Missed extra point ends Ravens’ comeback bid.
Sunday, October 21, 2018, M&T BANK STADIUM, BALTIMORE – The irresistible force met the immovable object. The ensuing battle was well-joined and entertaining.
But despite a bruising battle between the league’s top scoring offense and its most stingy defense, it took a mere gust of wind to determine the final score.
Kicker Justin Tucker, who is the league’s all-time most-accurate kicker on field goals and who had never missed a conversion kick in his career, kicked into a gusty wind in the stadium’s east end and saw his kick sail wide right.
That ended a mouth-watering interconference matchup, as the host Ravens fell to the New Orleans Saints, 24-23, before 70,639 wind-blown fans.
With a made PAT, this game would have gone to overtime. The Ravens’ John Brown (134 yards, seven catches, touchdown) hauled in a 14-yard touchdown pass with 24 seconds to go to bring the Ravens to within one point. The TD ended a Saints’ streak of 17 unanswered fourth-quarter points. New Orleans had scored a pair of second-half touchdowns against a Ravens team that had not allowed one all season.
But it was not to be. It was Tucker’s first miss after 222 straight conversions–the Ravens’ first PAT miscue after 318 in a row–and only the team’s third extra-point miss in its 23rd season of existence. (Matt Stover missed one in the team’s 1996 maiden season against St. Louis. Stephen Hauschka had one blocked in a Monday-night game in Cleveland in 2009.)
The Ravens had made 749 of 751 extra-point kicks in team history before the game-ending miss.
“In the moment I was surprised the ball didn’t go through,” Tucker said. “I’ll let this hurt for another couple of hours and then I’ll do everything I can to move on. The guys in the locker room have my back and that means the world to me,” he continued
The Ravens (4-3) were attempting to get off to a 5-2 start for only the second time in the last six seasons. The only other time that had happened was in 2014, which also coincides with Baltimore’s most recent playoff appearance.
The game was the first of two consecutive contests against teams from the NFC South–a rugged division that sent three teams to the playoffs last year and has had a Super Bowl representative two of the last three seasons. Next up: the Ravens will travel to Carolina to play the Panthers (Sunday, October 28; 1 p.m.; WJZ-TV, WIYY-FM).
But neither the brisk elements nor the late-afternoon start time could darken a matchup that was supposed to provide plenty of offensive fireworks. However, not even New Orleans (5-1)–one of seven top-ten offenses the Ravens will be facing over the final ten games–would explode at the start. The Saints stayed grounded at the start in the face of that gusty wind, giving the game a blue-collar feel.
A ten-minute, 20-play drive–one that included 13 runs–took the ball from their own 25 to the Ravens’ 5. The drive included a fake punt on a fourth-down conversion. But on another fourth down (and 1 from the 6), Alvin Kamara fumbled and Michael Pierce recovered to stop the drive.
Despite having only six active offensive linemen–tackle James Hurst and guard Alex Lewis were out with injuries and with rookies Brad Bozeman and Orlando Brown, Jr. starting–the Ravens put together a similar drive in the second quarter. It traversed 63 yards in 17 plays (most of them runs) before Tucker booted a 31-yard field goal for the game’s first points.
Eight different Ravens rushed the ball over the first quarter and a half as Baltimore tried to keep the Saints off balance. It was Brown’s 13-yard reception on fourth down that got the Ravens close enough to try the three-pointer.
Tucker’s field goal kick, which the wind nearly pushed wide right, was a clear indicator why both head coaches were more aggressive on challenges and fourth-down calls early in the game.
In the second quarter, the Saints drove with the wind towards the stadium’s west end. Drew Brees (22-for-30, 212 yards, two touchdowns, one sack, 114.9 rating) took advantage with a 32-yard strike to Michael Thomas (his top go-to playmaker) to put the ball in Ravens territory. Two Kamara runs drove the ball to the Ravens’ 5.
From there, former Ravens tight end Ben Watson caught a touchdown pass following a pass-interference call on Jimmy Smith. The veteran Ravens corner had gotten burned on the Thomas strike earlier in the drive before getting flagged in the end zone.
Watson (43 yards, six catches, touchdown) is now the answer to a trivia question: Which player grabbed Brees’ 500th career touchdown pass?
But Joe Flacco (23-for-39, 279 yards, two touchdowns, sack, 98.1 rating) answered the call. He hit Brown for 56 yards on a crossing route and the ball ended up at the Saints’ 2 as the first half wound down.
It was Brown’s seventh catch of 25 yards or more and it set up Lamar Jackson’s first NFL touchdown (a one-yard read-option run) that gave Baltimore a 10-7 halftime lead.
The Saints’ 30th-ranked pass defense had allowed Brown, who had just six catches over the past two weeks, to rein in five balls for over 100 yards. Meanwhile, the top-ranked New Orleans offense had been held to 145 yards at the break.
That was thanks in part to good coverage on Thomas, who had caught 46 of 49 balls thrown to him before this game. But, in the first half, he had two drops and just one catch.
Meanwhile, Michael Crabtree (66 yards, five catches) also had a slow beginning, getting shut out over the first two quarters. But he made three third-quarter catches, including an 18-yarder during a 61-yard, ten-play drive, which set up tight end Mark Andrews’ eight-yard scoring reception. That score extended the Ravens’ lead to 17-7 with 3:30 left in the period.
The Ravens had a team-record 11 sacks in Tennessee last week, but they couldn’t get to Brees through the first three quarters. Brees took advantage, including finding Tre’Quan Smith with two passes while avoiding sacks. Those plays put the ball on the Baltimore 16 as the fourth quarter began.
As the Saints often do, they then turned to Kamara (64 yards, 17 carries, touchdown) to finish off a ten-play drive. His two-yard touchdown brought the visitors to within three early in the fourth.
It was the first second-half touchdown Baltimore had allowed all year. No team had gone six-plus games without yielding one since the 1934 Detroit Lions.
The Ravens helped by picking a bad time to go three-and-out for the first time in the game. New Orleans took over and drove ten plays for the go-ahead score. Brees hit Thomas from five yards out with 4:58 to go.
Wil Lutz, a former Ravens camp body, added a 39-yard field goal just before the two-minute warning to stretch the lead to seven points. That set up an ending that was thrilling–before it turned anticlimactic.
As it turned out, even momentous matchups can turn on the most innocuous of plays.
