The Baltimore Ravens’ loss to the Buffalo Bills took me some time to process. They had a pitch-perfect start to the game, were up by as many as 17 with the ball late in the first half, and still lost. This of course was on the heels of their last home game in Week 2, in which they squandered a three-touchdown lead against the Miami Dolphins. Once is an outlier, twice is a trend. The collapse against the Bills makes trusting the purple and black impossible.
The buck stops at John Harbaugh’s desk. Coach Harbaugh has more to answer for than anybody else.
The Bills are one of the best teams in the league. If the Ravens had been completely blown away the result almost would have been easier for fans to accept. Most of the writers for this site (including myself) predicted a defeat. The loss wasn’t the surprising part. It was the way it went down. The Ravens had the Bills on the ropes. Then, they didn’t score a single point in the second half. This was a complete organizational failure, a total team loss, as Tony Lombardi put it.
When the Ravens went for it on fourth and goal from the two-yard line, it was the wrong decision. I’ve never been one to get excited for field goals inside the five-yard line. That being said, the situation of the game has to be taken into account. The second the Bills knew that they didn’t need a touchdown, this game was theirs. The Bills could take their time and get the ball down the field for a last-second field goal.
Harbaugh signed the defense up to be the scapegoat. The Ravens had to hold Josh Allen and company out of field goal range. If the Bills needed a touchdown to win in regulation, Baltimore could have played bend but don’t break defense. Harbaugh put them in a situation where they couldn’t bend at all, as if the Bills got into field goal range they won.
There are a lot of people calling out the defense this week, which I find a little unfair. Buffalo only scored 23 points. If you hold an MVP front-running quarterback to 23 points, you should win the game. The Bills were going to make plays and this was always going to be difficult. Buffalo was 4-11 on third down conversions, had a modest 62 offensive snaps, and they gave away the football twice. The defense had its best outing of the season. Yes, they gave up a lead, but I put a huge asterisk on that, considering the awful position their head coach – and counterparts on offense – put them in.
To the latter point, the Ravens didn’t score a point in the second half, while Buffalo put up 13, after scoring a touchdown to close out the first half. Lamar Jackson missed Devin Duvernay in the end zone on the last play. If he threw the ball on time we would probably be having a much different conversation. It’s easy to put this game on Jackson or the offense, but again, to me, that’s kind of missing the overarching point.
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The Buffalo Bills made adjustments. Those adjustments gave the Ravens problems. They never had a counter-punch. Harbaugh went into the game with a perfect plan to make the Bills uncomfortable, and it worked at first. Then the Bills changed gears, and he and his staff had to do the same. The Ravens were out-coached in this game. In the end, it came down to an all or nothing decision made by Harbaugh.
But that wasn’t the only thing the head coach did wrong in this game.
We’ve all heard or said something along the lines of “Harbaugh trusts his coordinators too much.” Greg Roman is the most talked about person on Ravens Twitter and it isn’t a particularly nice conversation. The Ravens have shuffled through coordinators. The inability to adjust in the middle of the game has been a recurring problem throughout Harbaugh’s tenure.
The biggest problem with the 2022 Ravens is that you just can’t trust them. Before this season they were 100-3 in games where they had a lead of 17 points or greater. This season their record after building a 17 point lead is 1-2. How does that happen? There isn’t one problem. There is however a man who is responsible for the whole operation. John Harbaugh can use whatever coach-speak he prefers, at the end of the day he’s responsible for the football team.
Let me be clear: I am not calling for his job. There’s no reality in which Harbaugh will get fired in the middle of the season. It won’t do anything positive for the team and it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
Baltimore has a problem though. The problem is that Harbaugh doesn’t feel enough pressure. Since the Super Bowl victory in the 2012 season, Harbaugh has just two playoff wins. He was the 2019 NFL Coach of the Year and he represents a franchise that believes strongly in continuity. Harbaugh’s seat has been warm before, but it’s quite comfortable right now.
This gives Harbaugh the option to so willingly make all or nothing decisions at the end of the game. Last year it was two point conversions to win the game instead of facing overtime. This year it was not taking the nearly automatic three points near the end of a tied game. The validity of his thinking can be debated. The results still continue to hurt the argument that the “analytics” say he is making the correct call. Perhaps the model needs to be adjusted if it doesn’t take this into account:
However, they have struggled w/ short yardage, goal to go situations.
Since 2019, the Ravens have successfully converted on only 48% of goal to go within 2 yardline. This is 6th worst in NFL.
W/ the weapons the Ravens have, they need to do better in these situations.— Daniel Rees (@DPRees8) October 3, 2022
On fourth and short, yes, they’ve been good historically. But, as Daniel points out above, that’s not the case when they’re about to punch it into the end zone. Remember against Miami when they got stuffed at the goalline over and over? Remember the failed two-point conversions of a year ago (of course you do)? That has to factor in. It’s good to trust your team. It’s not good to blindly trust them to suddenly do something at which they’ve repeatedly failed.
The 2-2 record is a reflection of how this team has been up and down this season. The Ravens haven’t been consistent from week to week and they haven’t even been able to put together a consistent 60 minutes of football. You can’t trust them to keep the foot on the gas pedal. The Ravens have been anything but boring this season, yet there’s been more nervous energy than excitement.
You add everything together it creates a bad look for the head coach of the Ravens. With the inconsistency, the lack of in-game adjustments and the eager aggressiveness on all-or-nothing plays, John Harbaugh has a lot to answer for.
3 Responses
If this were a new phenomenon, it would be one thing, but Harbaugh’s game day decisions have been problematic for a long time! The man simply has no feel for the game and insists on theoretical analytics for solutions, which don’t take all the circumstances of the game into consideration! Among his many OCs, we’ve had exactly one who was outstanding and that was Gary Kubiak, who was hired without Harbaugh’s input, brought his own coaches and answered to no one! All he did was enable Flacco, who he characterized as, “elite”, to have his most productive season of his career! So, it’s more than just game day deficiencies that Harbaugh suffers from as his hiring of cronies and refusal to fire underachievers attest to……
Harbs is a below average Head Coach, plain and simple!
I for one would like to see Steve B. clean house at the end of the year and that includes Eric DeCosta. His 4 drafts since becoming the GM haven’t produced impact players other than Duvernay and Dobbins when healthy. His last 3 defensive picks taken in the first round (Queen, Oweh and Hamilton) all look like busts.
As for Harbaugh, every coach eventually wears out their welcome sooner or later and I think Harbs time has come. I am tired of Harbs making these God awful decisions at the end of games resulting in a 1 or 2 point loss at the gun. After watching San Francisco on Monday night beat the Rams with a so-so offense and a hard-nosed defense, SB should ask to interview the 49ers defensive coordinator, Demeco Ryans, at the end of the season and offer a young, up and coming coach, his first head coaching job.