ExtremeRavens Posted yesterday at 12:30 PM Posted yesterday at 12:30 PM On a dreary Sunday night in Pittsburgh, one of the most disappointing seasons in Ravens history came to a crashing close. Not 48 hours later, Baltimore fired coach John Harbaugh. This whiplash season had no shortage of storylines good and bad, and ultimately proved a defining year for the organization. The Ravens missed the playoffs and finished below .500, both firsts since 2021. Here are five things we learned: John Harbaugh’s tenure ran its course When Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti fired his coach of 18 years, he jammed his thumb into the reset button. It was time. Harbaugh steadied the ship when the team could’ve capsized. He won a Super Bowl. He consistently coached his teams to playoff contention. But this season’s disappointments — a below .500 record despite championship forecasts, empty seats to watch the worst home record (3-6) in the organization’s 30-year history and another haunting exit — were enough to convince Bisciotti it was time. “Following a comprehensive evaluation of the season and the overall direction of our organization, I decided to make a change at head coach,” Bisciotti said in a statement. “This was an incredibly difficult decision.” This year was supposed to be different. Harbaugh introduced transparency in training camp with a full-scale grading system that, he thought, would clean up the kind of football minutiae that ousted the Ravens each of the previous three years, one hauntingly disastrous play at a time: Tyler Huntley’s goal-line fumble in the wild-card round, Zay Flowers’ goal-line fumble in the AFC championship game and Mark Andrews’ goal-line drop in the divisional round. “When you go through the things that we’ve gone through, in terms of different games and things like that, they can see when we do those things well, most of the time, the game’s not even close,” Harbaugh said in August, hoping to clean up midseason blunders and playoff collapses. “When we don’t do those things well — we haven’t been blown out, but we’ve given teams a chance to beat us.” The Ravens were chasing perfection in August, barely gave themselves a chance to sneak into the playoffs in January and were again undone by one excruciating kick. Those singular plays were not on Harbaugh alone, but rather a culmination of a team falling short. A team with enough talent to not be in those situations in the first place. They showed fight until the very end, as evidenced by the turnaround from a 1-5 start, but several players described their season with one defiant descriptor: They “underperformed.” “Our goal has always been and will always be to win championships,” Bisciotti wrote. “We strive to consistently perform at the highest level on the field and be a team and organization our fans take pride in.” Harbaugh’s legacy should not be whitewashed by how it ended. But to the final question he took as Ravens coach, wondering whether he’d like a chance to run it back with the same group, even Harbaugh sounded tired. “Yes, I love these guys,” he said. “I love these guys.” ‘Self-inflicted wounds’ left Ravens defense crestfallen, not ‘feared’ The Ravens’ defense promised to be feared. They vowed to be the kind of group who ripped heads off and snatched footballs, leaving opposing ball carriers to shrivel up at the thought of sharing the same patch of grass. They failed. One assistant coach from a rival team called Baltimore “soft” — a punishing insult and telling accusation. “There were a lot of highs and lows this year, a lot of just self-inflicted wounds,” cornerback Marlon Humphrey said. “We just never quite got to be the brand consistently, drive after drive, that we kind of wanted, game after game. It just was rough.” There was a fourth-quarter comeback allowed in Buffalo. Detroit bullied Baltimore on the ground. Kansas City scored a season-high 37 points against the Ravens. A six-game streak holding opponents to fewer than 20 points would look a lot better if more than two were against playoff teams. Yes, the Ravens shut out the Bengals on the road, which is a commendable feat against any team, but by and large, their defense struggled most against playoff quarterbacks in prime time. In September, Humphrey relayed a message from Harbaugh, who told the defense that they weren’t mature enough yet. There were signs as the leaves changed that the defense had too. Then Pittsburgh’s Aaron Rodgers authored a pair of fourth-quarter touchdown drives without his No. 1 receiver. Baltimore’s defense — a well-paid, talented group which performed beneath its capabilities — finished this season ranked 17th by defense-adjusted value over average. They tumbled from a sixth-place finish last year, Zach Orr’s first as the defensive play caller. Last year’s group enjoyed a midseason turnaround from the pit of the NFL to one of the league’s toughest. This year’s defense planned to carry the torch and instead required a similar turnaround, only to crumble as the curtains closed. Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry still got it Shame on us for ever considering otherwise. Jackson took a beating this year and it seemed, in his age-28 season, that his body might have started to break down. He dealt with injuries to most of his lower half, a back contusion and winter sickness. It was a down year by most metrics. His decision making raised, at times, raised eyebrows. There were even some outside voices (wrongly, very wrongly) insisting that Tyler Huntley should start in his place Week 18. Henry, 32, fumbled each of the first three weeks of the season then again in Week 16. There were times when he struggled to break into space. Times he apologized to the fan base and pointed the finger at himself. Henry toiled through four games failing to eclipse 100 yards. Then a three-game slump. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson celebrates with running back Derrick Henry after Henry runs for a touchdown against the Patriots. The duo wasn't at its best throughout all of 2025, but the backfield teammates showed flashes of why they're both bound for the Hall of Fame. (Kenneth K. Lam/Staff) Both superstars are bound for Canton, Ohio. Sculptors should get a head start on shaping their Hall of Fame busts. Neither has fallen off. They each finished the season on the highest of high notes. Jackson waited until the last quarter of the season. He spun a pair of ridiculous touchdown drives that resembled vintage Jackson. Down to the Ravens’ last try to save the season, a fourth-and-7 from midfield, he launched a perfectly placed pass to tight end Isaiah Likely. He “made some phenomenal plays,” Harbaugh said, that would be overshadowed by the loss. Henry shouldered the load with a season-saving performance a week earlier. He rushed for 216 yards on 36 carries for four touchdowns. Harbaugh called it “one of the greatest performances” that he’d ever seen. We all probably had the same thought. Henry matched his career high in touchdowns and set a new mark in carries while clocking his most single-game yards since 2022. If the Ravens are going to win a Super Bowl anytime soon, it will be that backfield duo hoisting the trophy. It took all year, but the biggest training camp question was resolutely answered in January In late May, at the start of optional offseason practices, Harbaugh was asked for the first time a prescient question: Is there risk involved to having a rookie kicker backstop for a championship-caliber team? “There’s a lot of risks in life,” Harbaugh said, readying to dodge that harsh reality entirely. “There’s a risk when you get in your car; you’ll be driving home in this rain. I want you to be very careful. It’s going to be risky out there on that road.” If memory serves correctly, it was raining that spring afternoon. But even then, folks at every level of the organization knew that by replacing their longtime positional stability with a sixth-round rookie out of always-sunny Arizona, rather than a proven commodity, they were taking a risk that may not pay off. Seven months later, Tyler Loop thinned a 44-yard field goal attempt in Pittsburgh that would have sent the Ravens to the playoffs. Ravens kicker Tyler Loop reacts after missing a field goal at the end of a 26-24 loss to the Steelers. The rookie kicker was perfect from inside 50 yards until the 44-yard miss in Week 18. (Gene J. Puskar/AP) That kick alone did not dispel Baltimore’s season. Nor was it the sole cause to Harbaugh’s effective firing. But Loop hadn’t been truly tested in those conditions — game on the line in the chilly AFC North — all year. The Ravens proved not to be a Super Bowl contender but had a chance to atone for their regular-season blemishes. Loop “just mishit the ball,” he said. It was a gutting end to an otherwise positive rookie campaign. Before that fateful swing, Loop was a perfect 29 of 29 from inside 50 yards. It was the long ball where his accuracy destabilized. He was given four tries from beyond 50 in the regular season, making only one from 52 the first week of the season. Still, Loop wasn’t called on in crunch time until Baltimore’s season depended on it. There’s a common Silicon Valley axiom: “Fail fast.” Maybe if Loop missed a critical kick early in the year he would’ve been more prepared for Pittsburgh. Instead, the ball sailed right and thumped to the turf, where a Western Pennsylvania-based priest had apparently blessed the end zone. Loop’s miss conjured haunting memories of Billy Cundiff in 2012, the year before Baltimore won a Super Bowl with an undrafted rookie kicker named Justin Tucker. Loop was called on as the successor to Tucker, who was cut a few months after being accused of sexual misconduct. Tucker built a Hall of Fame worthy career over 13 seasons as a Raven. Those are big shoes to fill. All season, Loop was built up to be his long-term replacement. We heard senior special teams coach Randy Brown tell the story of his first meeting with Loop and the qualifying traits the 24-year-old showed at a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona. Holder Jordan Stout said Loop has the “biggest leg I’ve ever seen.” And Harbaugh was adamant about his confidence the kid had what it takes. He still might. While Loop came to terms with the hardest moment of his football career, his teammates in the visiting locker room at Acrisure Stadium insisted that this would be the starting point of a successful career. We can’t know for sure if Loop remains in line to be the team’s kicker of the future (Cundiff never kicked in Baltimore after his playoff gaffe). We do know while it is risky to drive through a messy downpour, it’s also risky to pin your team’s playoff hopes on an untested kicker while 60,000-plus yellow towels swirl in his peripheral. Loop wasn’t ready for that moment. General manager Eric DeCosta didn’t invest enough in the trenches Let’s start here: social media isn’t real life. Those lowlight reels of right guard Daniel Faalele make him look far worse than the whole of his body of work. Second-year left guard Andrew Vorhees didn’t take nearly as much of the flack and struggled just as badly. Still, both proved major holes in an offensive line that struggled to keep Jackson upright. Ravens guard Daniel Faalele, shown in September, was inconsistent for Baltimore at right guard. (Kevin Richardson/Staff) In late November, Jackson was informed by a reporter that he had matched his sack total from all of last year in 10 fewer starts. “I got to talk to the offensive line about that,” he said, lifting an eyebrow. “I’m going to holler at my guys about that.” Jackson finished the season sacked 36 times in 13 starts, two off his career high but the worst sack rate (10.65%) and most lost yardage (239) of his career. Time and again, Baltimore’s offense began to hemorrhage when blown pass protection sent pass rushers flying toward a quarterback playing through lower-body injuries or when they couldn’t consistently create rushing lanes for Henry. The only year-over-year change to Baltimore’s offensive line was to backfill a departing Patrick Mekari with Vorhees and later rotate in third-round rookie Emery Jones Jr. As for the defensive line, general manager Eric DeCosta couldn’t have predicted such a brutal string of injuries; namely the season-ending neck injury to Nnamdi Madubuike. He could have taken a bigger swing to address the edges, though. Second-round rookie Mike Green rounded into form the second half of the season but never showed the kind of first-year dominance that some expected. Odafe Oweh, who hit double-digit sacks last year, failed to bring down any quarterback before being traded to Los Angeles, where he finished with 7 1/2 sacks for the Chargers. A 34-year-old Kyle Van Noy slowed down after two productive seasons. Midseason acquisition Dre’Mont Jones injected new life into the pass rush but couldn’t get the Ravens over the hump. A talented secondary can only hang on so long when the pass rush struggles to make quarterbacks uncomfortable. The Ravens were tied for 30th in sacks and 29th in pressure rate. Bottom line: A team-high five sacks (Travis Jones) won’t cut it for a playoff team. Have a news tip? Contact Sam Cohn at scohn@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/samdcohn.x.com. View the full article Quote
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