Will Poor Tackle Play Derail Ravens’ Championship Hopes?

Ravens Pass-Catchers Through 14 Games

Maturity is difficult to measure.  There aren’t any numbers or statistics to define it.  The most we can usually say is that we know it when we see it.  But it also shows up when we have something to compare with.

Last year I hammered Lamar for a lack of “poise” and “composure” at the end of the week 6 loss to the Giants.  In Sunday’s game against Jacksonville, Lamar was constantly harassed and under pressure.  I thought Jacksonville’s D played the Ravens as tough as any defense has this season.  They were much better than I had anticipated.  Lamar bobbed and weaved and kept plays alive, and he didn’t turn the ball over (except for one tremendous play by a defensive back).

There was one throw that looked dangerous and made me gasp in fear: the cross-body deep shot to Isaiah Likely, that he caught between two defenders.  But even that play was more of a calculated risk than a reckless heave: maybe too close for my comfort in a tight game, but obviously a play Lamar knew he could make.  Even when he was ducking under sacks and free rushers, Lamar was in-control and prudent.  Asked about his composure in the postgame, Lamar said “Do I look calm? Do I be looking calm?  Just keeping a level head. Like I said, I’m not trying to make a mistake. I’m just trying to keep us with positive yards, keep us moving, and that’s what we had to do tonight.”

Lamar’s poise stood out compared with Trevor Lawrence’s overall game.  Lawrence is a tremendous young quarterback.  He has every tool: he’s pretty great already, and will probably become one of the best QBs in the league in the next couple years.  But on Sunday he tried to do too much, and it cost his team.  This game was much, much closer than the final score indicated.  In fact the Jaguars outgained the Ravens on a per-play basis by a significant amount.  The Jags gained about 7.7 yards-per-play, the Ravens about 5.7.  If their kicker had made one of the two Field Goals he missed, and if the Jags had gotten another FG on the second-quarter drive where Lawrence fumbled (they were already in FG range), then Jacksonville has a 6-3 lead late in first half.  Maybe that long touchdown drive the Ravens put together after the fumble doesn’t happen.  It’s a whole different game.

Lawrence’s two fumbles were probably the difference in the game: Lamar’s judgement & maturity beating Lawrence’s.

Lamar’s maturity also shows up when you hear his teammates talk about him.  Melissa Stark stuck a microphone in Justin Madubuike’s face after the game, and Beek said Lamar pushed him over the offseason to “be great.”  Madubuike has said in other interviews that the reason for his breakout this season is that he has “grown up:” that he’s taking care of his body better, managing his diet and sleep better, and just generally preparing better.  That’s great, and a credit to him.  If Lamar putting a bug in his ear contributed to any of that, then that is impactful leadership, and we should take note.  Marlon Humphrey told Jonas Shaffer of the Baltimore Banner that this past week Lamar told him he needs to play better.  Shaffer seems to think Marlon was joking (and Shaffer was there), but I’m not so sure.

Lamar’s demeanor is SO different from how he was in his MVP season.  Back in 2019 Lamar was everybody’s kid brother, bouncing around his teammates, giggling and pranking.  It was all “Big Truzz” and laughing it up on the sidelines, wearing shades and resting in the last five minutes of blowouts.  This season Lamar looks positively steely.  Everything about him says “I’m not playing around this time.”  He seems driven: serious as a heart attack.  He still celebrates touchdowns, but then very quickly he’s on to the next play.  When congratulated on a win he’s as clipped and earnest as any coach about “taking it one game at a time” and “focusing on the next opponent.”  Melissa Stark asked him to look forward to the playoffs and, Lamar immediately told her they’ve been playing playoff-caliber opponents.

I’ve seen some chatter on the RSR boards that the Ravens don’t handle the prosperity of being the #1 seed well, and we fans should prefer they get the #2 seed for the playoffs.  People who say that are reaching back to history: 2019 when the Ravens lost to the Titans as the #1 seed, and 2006 when they lost to Indianapolis as the #2 seed (back when the #2 seed got a BYE) in one of the most infuriating games of all time.  But I think the take is dead wrong.  For one thing, it’s a huge advantage to play the Conference Championship Game in Baltimore rather than in Kansas City or Miami.  It’s crazy to root for giving that up.  But more importantly, I think it reads the mood of this team wrong, starting with Lamar.  Back in 2019 Lamar was a young meteor blazing across the sky, who had never really experienced NFL adversity.

Four tough years later, the quarterback of the 2023 Baltimore Ravens is a wholly different, extremely serious individual.

Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?

What I’m about to say is an extremely selfish take on Keaton Mitchell’s injury, which is heartbreaking, and which obviously is a huge chunk of adversity dropped into a young man’s life.  But:

The Ravens entered 2021 with a “stable” of running backs that looked to be among the league’s best.  JK Dobbins had averaged 6 yds-per-carry the year before as a rookie, with a 56.7% Success Rate.  Gus Edwards was 26 yrs old with a career average of 5.2 yds-per-carry and 58.5% Success Rate.  For comparison, this year’s current leaders in rushing yards (C-Mac, James Cook, Raheem Mostert and Kyren Williams) all have yds-per-carry averages at or below Gus’ number (C-Mac is actually a tenth higher), and Success Rates of 55%, 57%, 56% and 59.7%.  It was as if the Ravens had a RB platoon of low-cost versions of LaDainian Tomlinson and Arian Foster.  Justice Hill was a fine RB3.  That rushing attack should have been dominant.  Instead, all three players got injured a week before the season opener, and were lost for the year.  The Ravens scraped together an old-guy RB room with players like Devonta Freeman & Latavius Murry & Le’Veon Bell, and they muddled through the season.  It was ugly.

The 2022 Ravens had too much talent in Dobbins & Gus to spend resources on Running Backs; but those guys weren’t available to start the season.  Kenyan Drake wound up getting the lion’s share of RB carries, and he was not good (except for one amazing game).  Dobbins came back for the last five games and performed like he was the best RB in the league.  Seriously: in four games, almost 400 yds, with almost 7 yds-per-carry and a 59.65% Success Rate.  But it was too late to really make a difference.

The Ravens entered 2023 with a healthy Dobbins, looking to build on his explosive finish to 2022.  But!  He sat out training camp and the preseason to “protect himself” from injury.  When he played in Game 1, he wasn’t in good-enough football shape to hold up, and he blew his Achilles in the first quarter.  They had Keaton Mitchell on deck; he’d been hurt in preseason and was on the shelf for the first five or six games, but when he finally got to carry the ball in Week 9 against Seattle he showed he was incredibly explosive.  A 60-yd run in his first game; a 39-yd run in his second game.  The Ravens have been slowly working him into the rotation – his blitz pickup skills were not where they need to be, which is typical for a rookie back – but over the last three weeks he was getting about 10 touches a game (rushing & receiving) and averaging 7 yds-per-carry.

Cris Collinsworth discussed on the Sunday night broadcast how the presence of a home-run treat in the backfield next to Lamar Jackson creates a huge problem for defenses.  Yes, Edwards is an effective runner, and Hill has matured into a solid back.  But Mitchell was a problem for defenses, the same way Mostert and Devon Achane are problems.  When those guys are on the field, you have to tilt your rush defense toward the edge they threaten, because they can put it in the end zone if they get a crease.  Their presence can have a straw-that-breaks-the-back effect, on top of defending Lamar and covering Odell Beckham + Zay Flowers + Rashod Bateman + Isaiah Likely.

And now he’s out for the rest of the season.  Again, I don’t want to diminish the humanity of the young man at the center of the story.  He’s not a trading card.  He’s a fresh-faced kid with (by all accounts) a great attitude; an undrafted free agent made good; a Ravens legacy from his father’s participation in the team’s first Super Bowl win.  As an undrafted player he has no contract guarantee; his calling card is speed, and a knee injury could rob him of that.  It’s a sad situation, and I wish him the best.

As a selfish fan, his absence hurts.  That’s a weird thing to say about a back with less than 50 carries on the season, but it’s one of those things where the impact is disproportionate to the counting stats.  It lowers the ceiling for the Ravens offense.

It’s crazy how snake-bit the Ravens have been at RB, these past three seasons.  And by contrast, isn’t it disorienting that these Ravens now have a good Wide Receiver corps by NFL standards, but haven’t been able to put a primary Running Back on the field for three years now? Crazy. I have this as a sneaky need for the team in next year’s draft.  It’s deceptive because the Ravens lead the league in rushing yards (again), and they’re top-two in yards-per-carry (again).  So it doesn’t look like they need to upgrade their backs.  But Lamar has been driving the Ravens run game.  Without him things would be bleak.  And paradoxically Lamar’s presence amplifies the impact that a good back would have on opposing defenses.  A dangerous back standing in the backfield next to Lamar would compound the problems defenses already face.  It would pull them apart.

Running Back is definitely not the top need.  See the next section; and if Odell doesn’t return then the WR corps will have issues as well.  But a quality back could make a big impact for the Ravens.

It’s Time to Worry Panic About

The thing most likely to keep these Ravens from the Super Bowl is their issues with pass protection.  Their Offensive Tackles just cannot keep pass rushers off Lamar.  He is playing amazing football behind the line of scrimmage, but every damn play he is dancing between raindrops to evade pass-rushers and get the ball away.  It’s a marvel.  Honestly, sometimes he looks more like a Point Guard, driving the lane among the big guys and dishing the ball to a teammate for an easy layup, than like a Quarterback.

.@Ravens @Lj_era8 nobody compares to Lamar; nobody wins like Lamar; especially on the road. Completely unique player without Comps. #ravensflock #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/9vqrVRmLIv

— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) December 18, 2023

It’s fabulous.  But it doesn’t seem sustainable.  It looks like something that must inevitably break down.

This offense reminds me of the 2020 Chiefs team that lost the Super Bowl to the Tampa Bradyneers.  Remember how, in that Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes was making astonishing plays, completing passes while fully horizontal diving away from rushers, that kind of thing?  Tampa sacked Mahomes three times, intercepted him twice, and held him under 6 yds-per-attempt; and Tom Brady won his millionth Super Bowl.  Yet after the game all anyone could talk about was how astonishing Mahomes was in the game.

That’s the kind of thing it feels like these Ravens are headed for: Lamar being amazing in a heroic effort with no hope for success because the O-line can’t protect him.

You can draw all kinds of parallels between these Ravens and those Chiefs: Kyle Hamilton is Honey Badger Mathieu, Madubuike is Frank Clark, Zay Flowers is Tyreek Hill (sort of), Mark Andrews (if he makes it back) is Travis Kelce.  In this analogy, Ronnie Stanley & Morgan Moses are Mike Remmers & Andrew Wylie, the two emergency Tackles who got whipped by Tampa pass-rushers in the Super Bowl.

So, how can the Ravens keep the roof from caving in?

First, they can get a feel for the scope of the problem next week in San Francisco.  I’ve had that game penciled-in as a loss for a long time; but the Ravens can absorb valuable lessons from Nick Bosa & co. in that game.  Second, the Ravens can clinch the AFC 1-seed by winning at home vs Miami & Pittsburgh in the last two games.  They have to not fall into a tie with Kansas City: the Chiefs would win the conference record tiebreaker.  But holding serve at home would give the Ravens the top seed, no matter what happens in San Francisco.

The top seed would give Baltimore a bye; and that would give Ronnie Stanley an extra week to get his knee right.  That’s really what it comes down to.  If the Ravens can win their last two home games, Dolphins & Steelers, then their first playoff game would be the weekend of Jan 20-21.  That’s more than a month away.  If Stanley can get back to something like 75-80% of his normal level, then the pass protection isn’t an emergency and the Ravens can compete.  If not – well, it seems like the Achilles Heel.

Finishing the Game

We’ve talked about “4-minute offense” before.  It is my opinion that every “defensive collapse” is a game where the offense had a chance to maintain a working margin, but failed, and instead put their defense in a tough spot.  If we broaden our view from just the last ~4 minutes, to the whole 4th quarter, in the Jacksonville game we see that the Ravens:

• finished off a drive that began late in the third, with a TD
• took a punt and put together a 5½ min drive ending in a Field Goal
• took advantage of a Jacksonville fumble to score another Field Goal.

This 4th-quarter performance comes on the heels of another good 4th-quarter offensive effort last week against the Rams: a FG early in the 4th, and then a clutch go-ahead drive for a TD and two-point conversion.  Fourth-quarter woes were a story earlier in the season and last year, but the Ravens have pushed that concern away for now.

Play of the Game

You know and I know that the bomb to Likely down to the 4-yard line was the Play of the Game.  But honestly that was too stressful for my delicate nerves.  Let’s instead look at the TD to Likely, for a different aspect of Lamar’s game:

Lamar Jackson's long pass to Isaiah Likely was magical, but this touchdown pass to Likely was surgical.

Look at the anticipation and tight window throw by Lamar. 🤌 pic.twitter.com/YEsZo0Qcom

— Ryan Mink (@ryanmink) December 18, 2023

A whole lot of the Ravens passing offense occurs when Lamar breaks free of the pass rush and keeps a play alive longer than defenders to cover.  But this is the opposite.  It’s an anticipation throw in-rhythm, probably from a pre-snap read.  Flowers runs Jet Sweep motion from the opposite slot just before the snap, and Jags safety #2 Rayshawn Jenkins walks down into the box, probably for run support.  You can see after the snap he’s keeping eyes on Flowers in the flat.  This makes him too flat-footed to stay with Likely.  Lamar threads it between four defenders, and to my eye he also takes enough off the pass so that Likely isn’t forced into a ball-jarring collision with the thumping safety #42 Andrew Wingard.

It’s a very, very sweet play.

Big Cat Game Theory Revisited

Shockingly, Nelson Agholor broke his streak of touchdown in big cat games, set against the Bengals and Lions and Bengals again.  The only Agholor target on Sunday wound up intercepted, as Jags DB Rayshawn Jenkins slipped neatly in front of Agholor as the pass was arriving.  I thought Agholor was a little passive on that play: he waited on the ball to get to him, rather than coming to attack the ball.  It’s an easy thing to do: you want so badly to gain yards that you don’t want to give any back by returning to the ball, when the ball will just get to you anyway.  But you have to know where the defenders are, otherwise the ball might never get to you.

Do you think Agholor was overconfident on that catch, because of Big Cat Game Theory?  Y’know, if the Ravens played in the NFC, it would be nice to have a receiver start a streak against “bird” teams.  That conference has the Eagles, Falcons, Seahawks and Cardinals.  But alas the Ravens are the only “bird” team in the AFC.  So we can put this whole bird-brained idea behind us.

Things I Was Wrong About

This column feature makes an unwelcome return.  I wouldn’t have to write it if I didn’t keep finding stuff I was wrong about!

Last year, all over the RSR forums and somewhat in this column, I maintained that Eric DeCosta had cost the Ravens the division by not drafting WR George Pickens, who went to the Steelers, and instead drafting pass-rusher David Ojabo, who has played a whopping total of about a hundred snaps across five games in two years. I probably said Pickens would have saved Greg Roman’s job, and would have sent the Ravens to the Divisional Round in last year’s playoffs.  Pickens, Pickens, Pickens!

So, uh.  How did The Great Missed Opportunity look in the Steelers game against Indy this past weekend?  Let’s take a quick peek – Pickens is #14 in the foreground:

#Steelers WR George Pickens shows ZERO effort in trying to block a #Colts defender with his teammate running full speed at them

😳😳😳
pic.twitter.com/LOJYlWndoN

— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) December 16, 2023

Ouch.  That’s not a great look.  Every offense requires WRs to block in the run game, not just Roman’s.  That’s a touchdown if Pickens can keep that DB off RB Jaylen Warren for a moment. Was that lack of effort isolated to just that run play?  Well, check out Pickens on this  next play.  The pass intended for him is intercepted, which happens; but watch what Pickens does after the interception, while his teammates are hustling to tackle the guy with the ball:

Watch George Pickens after this ball is intercepted. #Steelers pic.twitter.com/UrbwuBPhdl

— Josh Rowntree (@JRown32) December 17, 2023

Oh dear.  Pickens jogs roughly parallel to the ball-carrier for about ten yards, then veers away from him so as not to get his hands dirty with any of that yucky tackling.  He seems like a guy trying to look busy for the cameras, but not break a nail.

The Ravens scout for character just as much as skill & athleticism.  Did “character concerns” push Pickens completely off their draft board?  Quite possibly.  While at Georgia, Pickens was suspended for fighting a Georgia Tech corner and squirting another opponent with a water bottle.  Dane Brugler’s scouting report said Pickens “lacks discipline in several areas.”  Sports Illustrated quoted scouts as saying Pickens came with “big reg flags” and “has some growing up to do.”  Walter Football quotes scouts as saying that is interview was “horrible” and their character evaluation for him was “terrible.”

If the Ravens scouted Pickens as a head case, and they didn’t want any part of having him on their team – then (a) it looks like that may have been the right call, and (b) I was dead wrong to rip them for not drafting him.  Sorry, Eric!

Vocab

The word “Schadenfreude” comes to us from the German.  Dictionary dotcom defines it as “satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune.”  Brittannica says it’s “the emotional experience of pleasure in response to another’s misfortune.”  It’s four syllables, with accent on the first: “shah” like the Shah of Iran, “den” like a fox’s den, “Freud” like Sigmund, and the trailing “e” is not silent, making a sound between “deh” and “duh”.  You can hear it here.

“Schadenfreude” is one of those German compound words.  Schaden means harm, and freude is joy: schadenfreude is “harm-joy”.  The earliest appearances in German texts seems to date from around 1750; it comes over into English texts around the 1850s or ‘60s.  But it’s not just a German concept.  One linguistic philosopher helpfully writes:

The Japanese have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The French speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. In Danish it is skadefryd; in Hebrew, simcha la-ed; in Mandarin, xìng-zāi-lè-huò; in Russian, zloradstvo; and for the Melanesians who live on the remote Nissan Atoll in Papua New Guinea, it is banbanam. Two millennia ago, the Romans spoke of malevolentia. Earlier still, the Greeks described epichairekakia (literally epi, over, chairo, rejoice, kakia, disgrace). A study in Würzburg in Germany carried out in 2015 found that football [soccer] fans smiled more quickly and broadly when their rival team missed a penalty, than when their own team scored. “To see others suffer does one good,” wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle.”

Thanks, Nietzsche!

You might wonder how you would use that word in a sentence; or even why you would ever use that word.  But I think if you ponder the Pittsburgh Steelers’ current three-game losing streak, and consider that they still have road games at Seattle and at Baltimore, you might be able to come up with some uses for that word.

Stats

This game was one of Lamar’s lowest passing-yardage totals all season.  Yet I honestly think it was one of his most impressive performances.  He created big gains out of certain sacks and kept the offense moving with timely completions and almost a hundred yards rushing.   He played a hell of a game.  But, the receiver statistics are not going to move the needle much.

What a great game for Likely!  In the three games since Mark Andrews went down with injury, Likely has had 14 catches on 19 targets for 193 yards (10.2 YPT) and 2 TDs.  That’s what we call stepping up.  Very nice.

Can we talk about my receiver obsession, Rashod Bateman?  Bate started hot: through two quarters he had three catches on three targets for 39 yards, a sweet 13.0 YPT.  And then the rest of the passes toward him fell incomplete.  I don’t think they were all catchable.  Lamar seemed to feel the same way.  In the post-game press conference he said “I believe we left some plays out there on that field because if I would have thrown a better pass to Bateman in that end zone, that would have been a touchdown. So, I’m [ticked] off about that as well, but we got the ‘dub.’”

Those 39 yards are Bateman’s season-high, if you can believe that.  Disappointing.  And if we want to go back to my preseason prediction essay, there’s good fodder for another “Things I was wrong about” entry.  Anyway: Three catches with 6.5 yds-per does not quite meet our standard for a “Quality Start” by a receiver: 3+ catches with 7+ yds-per.  Can I round up his yards-per-target?  No?  Stats are cold, man.

Zay Flowers’ worst game as a pro. I am not the slightest bit concerned about him.  Are you?  Without looking at the All-22, I bet we’d find that the Jags tilted their coverage to take him away.  Lamar responded by targeting Likely & Bateman, to good effect: 9 yds-per-target cumulatively.  That’s the point of having diverse receiving weapons.  You can take one or two receivers away, but other players will keep the ball moving.

Season Stats & Leaderboard

Here are the full-season stats to date:

This week I removed the row for “Odell + DPI”. As the season has gone on, the delta between his actual stats and his stats with the Pass Interference penalties he’s drawn is not as significant as it was earlier.  I started to feel the extra row was obscuring some of the most important information on the table: where the TDs and “Quality Starts” were coming from.

No Ravens pass-catcher is anywhere near the top of the league leaderboards.  But the Ravens have three players with 700+ scrimmage yards (Gus, Flowers, and Lamar rushing), and three more players with 500+ (Andrews, Beckham, and I’m cheating by including poor Keaton Mitchell’s 489).  Justice Hill is on the cusp of 400 scrimmage yards; Bateman & Agholor & Likely are in the 300 club (well, Likely is close).  They’re really using everybody!  I’ve chafed at Bateman’s low usage, but big picture they’re actually making use of all their skill players.  Greg Roman tended to funnel touches through a smaller number of players.  This greater “diversity” should benefit the Ravens come playoff time.

The Ravens offense is 7th in pts-per-drive and 6th in Scoring% per drive.  They’ve fallen to 8th in 3rd-down% and 9th in Red Zone TD%.  They are 4th in pts-per-game and still 4th in DVOA.  The DVOA playoff projection has the Ravens getting the AFC top seed in 68% of simulations, and making the Conference Championship Game in 70%.  A Niners-Ravens Super Bowl is by far their most common projection, occurring in fully a third of their simulations.

Lamar is 4th among QBs in yards-per-attempt.  His other stats have fallen down the leaderboard over the past month or so.  He’s now 8th in QB rating, 11th in completion%, 16th in TDs and TD%, and 17th in yardage.  The DVOA guys have him 14th in both their counting and efficiency stat (min 15 attempts).  QBR has him 8th.

What’s interesting is that as Lamar’s rank in various stat categories has gone down, his prominence in MVP chatter has gone up.

MVP

Much of Lamar’s ascension in the MVP conversation is due to the Ravens surge to the top of the AFC playoff seeding, while other teams have fallen off.  Dak Prescott’s Cowboys just got killed, and the Eagles have lost three straight.  Patrick Mahomes is a perma-candidate for MVP, but the Chiefs have gone 3-4 over their last seven and don’t look as dominant as they usually do. Another part of it is analyst appreciation for just how much Lamar is driving the Ravens entire offense.  Sunday’s prime-time game, with Collinsworth gushing over that bomb to Likely, only helps that.

If I had to handicap the MVP race, I would say that among quarterbacks, Brock Purdy and Lamar are neck & neck, in some order.  Right now I would give it to Purdy; it might be more precise to say that whichever QB wins the Christmas game will get MVP.  But this might be a year to award it to a non-QB.  Among the nons, Christian McCaffrey & Tyreek Hill are the leaders.  Collinsworth said on Sunday that if Tyreek gets 2,000 yards, which has never been done, he should get it.  C-Mac & Tyreek are 1-2 on the scrimmage yards leaderboard.  C-Mac is ahead; but Running Backs have an inherent advantage in scrimmage yards, and 2,000 from scrimmage has been done several times by a RB.  2,000 yards receiving would be a unique accomplishment.  Tyreek is still on pace, but it’ll be tight.

The fact that McCaffrey and Purdy are on the same team hurts both of their candidacies.  Lots of analysts think Purdy isn’t even the offensive MVP on his own team, so how could he be league MVP?  That conundrum doesn’t bother me: it’s not unprecedented.  Kurt Warner was league MVP in 1999, but the Rams considered Marshall Faulk their MVP, and Faulk won Offensive Player of the Year.  Peyton Manning said his whole Indy offense hinged on how defenses played Tight End Dallas Clark.  That might make Clark the lynchpin, but he wasn’t making the decisions (or the throws), and Clark wasn’t the 5-time MVP.

You want a prediction?  I’m too timid to do a straight one, but I’m willing to do a conditional if-then prediction, like a software developer might:

• If Tyreek gets 2,000 yards receiving, then he’ll win MVP (Purdy & C-Mac split the Niners vote, Lamar’s numbers aren’t impressive enough)
• Else if the Niners win out, getting to 14-3, then Purdy will win MVP (he’ll have the best numbers and will have beaten Lamar head-to-head)
• Else if the Ravens get the AFC top seed – and especially if they beat the Niners on Christmas – then Lamar will win MVP
• Else I dunno what the hell might happen. Maybe Josh Allen goes on a tear and drags the Bills to the playoffs.

Next Up:  Christmas in San Francisco!  Potentially a Super Bowl preview.

I think the Niners are far & away the best team in the league.  DVOA has them as the 3rd-best team they’ve tracked in the past 40+ years, on par with monsters like the ’85 Bears and the ’91 Skins.  They also have them as the 3rd-best offense they’ve tracked in the past 40+ years, along with units like the Imperfect Patriots of Moss & Welker et al and Peyton Manning’s first 49+ passing TD season with Marvin Harrison & Reggie Wayne & Brandon Stokley & Edgerrin James.

Not to be a downer, but the only reasonable expectation is that the Ravens will get stomped.  Playing them tight will be an accomplishment.  If that happens, I encourage you not to let it ruin your Christmas, but instead take the long view.  If the Ravens play respectably, and come out of it healthy, then they still have full control of their destiny.  They may be able to create an opportunity for a rematch at a neutral site in February.  THAT would be a fun game to watch.

Best wishes for the holiday season to you & yours.