ExtremeRavens Posted September 3 Posted September 3 It felt as if the previous four months simply had not happened. Lamar Jackson’s second NFL Most Valuable Player season? December maulings of the San Francisco 49ers and Miami Dolphins? A sense that, finally, they were the league’s best? Poof — gone. Replaced by another crushing disappointment against the inevitable Kansas City Chiefs, by the acid aftertaste of another monumental game in which the Ravens failed to put their best foot forward. There’s always next year? Baltimore football fans no longer wanted to hear it. After the Ravens’ 17-10 loss in the AFC championship game, their outlook turned unforgiving. Brilliant regular seasons would no longer suffice. The home team could only erase their skepticism by taking the final step to the Super Bowl. Eight months later, with a new season set to begin Thursday night against those same Chiefs, the Ravens find themselves living in that zero-sum reality. They have to win enough games to reach the postseason, but they can’t change hearts and minds with anything they do over the next four months. It’s a tricky line for players and coaches to walk. They, too, see the Super Bowl as their one, true measuring stick, but they won’t have a chance to reach it if they don’t hone in on the mundane toils of each football week. The end of the story might be everything, but they can’t skip to it. “We have to win regular-season games to get to January,” Jackson said. “We can’t just go into the season and go 5-12, because then we’re not going to be in the playoffs. We have to go into every game trying to make the playoffs. Playoffs are on our mind, but at the same time, we have to win this game that’s ahead of us.” That from the man who threw down the Super Bowl gauntlet for himself the night the Ravens drafted him in 2018. Those words rolled easily off the tongue of a 21-year-old who had won the Heisman Trophy and captured the imagination of college football fans around the world while at Louisville. The 27-year-old version of Jackson has taken more bruises, existing at the center of national sports discourse that says you can’t be one of the true greats without a ring. At times, this mindset sucks the joy out of games and seasons, not to mention that it ignores the sheer difficulty of becoming the last team standing. Are we living in the sports world we want when a 13-4 season is remembered as a failure? “Just to make it to the championship game in the AFC, I mean, think about what that’s going to mean this year,” said NBC Sports analyst Cris Collinsworth, who will help call the Ravens-Chiefs opener. “Everybody is going to pencil these two teams back into the championship game. They played so well. But who doesn’t have a chance? Bills, Dolphins, Jets for sure. Bengals, Ravens, I don’t know what the Steelers are going to do, Browns for sure. Texans, what they did. Chiefs, Chargers now with [Jim] Harbaugh out there. It’s just really hard.” “You understand it from the fans because this has been such a sustained, very good football team and they want to see the trophy that comes with it — and it hasn’t come,” Collinsworth’s broadcast partner, Mike Tirico, said. “I understand the fans being restless about trying to get back there, but I think those players know full well, as Cris detailed, how many good teams you’ve got to play to get from Week 1 to the last Sunday of the AFC season and the conference championship game. It’s very hard to get back and shouldn’t be underappreciated how difficult that task is going to be.” Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta said of the notion anything but a Super Bowl would be considered a failure, “I am proud of our team — what we’ve accomplished. We haven’t accomplished our ultimate goal, but I don’t really subscribe to the idea that your season is a failure if you don’t win the Super Bowl.” (Kevin Richardson/Staff) The Ravens aim never to endure a rebuilding downturn, at least not as long as they have one of the league’s elite quarterbacks on their roster and his $260 million contract on their balance sheet. They take cost-saving risks such as going with a young, overhauled offensive line this season, but winning big is the goal. Does that mean a Lombardi Trophy is the only stamp of success for those who assemble the team? General manager Eric DeCosta thinks back over the best teams in Ravens history, and perhaps four of the top five — 2006, 2011, 2019 and 2023 — did not make it to the final game. The 2000 Super Bowl champions did it with a below-average offense. In 2012, the Ravens bumped along for four months, not hitting their stride until the games mattered most. “It’s an excellent question,” DeCosta said when asked how he judges a season. “My goal is to build a team that has talent at every position, that is flexible enough to withstand injuries, that we have depth to get us through a long season and to make the playoffs and to be sort of ascending at that point. I think we’ve maybe had the best record twice in the last five years, and we didn’t make it to the end; that’s tough. But I am proud of our team — what we’ve accomplished. We haven’t accomplished our ultimate goal, but I don’t really subscribe to the idea that your season is a failure if you don’t win the Super Bowl; I know a lot of people do. If I did that, I’d probably be in a mental institution.” In some sense, elite athletes have had to balance this all-or-nothing mentality most of their lives. They wouldn’t be where they are if not driven by bold visions, but they often need to shut out big-picture thoughts and emotions to focus on perfecting the next practice rep or knowing the next opponent’s defense like it’s second nature. The regular season might not matter to fans or pundits, but it has to matter to them. “I think each and every guy’s goal — and ours as a team — should be to make the Super Bowl,” Ravens All-Pro linebacker Roquan Smith said. “But there is a process in place, and you have to respect the process, and I’m a firm believer in respecting the process. So, it starts with Week 1. Kansas City is in our way for what exactly we want to do, and I’m sure, from their eyes, we’re in their way.” Smith’s ritual of sprinting out to practice every day is his physical demonstration of respecting the process. Of course, the Ravens thought they had clocked into the right head space last year, when they entered the postseason as calmly and professionally as a team could. And still the Chiefs seemed more prepared on that final Sunday in January. One lost day defined a season. More than that, the 2024 Ravens know they will be judged by the same harsh standard this time around. “Nobody remembers the AFC championship runner-up from 10 years ago,” All-Pro safety Kyle Hamilton said. “We’re trying to be that team that everybody remembers won the Super Bowl. So, we lost — it is what it is — [we] had a good year, but we have to do it again.” View the full article Quote
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