There would be at least three times when the pass was perfect. Lamar Jackson would cross the wide white boundary of the field at M&T Bank Stadium, maneuver past his teammates and the assorted sideline personnel and, even in a state of manifest frustration, accurately drop his helmet onto that plastic peg on the rear of the Ravens bench.
The regular season for Jackson was filled with scores of brilliant highlights and a baker’s dozen of NFL triumphs. He will be named the league’s most valuable player. He was the person most responsible for the Ravens’ status as the No. 1 seed in the NFL playoffs. In that sense, he was by far the best bargain in the 2018 NFL Draft.
Home-field advantage in the playoffs, though, is not the goal. The idea is to play in the Super Bowl, maybe even win it, and the Ravens’ planned trip was grounded right there in the Inner Harbor. Immediately.
IYER: How Titans stunned Ravens, Lamar Jackson
“I felt like this team was the best football team we could be this year,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said after the game. “We made the most of us. We just weren’t that today.”
While football fans and analysts languished in their boredom waiting for the playoffs to resume, there was a lot of media — and social media — energy expended haranguing the 27 teams that drafted in advance of the Ravens for allowing Jackson to be available a couple springs ago, when they made their choice.
There were moments in this one when Jackson reminded us why those people felt they had sufficient ammunition for their argument. There was the brilliant throw down the right sideline on the final possession of the first half, caught beautifully by Marquise Brown. There was the dazzling right-side run on the first Baltimore possession of the empty fourth quarter.
There is no question Jackson is an outstanding NFL quarterback. There still has never been, however, a Super Bowl champion that has built its attack on the option game. That is the vehicle that carried the Ravens as far as they went this year. There was beginning to be some belief the reason no one had won it all with the option is it had not been deployed by a team blessed with an operator owning Jackson’s surpassing talent.
That contention can stand for as long as Jackson is in the league. He will have the Ravens in this position, or close, many more times.
For at least another year, though, that belief will rest on equal footing with those who doubt the system as an NFL vehicle. College teams have been playing the read option for roughly a half century. It is not a new concept. NFL teams have used it sparingly, though.
MORE: How Ravens' loss could have been predicted
It is not about the quarterback being exposed to excessive hitting and punishment, and thus potential injury. That’s a canard. Jackson was so deft at avoiding contact he might have taken fewer hard hits than any starting quarterback in the league.
It is about:
1. Opponent game-planning: The Titans understood their only concern at this point was to stop the Ravens attack. NFL teams can say they play one game at a time, and it’s true to an extent, but rare is the team that will completely abandon its principles to deal with a single opponent in the regular season.
Perhaps an opponent within a division will consider it, because that game is going to be played twice in a year, but someone from the NFC West will recognize there are 15 other games on the schedule that are more or at least as important.
The playoffs are different. The Titans were ready for everything Jackson can bring to a game. They worked hard to force his throws to the sideline, where he tended to be less accurate and the passes were more easily defended, and they also forced him whenever possible to run wide rather than upfield. They used a spy on the quarterback when necessary, which mostly kept Jackson from dashing into the secondary.
Tennessee coach Mike Vrabel said the key was restricting Jackson’s activity “between the numbers” and forcing him to go searching for room on the outside. “The players understood the scheme, some of the keys to dealing with him,” Vrabel said. The biggest: making him move laterally and eventually search for refuge out of bounds.
Harbaugh asserted he key to the Titans’ defense was the performance of their defensive line. “I thought they did a great job up front,” Harbaugh said, insisting there was nothing new about their schemes.
2. Desperation matters: There was a least one different ingredient. A team’s defense is fundamentally altered by the degree of intensity invested in it. The Titans recognized Baltimore was going to have some success moving the football and concentrated on ways to excel in short-yardage situations.
That included selling out hard on the Ravens’ three attempts to convert fourth downs, all of which were decisive plays. The first came at their own 45 after the Titans had opened with a touchdown drive. On fourth-and-1, Jackson tried to keep the ball and ram it through the right side but was stopped cold. Tennessee turned that into a one-play, 45-yard touchdown drive and a 14-0 lead.
The second ended the Ravens’ 13-play drive following the second-half kickoff, which carried them to the Tennessee 18 and another fourth-and-1. This time, Jackson tried the right side, found his path blocked, then turned back to the middle and still saw no room. The Titans scored after that one, too, and all but sealed the game.
3. Coming back: Because the Ravens are first a running team, there always was doubt about how they would handle facing a significant deficit. One reason that doubt lingered is they so rarely were behind by more than one score.
They scored first-drive touchdowns in 11 of 16 games. They hadn’t overcome more than a single-score deficit at any point.
So far behind for so long against the Titans, Jackson wound up throwing 59 passes, completing 31 for a .525 percentage. Throwing so much led to two interceptions and one sack that caused him to fumble. That represented half his turnover total for the season.
It would be wrong to make this entirely about Jackson; receivers dropped six passes on him, although that might have been a byproduct of a team suddenly slinging the ball after only once topping the 40-attempt mark.
But it isn’t entirely about Jackson. It is about the system, the approach to the game, in which he has proven to be most comfortable.
There are six teams still playing, and though all the remaining quarterbacks function differently, they all are operating with the same fundamental approach. For lack of a better term, this has, for decades, been called a “pro-set” offense. It makes sense, when you think about it.
