, where the Ravens took a 35-14 lead into the 4th quarter – and lost 42-38 after giving up 4 TDs in the 4th quarter.

It is kind of ricidulous how close the Ravens came to winning this game. They dropped three interceptions:

That’s in addition to the one they actually caught on the 2pt conversion attempt.
And then Kyle Hamilton came THIS close to blocking the game-winning Field Goal:

Already a drop-dead drama game: imagine it with just that extra dose of insanity added to it!

An Offensive Collapse

Technically this was a defensive collapse; anytime you give up 16 pts in the last 4 mins of a game to lose, the defense will come under fire. Marlon Humphrey has been outspoken about the defense taking responsibility. But this is a column about offense. A central tenet of this column is that every¹ defensive collapse is a game where the offense could’ve done more to clinch the victory.

In this case, the Bills punted with about 9:30 to play, and over their next three drives the Ravens did this:

3-&-out, fumble, 3-&-out. That’s awful.

The NFL has purposely transformed itself into the NBA over the last couple decades; ideally they want every game, esp every big game between contenders, to come down to the final possession. And that means you must keep scoring. The Ravens did not.

Let’s take a quick look at each of those possessions:

#9, 9:18 left, up 15

Play #1: Derrick Henry off tackle right for 3 yards.
I don’t have a real problem with this. A 3-yd gain with a 2-TD lead is probably a “successful” play under the old Aaron Schatz / Football Outsiders rubric (where the success thresholds adjust with a lead).

Play #2: Derrick Henry off tackle left, stuffed for loss of one.
I might have a slight problem with this. Not a lot of urgency shown here, though still a 2-TD lead. Leaves them with 3rd-&-8.

Play #3: False Start on Tylan Wallace.
Composure.
Play #3 redux: 9-yd pass to Zay Flowers. Illegal motion penalty on Flowers declined.
That gain woulda been a 1st down without the previous penalty. But it woulda been called back for this penalty.

We start to see cracks in the facade. But, to this point the Bills had had 4 possessions in the 2nd half; two scores and two punts. Taking two minutes off the clock and punting does not seem like a terrible outcome.

#10, 3:56 left, up 8

Play #1: Lamar keeps it and picks up 13.
We forget what a promising start this drive got off to. Ravens pick up a first down and burn 40 secs of clock.

Play #2: Derrick Henry fumbles
Gah!

Trigger warning:

Look at this box, though:

The Ravens have gone with a condensed formation, an 6th O-lineman; a goal-line / short-yardage formation. The Bills have countered with 10 men in the box. The Ravens are ramming Derrick Henry into a 10-man box.

The Ravens have Lamar Jackson. The Bills must attack the line with the I-formation and 6-man OL and the damage Henry has already done. To me it makes sense to send Lamar to the line with an option: if he sees this shit, abort the handoff and roll out. There’s that WR on the offensive right side; and if Lamar doesn’t like it, he can just pick up 5 and slide.

Granted that I have the benefit of hindsight, that John Harbaugh & Todd Monken didn’t have in this situation. But goal-line offense with 4 mins to play and a 1-score lead? Even without the fumble, that strategy is risky.

#11, 1:58 left, up 2

This is the ballgame.

Play #1: Derrick Henry off tackle left for a yard.
Same shit (basically), different drive. Check it out pre-snap:

This isn’t going to go anywhere.

In real time, I felt the Ravens were giving Henry a “get back on the horse / we still luv ya Big Guy” carry. And I wasn’t necessarily opposed to that, philosophically. It’s a long season. But if you’re going to “waste” a down doing that, then you need to back it up with some stronger efforts to pick up yardage on 2nd and 3rd down.

Play #2: Jet Sweep with Flowers, stoned for no gain.
Seriously, when has this shit ever worked?

Flowers is a small quick receiver, so he looks like a gadget guy. But in real life, his actual skills are downfield. This is Year 3 of trying to make Gadget Flowers into a thing, and it won’t happen.

Play #3:
This is the one where Lamar walked over to De’Andre Hopkins pre-snap, split out wide right, thus drawing the attention of everyone in the stadium. Lamar did indeed go to Hopkins, but for a game of only 6, bringing up 4th-%-3.

This used up the last of the Bills timeouts. A first down ends the game. A punt – well, up know what a punt does. But let’s look at this play again, thru the eyes of Hall Of Fame (and Super Bowl -winning) QB Kurt Warner:

It’s the blitz thing again. Lamar has decided to go to Hopkins, before even getting under center, rather than trusting the offense and the process to find the man left open by the blitz.

Taken as a whole, the decisions Lamar makes lead to unbelievably good results, esp the past two seasons (‘23 and (‘24). But there’s some volatility in there. Lamar doesn’t play like a “system QB” and sometimes there are negatives associated.

4th and ?

I was hugely critical of the decision to punt here.
The models were split on the decision:

The models of course aren’t configured to dwell on momentum and emotion.

But then I learned that Lamar limped off the field after the completion to Hopkins:

Either a calf cramp or pain from getting drilled after the throw to Hopkins:

Wish we had another angle on that. I think it’s right on the edge of Roughing The Passer: I’d like to see if Oliver landed with his weight on Lamar.

Either way, Lamar was out of the game. That changes the calculus. With Lamar, I go for it on 4th-&-3 for the ballgame. Without Lamar? Well —

I don’t blame them for punting in that situation, given the circumstance.
However.
It’s worth them investing some effort into non-Lamar 4th down situations. They still have Derrick Henry. He could line up and take a direct snap; maybe with Justice Hill next to him, and they could run a speed option.

I don’t prefer that to having Lamar on the field for 4th down: not in a million years. But I strongly prefer it to having the choice of going to it taken away. “Ah well, Lamar’s got a cramp, I guess we’re fucked.” No.

It’s okay to be heavily, heavily reliant on your star QB. But you also should be able to survive one play without him.

Firebaugh?

This game triggered some “Fire John Harbaugh!” chatter on social media. Here’s why:

Another datapoint was a tweet showing that since 2022 (or 23?), of all teams that held a lead of 9 to 16 pts in the 4th quarter, Harbaugh’s Ravens have the worse win% in those games. (Lost that tweet, sorry.)

Jonas Shaffer did a writeup in the Banner:

Why do the Ravens keep blowing big leads? Here are the 5 leading causes.
by Jonas Shaffer | 9/10/2025

Shaffer focused on eight games the Ravens lost after having at least a 90% win probability. He calls out Special Teams execution; 4th-down woes; Offensive miscues; Defensive miscues; and some plain ol’ bad luck.

We see all of that in the loss to the Bills:

• Spec Teams execution:
Trenton Simpson’s misplay on punt coverage to create a touchback rather than a down-at-the-1; also the missed Extra Pont.

• 4th-down woes
The Ravens lost their own opportunity to go for it on 4th-&-3 to ice the game; and they gave up a TD on a 4th-down throw.

• Offensive miscues
Henry’s fumble; Daniel Faalale’s adventures in blocking; Lamar’s play on that 3rd-down throw against the blitz.

• Defensive miscues
Too many to count.

• Plain ol’ bad luck
That TD the Ravens gave up on 4th-down: it initially bounced off the hand of the intended Bills receiver, and landed in the hands of a different Bills receiver.
Plus Ravens defenders dropped 3 interceptions.
Plus Derrick Henry fumbled.
And Lamar’s cramp occurs at that exact moment??

There’s another way to read all that. The Ravens went on the road against the presumptive stongest team in the AFC, and the Bills needed all of that to go their way to snatch the win.

All of these arguments cut both ways. I meantioned above the start about all the teams that held a lead of 9 to 16 pts in the 4th quarter. Harbaugh’s Ravens had the most losses of any such team; but they also had the most such games of any such team! Harbs’ teams have taken leads of 9 to 16 pts in the 4th more than any other team over that span! That’s not bad, that’s great. Yes, he should close more; but creating that situation is good.

Ben Baldwin brings up the same point:

The pic that Baldwin is quote-tweeting is a list of every time since 2019 a coach's team had an >=80% win probability. Here’s that pic blown up: check out the highlighted numbers:

Only Andy Reid (and Patrick Mahomes) have created more such “winning opportunities” since the start of 2019. This is what we want to fire Harbaugh for?? Like, would Harbaugh be a better coach if he had lost some of these games without ever building a lead? I don’t think so.

The national media might have a calmer sense of this sitiation than Ravens fans do. Most of “the media” seems to think that the Sunday night game was a classic that would make a worthy AFC Championship game. The Ravens web site has a survey of power rankings, some of which had the Ravens going up after the loss:

Power Rankings: Ravens Climb in ESPN Rankings Despite Bills Loss

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell made a similar point:

It seems telling that the Ravens lost their season opener and still managed to mostly maintain their chances of coming away with the top seed. In part, that owes to FPI's belief that this is the best team in football. The model saw the Ravens narrowly ahead of the Eagles and Chiefs heading into Week 1, and after they became the first team to drop 40 points on a Sean McDermott-led defense in Buffalo since Carson Wentz and the Colts did it in 2021, FPI only likes the Ravens more.
…
That might seem weird given that the Ravens lost, of course, but the model is giving Baltimore a boost for playing so well on the road against another highly ranked team. The Ravens recovered only one of three fumbles and went 1-for-3 in the red zone, the latter a surprise for the league's most efficient red zone offense a year ago. The Ravens averaged nearly 9 yards per play, the most any team has generated against a McDermott defense since he was the coordinator for the Panthers in 2016 … FPI sees this as a dominant performance by a truly great offense.
…
To piggyback off a slightly different point my colleague Ben Solak made, the Ravens have now lost eight games where they had a win probability of at least 90% at some point in the fourth quarter during the Lamar Jackson era, the most of any team in that span.

It's fair to mention that the Ravens have simply had a ton of fourth-quarter leads to work with over the past few years. Since Jackson took over, Baltimore has had a 90%-plus win probability in the fourth quarter of 77 games, going 69-8 over that span. Winning 69 of 77 games is an 89.6% hit rate.
…
The Ravens get into a lot of these dominant win probability situations, which is the mark of a great team, but they rank 27th in winning percentage in those spots, below teams such as the Chargers, Raiders and Falcons

Mike Tanier also hit a similar note:

You may remember one of the Ravens’ dropped interceptions:
...
The Ravens suffered 12 dropped interceptions in 2024
…
Perhaps the Ravens take too many chances by acquiring defenders with bad hands. Perhaps they don’t practice catching interceptions properly or diligently enough.

Or – and this may sound crazy – maybe a team that’s consistently excellent over multiple years gets so many opportunities to intercept passes that they inevitably drop a few! Maybe they drop more interceptions than other successful teams due to tiny sample sizes and normal distribution! And because that team is expected to win every week and is often on national television, their losses are over-analyzed and form-fit into oversimplified narratives.

No, no that cannot be it. The answer must be: Harbaugh bad.

With a couplefew days to simmer down, the argument to Fire Harbaugh! looks silly. The Ravens & Bills played a magnificent game on Sunday; firing either coach for losing that game is beyond unjustified.

The other thing I remember is the Ravens two Super Bowl teams. Each of them went thru some serious doldrums during the regular season. The 2000 squad went the entire month of October without scoring a Touchdown; a span of 5 games. They switched QBs. The 2012 squad fired their Offensive Coordinator and finished 1-4 down the stretch leading into the playoffs. Some teams sail majestically and inevitably into the Super Bowl, like the 1991 Redskins. Other teams have to scratch & claw.

A special season can still arise from disappointment. We need to stand a little more stout. There are plenty more touch games on the schedule.

Stats & Leaderboard

Only one receiver did much of anything in the game:

       Y/T   = Yards-per-target
       YTS   = Yards-per-target Times Success-rate
       aYTS = Attempts Times YTS
       QS    = games of 3+ catches with 7+ yards-per-target
       Expl  = plays for 20+ yards

Longtime readers of my “pass catchers reports” will recognize the stat YTS. In previous years I’ve sorted this table of Ravens receiver stats by that value. This year I’ve added a column to the table, “aYTS”, for Attempts × YTS. That’s the “counting stat” version of YTS. I go into exhaustive depth on it here; but basically think of it as “success yards”. An exchange with Mike Tanier made me reconsider the importance of that version of YTS. So I’m sorting this table of stats by that value now.

One of the most dominant games for a Ravens receiver I can remember. It does NOT crack the top ten Ravens games for receiving yardage. We think of the Ravens as being perennially shortchanged in receiving talent, but their single-game leaderboard is actually very respectable. Qadry Ismail had a game in 1999 of over 250 yards, Derrick Alexander had almost 200 one time and 150 another; Steve Smith went for 180 and 150; Torrey Smith went for 160+ twice and 150 another time; Todd Heap and Marqiuse Brown and Mark Andrews have all had games near 150.

The full list of Ravens single-game leaders in receiving yards is here:

Marquise Brown’s game in the 2019 season-opener vs the Dolphins is the most recent game similar to Flowers’ game on Sunday: high yardage volume with yds-per-catch up over 20. Hollywood’s game was actually by the explosions statists: but this game game was more of a one-man wrecking crew.

Your Ravens have the NFL’s leading receiver, the leading rusher, and the leading passer by rating (and Yds-per-att, and Net-yds-per-att):

A fun moment that probably will not last.

Or hell, maybe it will. After all Lamar led the lead in those stats last year. Derrick Henry was only 84 yards off the league lead. And if Zay Flowers is going to continue posting 4 explosive plays per game, they might as well keep feeding him.

Next Up:

Joe Flacco comes to town!

Since Joe was traded after in the 2018-19 season, he has played the Ravens just once: the 2022 season opener for the Jets. That game was in New York; so this represents Joe’s first trip to Baltimore since the trade. So I’m excited. I hope he gets a big ovation.

Oh: and he brings his Brownies to town with him. The Browns have an excellent defense, again, and probably not much offense. Again.

If this game is like every other Ravens-Browns matchup, it will be a slog.

1. Unless the offense never touches the ball, like in score - successful onside kick - score situations.