After a slow start, Baltimore kicked into gear with a dominating second-half performance.
Saturday, January 20, 2024, M&T BANK STADIUM, BALTIMORE – The NFL world has parity and unpredictability. But in the Baltimore Ravens’ world, another similar-sound word fits well, too. It’s inevitability. That’s because the franchise has had a short history but a mostly glittering one, and it added another line to its gaudy resume Saturday afternoon.
With poetry befitting the man who penned the work for which they are named – Edgar Allan Poe, whose 215th birthday was Friday – the Ravens parlayed the AFC’s top seed and the perception that it is the NFL’s best team into a 34-10 Divisional Playoff round victory over the visiting, fourth-seeded Houston Texans before 71,018 freezing fans.
The Ravens will now host the AFC Championship Game for the right to advance to Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas on February 11. It’s something the rabid Baltimore fan base – one that had witnessed three playoff losses in the team’s last four such games – has longed for because home postseason games have been relatively rare for Baltimore despite its success. The team has played a staggering 21 of its 29-lifetime playoff games away from M&T Bank Stadium.
Next up is either Buffalo or Kansas City on Sunday, January 28, at 3 p.m., in a game that will televised nationally by CBS. It will be the franchise’s first in the post-merger era and only the second-ever championship game held in Baltimore. The AFC title tilt in 1970 saw the then-Baltimore Colts defeat the Oakland Raiders, 27-17, and advance to Super Bowl 5, where the Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys, 16-13.
For the Ravens, it will be their fifth lifetime AFC title game appearance; they have split their previous four attempts to go to the biggest game of all. This year, for the first time, the Ravens have a chance to be the Super Bowl’s designated home team because it is an even-numbered Super Bowl. That would give them jersey choice and a chance–should they choose to do so–to wear purple jerseys for the first time in three Super Bowl appearances.
But to achieve that goal, the first step was to win with a rested team against the surging Texans. “Rested” = not playing multiple players in the season finale vs. Pittsburgh and then having the entire team rest during the Wild Card round. Saturday was the first time that do-everything QB Lamar Jackson had taken a snap in 20 days. The concern wasn’t baseless either. Too much rest contributed to issues in 2019 when Tennessee held the home-standing Ravens to a season-low 12 points and won by 16.
That was then. This season, Baltimore had averaged 33.8 points per game down the stretch and had allowed a mere 17.7 per contest, with marks ranked at the top of the league during that span. The Texans could boast, too, having resurrected themselves from the AFC South Division cellar (11-38-1 from 2020-22) to win the division in the regular season’s final week. That was quite a turnaround for a team that Baltimore had beaten 25-9 to open the season.
This time, Baltimore showed its superiority by allowing approximately 60 second-half yards and shutting out the Texans after the intermission; the offense took over the game by putting together three long touchdown drives and adding a field goal. Houston didn’t help its cause by committing a team-playoff-record 11 penalties, and its offense, as in Week One’s loss at Baltimore, never found the end zone. In fact, Stroud and the Texans’ offense never had a red-zone snap in the entire game.
Highly touted rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud flashed his considerable talents again, as he did against the Ravens in September. He avoided the five-sack fate that awaited him then, completing 19 of 33 passes for 175 yards, but his offense could only rush for 38 yards. It was quite a contrast to 229 yards for the Ravens.
Stroud failed in his second attempt to become only the fourth rookie quarterback to win in Baltimore during the Ravens’ 28-season history, following Arizona’s Jake Plummer (1997), Chicago’s Mitch Trubisky (2017) and Pittsburgh’s Kenny Pickett (2022). Team-wise, Houston is the only NFL franchise to have never won a playoff game on the road.
If the Texans held any advantage, it was rhythm and momentum from having played and beaten the Browns in the Wild Card Weekend. Meanwhile, the Ravens hadn’t had its entire first-string squad on the field since the regular season’s next-to-last game against the Miami Dolphins. But at the beginning of Saturday’s game, it appeared that neither Stroud nor Jackson could make much headway against the opposing pass defense.
Houston elected to receive the kickoff, ostensibly to put pressure on the Ravens’ defense but went three-and-out despite two Stroud dropbacks. In turn, the Ravens saw Jackson (16-for-22, 152 yards, two touchdowns, 100 rush yards, two touchdowns) hit Zay Flowers and Odell Beckham, Jr. for first downs to set up Justin Tucker’s game-opening 53-yard field goal. While that may have seemed like a reasonably good start, it wasn’t for this reason: it was the only time the Ravens had been held scoreless in the first quarter of their last five playoff games.
The Texans continued having trouble moving the ball, incurring two false starts and an intentional grounding call on their next drive. Houston would go on to commit eight sloppy first-half penalties to the Ravens’ one, and it was flagged for a staggering seven pre-snap penalties through three quarters. All told, the Texans committed six first-quarter penalties, three more than they were flagged for during last week’s wild-card win over Cleveland.
The visitors did rally to get a game-tying 50-yard field goal from Kaimi Fairbairn, and the first quarter was relatively even statistically. What stood out was the Ravens’ gaudy 43-6 rushing advantage. Jackson contributed to that with a 23-yard sprint up near midfield as the period ended. And the running game would play a big part in the six-minute, 11-play, 76-yard drive that had just begun, with Jackson running the ball for 15 yards down to the Texans’ 2 after Gus Edwards had gained 15 yards on two early carries. Flowers, the first-ever rookie to lead a top-seeded team in receptions and receiving yards, contributed a first-down catch, and Nelson Agholor capped it all off by being wide open in the left side of the east end zone for a 10-3 lead with nine minutes to go before halftime.
But Houston’s nothing-to-lose, freewheeling style would soon pay a huge dividend. Texans punt returner Stephen Sims made up for the lack of production from his offensive teammates by taking a Jordan Stout punt 67 yards for a game-tying touchdown, streaking right up the middle through traffic. After going seven years without allowing a punt return score, the Ravens have yielded two scores this year, the first coming in Cincinnati during a Week Two road win. In the Harbaugh era, the team has allowed only five punt return touchdowns.
Houston then threatened to take the lead, thanks to Stroud’s first big completion to standout receiver Nico Collins, gaining 29 yards into Ravens territory on third-and-long. It set up Fairbairn for a go-ahead 47-yard field goal try into the wind, but it sailed wide right to end his streak of 38 successful kicks inside 50 yards.
The Ravens’ offense had stagnated to end the half with three straight three-and-outs while succumbing to relentless inside pressure to the tune of three Jackson sacks. While Lamar played to an over-100 passer rating in the half (105.1), he had just 23 net passing yards. But his second half was the difference-maker. The Ravens got a 37-yard kick return from Devin Duvernay and first-down catches from Isaiah Likely and Rashod Bateman down to the Houston 15. Jackson stymied the Texans’ blitz from there with a designed up-the-middle run into the end zone to restore the Ravens’ lead at 17-10. On the 55-yard drive, Jackson had accounted for 52 of the yards himself.
Even after a Texans punt rolled dead at the Baltimore 7, Jackson continued to reclaim momentum for the home side, finding Bateman for a first down near midfield, converting a fourth-and-one on a designed keeper, and hitting Justice Hill on a third-and-short pass. Likely capped off the drive as the fourth quarter began by gathering in a 15-yard touchdown pass from Jackson in the east end zone to finish off a 12-play, 93-yard sojourn that took seven minutes off the clock and made it 24-10.
The Ravens applied the coup de grace on another seven-minute fourth-quarter drive that featured the first three carries for the recently-signed Dalvin Cook, who was acquired on waivers from the New York Jets after young speedster Keaton Mitchell was lost for the season in Week 15. Cook carried the ball three times for 22 yards on a 78-yard, 11-play drive that ended with Jackson careening around left end for an eight-yard touchdown, a third straight scoring journey that had broken open a game tied at halftime.[/beautifulquote] It was now 31-10 with only 6:20 to go, and Baltimore got its closing points on Tucker’s 43-yard field goal with 1:56 remaining.
That second-half domination was a thing of beauty for Baltimore’s fans, something they hope will carry into next Sunday’s long-awaited game. Their Ravens will play for the much-anticipated AFC Championship and a Super Bowl slot.
