Baltimore is denied its first-ever 6-1 start. Head for a bye week in a defensive slump and with offensive questions.
Sunday, October 24, 2021, M&T BANK STADIUM, BALTIMORE – Ravens head coach John Harbaugh is a big fan of “stacking.” Whether it’s stacking good classroom sessions, productive film work, solid practices, successful games, or uplifting seasons, the habit of building one good effort onto another is part of what gives the Ravens the mostly positive reputation they have.
But just when the Ravens were reaching plateaus rarely reached in team history, they were knocked off course when they were launching another assault on the NFL summit.
The Ravens–the AFC’s top playoff seed if the season had ended last week–are now in second place in the North due to their five-game win streak getting decisively snapped by the visiting Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday afternoon.
Cincinnati’s 41-17 win in front of 70,659 silenced fans put the visitors in pole position by virtue of the head-to-head tiebreaker. Both teams are now 5-2.
The Bengals, who had scored only 36 points in their last four games against the Ravens and hadn’t scored a touchdown against Baltimore in ten quarters, outdid themselves in just one afternoon. Put simply, the Cincinnati Bengals played as near-perfect a game as a football team can play.
One of the reasons Cincinnati has won four of its last five is the lack of penalties. It had only 29 coming into the game, the league’s fourth-fewest, and didn’t commit its first infraction Sunday until 7:07 was left in the fourth quarter. It helped seal the win along with an unanswered 28-point burst after the Ravens assumed their first lead of the day, 17-13, early in the third quarter.
Not willing to engage Baltimore in a grueling ground duel, the Bengals instead struck with five short, big-play scoring drives, none of which lasted longer than five plays. As a result, Cincinnati scored its most points in a game since 2013, the same year Baltimore had last allowed this many.
The Ravens came into the game having gone 5-1 for only the fourth time in team history, also having done so in 2000, 2012, and 2020. But in all four cases, the team failed to record a first-ever 6-1 start to a season. This time, Cincinnati broke a five-game losing streak to the Ravens and gave third-year head coach Zac Taylor his first-ever win over Baltimore after dropping four straight at the start of his tenure at the Bengals’ helm.
And just as Lamar Jackson has been the spearhead for the Ravens’ successes, another young quarterback led the charge for the visitors. In a game that saw Jackson pulled in a lopsided loss for the first time, Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow dazzled the Ravens’ defense and silenced the crowd with a 23-for-38, 416-yard performance (career yardage high), along with three touchdown passes, one interception, and with only one sack incurred. Burrow ended the day with a gaudy 113.5 passer rating.
It was the third time the Ravens had allowed a 400-yard passing performance in the first seven games, following similar efforts from Las Vegas’s Derek Carr and Indianapolis’s Carson Wentz.
“Up and down. Hot and cold,” defensive lineman Calais Campbell said. “(But), in the second half of the season, we’re going to be a force to be reckoned with. That’s for sure.”
The primary beneficiary of Burrow’s throws was rookie wideout and former college teammate Ja’Marr Chase. Chase now has 754 yards this season, the most by any receiver through the first seven games of his career. Chase gathered in 201 yards on eight catches, including a short slant route that, after three missed tackles, turned into an 82-yard touchdown into the west end zone that extended the visitors’ lead to 27-17 in the third quarter and seemed to indicate that it would be the Bengals’ day.
That play followed a disastrous sequence that saw the Ravens pass up a long game-tying field-goal try and opt for a punt instead. But in the confusion, they burned a timeout much earlier than they would have liked. On their next drive, the Bengals converted two long third-down plays, drew a pass-interference call on Anthony Averett. Then, Cincinnati got a break when Chase’s fumble at the Ravens’ 11 was not covered by Chuck Clark before he went out of bounds.
Marlon Humphrey stopped that drive with an end-zone interception as the fourth quarter began, but the Ravens couldn’t capitalize. The big hurt was Alejandro Villanueva’s holding penalty that wiped out Jackson’s 39-yard run. Baltimore had to punt again. Long touchdown runs by Joe Mixon and Samaji Perine followed as the purple-clad crowd, sapped of more energy to boo, headed for the exits.
“Giving up 250 yards hurts,” Humphrey tweeted after the game. “I gotta play better…. time to get back in the lab.”
It might be tough for them to do in the wake of this loss, but the Ravens can head into their off week with a lot of which to be proud of. They usually do plenty of damage within the friendly confines of M&T Bank Stadium, where, before Sunday, the Ravens had won 19 of their last 23 home dates, not to mention four of their last five games hosting the Bengals, including the previous three. But viewed as a whole, the season has also included a road win at a difficult place like Denver, a come-from-behind victory over longtime nemesis Kansas City, a 19-point rally against spiritual rival Indianapolis, and a narrow overtime loss at Las Vegas.
If that weren’t enough, it has all taken place within the vortex of numerous nagging injuries, the vaccination debate, and a staggering, league-high 17 players on either short-term or season-ending injured reserve. Left tackle and former 2016 first-round draft pick Ronnie Stanley (ankle surgery) was the latest go on that list, it was announced on Tuesday. As if all that weren’t enough, backup right tackle Patrick Mekari hurt his ankle Sunday and never returned to the game, and Tyre Phillips had to fill in for him.
Also, the Ravens were denied a sixth straight win, which would have marked the Ravens’ third-longest regular-season win streak in team history, topped only by the seven-game run that concluded the 2000 regular season and the club-record 12-game streak that wrapped up the 2019 campaign.
A win would have been Harbaugh’s 50th within the AFC North (29 loses). The team also failed to register its 200th outdoor win against 123 losses since 2000, the year of the franchise’s first playoff appearance and Super Bowl title. The Ravens’ October win streak was also snapped at nine on Sunday. October is the only principal regular-season month where Baltimore has a losing record. But recent October success has raised its lifetime mark in the month to 45-53. The Ravens had not lost an October game since 2018 when it fell on the road at Carolina.
After the idle week, the Ravens will return to their home field to wrap up a long home stretch, attempting to get the sweep of the four-game Russell Street stretch against the Minnesota Vikings (Sunday, November 7, 1 p.m.)
The weather is not likely to be too bad for that game. Still, Minnesota was the visitor in 2013, its most recent trip to Charm City, when the Ravens and Vikings played the only real snow game in Baltimore franchise history, with falling and accumulating snow. Five lead changes in the last 2:10 culminated in a last-second Joe Flacco-to-Marlon Brown touchdown pass on the back boundary of the stadium’s west end zone, resulting in a 29-26 Ravens victory.
Despite the Ravens’ post-bye schedule looking considerably tougher (the team has the league’s second-hardest total schedule this year), based on 2020 records of their 2021 opponents the team at least has been more than able to play the first resumption game with a great deal of success. Baltimore’s record in games immediately after the off-week is 17-8 (.680), second-best among all AFC teams behind league-best Denver (23-9, .718). Both at 22-10 (.687), Dallas and Philadelphia share the NFC’s best post-bye marks.
The Ravens will have five road games in seven weeks after the game against the Vikings – including four AFC North games, three of them on the road – a stretch the franchise has had to endure at least twice before in team history, including the start of their eventual 2000 championship campaign.
Harbaugh would probably say that it would be an excellent time to build another stack of wins. But building that stack has to come on the heels of a sour taste in the team’s collective mouth.
