Ravens Win Yet Another All-Time Duel Between Lamar Jackson And Joe Burrow
Holy fuck. What a game. Just like the game last month, this game had it all. Magnificent QB play, quick answers on long touchdowns, absurdly freaky Lamar shit, missed kicks, and a little bit of awful officiating.
Maybe I should start there and get it out of the way. I won't apologize for what wasn't called on the 2 point conversion because there were half a dozen calls that went the other way early in the game that helped put the Bengals in control of things. Plus I'm not convinced (based on a handful of replays on the video board at the stadium) that the game shouldn't have been over on 4th and 10 earlier on the drive anyway.
On to everything else. With respect to Jamarr Chase and the game he had (which is par for the course against the Ravens, he's our daddy)... this game came down to Lamar Jackson just continuing to play insane football and balling out the entire 2nd half. He can get a bucket whenever he wants right now. Casual 4 TD game in primetime. He's up to 24 TD's and 2 INT's on the year, and 14 TD's and no INT's in just the last 4 weeks. The clip he's playing at is outright insane. He's currently at the highest single season QB rating OF ALL TIME.
Not to mention that whole thing where he can rip off a play like this that doesn't even factor into the passer rating calculus
It's old hat at this point, but week in and week out the guy amazes me and he's playing better than ever.
Best of all is that he's playing with tremendous poise. That whole "Lamar can't win from behind" narrative. Debunked. It's totally bunk. There's no panic in his game at all. He's playing extremely clean football and has this offense humming like never before.
With that said, it was a little bit of a slog to start the game... but it felt worse at halftime than it really was only because the Ravens only had the opportunity to run 22 offensive plays. At one point in the first half I looked up at the stat board and Burrow had 17 pass attempts and Lamar had 1. That's always going to be the formula for beating this team... simply keep Lamar off the field and you'll have your best shot at beating him.
The problem is that this offense is too inevitable. As god awful as the Ravens defense can be at times (ok, maybe most the time)... the Ravens are never out of it because Lamar can move the ball so damn quickly down the field.
Whether that's sustainable across 4 games in January/February where the defense and occasional onslaught of offensive line penalties doesn't come back to bite them... yet to be seen. But for now, this is just so damn fun.
HUGE one in Pittsburgh next week. Lamar has played surprisingly little against them in his career, and when he has it hasn't gone all that well. That's the next frontier for him... Keep it rolling against a great defense and take back control of the AFC North.
