I'm looking at everyone.

I get Ronnie is probably rolling in the EBT dough right now with his blossoming movie career and that bitch Tabitha’s probably up to her fake tits in alimony payments nowadays but in the name of Cal Ripken Jr Junior, not having this man’s manic post-win toasts or his suicidal post-loss pining has this season thus far so intolerably ambivalent. Ronnie’s the gauge, yo.

The blown-lead graphic is floating around with the total now at 22 games; my main premise is that this is largely overstated and a mix of three different things. I went through every game on the graphic and linked the box score below with my thoughts.

What it gets right: about a fifth of these are genuine collapses, with some bad losses sprinkled in.

• Miami 2022: up 35-14 in the fourth, lost 42-38.
• Buffalo 2025: up 40-25 midway through the fourth, lost 41-40.
• Cleveland 2023: up 31-17 with 11 minutes left, at a 98% win probability.
• Cincinnati 2026: up 13-0 at halftime, lost 35-13 (Huntley Game, still historic L)
• The 2011 Steelers, 2018 Saints, 2020 Titans, and 2026 Saints games were bad losses but not notable leads imo.

What it gets wrong:

1. About 12 of the 22 are screenshots taken seconds before the opponent scored, and 5 more are scores from right before halftime. Using a fixed checkpoint (up 15+ at the half or 10+ entering the fourth, equal possessions, etc.), only 3 of the 22 qualify. Many of the rest were back-and-forth games with multiple lead changes, where the "lead" was 10 points for a single possession.
2. It spans 18 years and multiple eras. Flacco, Lamar, three different Huntley starts, and a new head coach are all treated as one identity. Only 2 of the 22 come from Lamar's 2018–21 seasons, when the Ravens were an elite 31-2 when up 10+ in the second half.
3. Raw counts reward good teams. The Ravens are one of the NFL’s best fast starters; in 2023, they led at halftime in 11 of their first 12 games and outscored opponents by a league-best 116 first-half points, and no defense played more snaps with a double-digit lead in 2022–23. You can’t blow a lead you never had. So far, the Ravens led at half 6 out of their 7 games this year.

What the data actually suggests:

• 2018–21: the Ravens won about 94% of games when up 10+ in the second half, the same rate as Mahomes' Chiefs.
• 2022–23: that dropped to roughly 73–80%, which is a real problem.
• 2026: three blown double-digit leads already, and they’re just 3-3 when leading at halftime (league norm about 90% when lead is 10+). That’s concerning, but with two of those losses under a backup QB and no lead larger than 13, it’s too early to call it a trend.

Bottom line: the Ravens had a real lead-protection problem in 2022–23 (ironically while Macdonald was here; see side tangent below), and 2026 is trending the wrong way. The now infamous meme is a 20-year collage of mostly 10-point snapshots that doesn't prove the "chronic chokers" label rather inflates a two-season problem into a franchise identity.

Side Tangent: The 2022–23 dip, funny enough, lines up exactly with Mike Macdonald’s tenure as defensive coordinator. In 2023, his defense won the triple crown, leading the NFL in sacks (60), takeaways (31) and points allowed (16.5 per game), yet it still gave up a 31-17 fourth-quarter lead to Cleveland.

The pattern also followed him to Seattle. His 2025 Seahawks defense was elite by most measures, but it had a negative point differential in the fourth quarter while dominating the first three, and it twice failed to close out games early in the season.

Macdonald is an excellent defensive mind. Still, the evidence points to a possible pattern in this scheme family: dominant early, more vulnerable late. That could be from opponents adjusting to the disguise-heavy looks, or from a structure that gives up efficient drives when protecting a lead. We may be seeing a similar pattern early with Minter, but there are far more variables at play; an interesting thought regardless.

Here is each game summarized below for your own review:

#RavensFlock

I’ve been a Ravens fan since 2000. They were the first football team I ever watched play on TV, and I’ve been riding with them ever since. Back in the day, no matter how bad things looked, I always believed we had a chance. Even when we were an average or bad team, we fought until the very end. We always found a way to hang around and make it a game. We could be down 40 points, and I’d still believe we could come back.

But these past few years have been different. It’s sad because now, even when we’re winning, I find myself expecting us to somehow lose the game. I never thought I’d reach a point where seeing my team leading at halftime or in the fourth quarter would make me nervous instead of excited.

I miss that feeling of knowing we were going to fight until the final whistle. I still love our team, and that’s never going to change. I just hope this game was the wake up call we needed. I want that Ravens mentality back. 🫡💪🏿

Link to presser with timestamp

Sorry for the jacked title but hard to distill the exact exchange succinctly.

That is a crazy answer for a coach that has been so measured in his responses thus far. I'm not blaming Lamar, nor looking to start drama, but that indicates to me that they're not always on the same page. Going to continue to be an issue as we try to work out an extension next off-season.

Huntley is sitting at 1-2, which is about what you would expect. These past three weeks aren't necessarily indicative of what we'll look like down the stretch. This is just what a team operating with a backup QB looks like

The season isn't over, the whole team doesn't need to be blown up and rebuilt

Stop being doomers, things will improve once Lamar is healthy and returns

I heard the R-A-V-E-N-S chant yesterday as I was walking in, this was well before kick-off. Once the game started I didn't see Dan or hear the chant once. Was he not at the game yesterday?

This is a failure in all 3 phases of the football. Unacceptable.

Jak has run 68 routes this season and has been targeted 13 times (19.1%)

Bateman has run 176 routes this season and has been target 26 times (14.7%)

We knew Jak was gonna surpass him eventually but it’s crazy it might have already happened 3 games into his career

He was solid last year but now I hardly hear anything about him.

We've lost two division games early, so naturally it's time to making sweeping generalizations about the future of the season (and the franchise as a whole). Which of these two extremes is correct?

The Case For Being Fine

• Lamar is the most important player in the league, and when he returns, we're a completely different football team. The numbers don't lie on this one. The delta from Lamar to Huntley is cavernous, and every important offensive statistic in football goes from subpar to elite with Jackson under center.
• We already have 4 wins; we likely "only" need to go 6-3 the rest of the way to get a playoff spot. While the joke part of our schedule is done, we still have Carolina, Tampa Bay, LA Chargers, and the Browns left. We'll be big favorites in all those games with Lamar. So we need to get two from Pittsburgh, at Pittsburgh, at Houston, at Buffalo, Jacksonville, at Cincy. Not impossible by any means.
• We still have four division games remaining. The Bengals aren't anything special, the Steelers are a typical rolling ball of luck against bad teams, and the Browns are straight up terrible. 4-2 the rest of the way against the North is very possible with Lamar.
• The division isn't nearly as good as its record. The first-place Browns have a negative point differential and win coin-flip games against terrible teams; neither is sustainable. The Steelers have an abominable offense and were annihilated by the only decent team they played. The Bengals beat the Bucs (2-5), Dolphins (1-5), Texans (2-5), and us with Huntley. All of these teams are less talented than us and will lose games when they play better teams.
• The defense is too talented to be this awful all season. There are simply too many good players on the starting 11 to be giving up 30 points per game, even against good offenses. Minter did far more with far less in LA; he should be able to fix this.

The Case For The Season Being Over Already

• Lamar is hurt and won't be 100 percent for months. High ankle sprains are tricky injuries that linger. 70-80 percent Lamar is not enough for a team built around an elite QB. We'd be underdogs next week even with a fully healthy Lamar and have a tough time winning on a short week against Jacksonville.
• We're already 0-2 in the division with two terrible losses to crappy teams; we have no shot at the North. We've lost to the Browns and Saints, two bottom 8 teams in the league, and were annihilated by an average Bengals team. Yes, we have winnable games left, but we've already dropped a pair of games to the trash of the league; why on earth would we think things will suddenly change.
• The injuries have become too much to overcome (again). We've already lost Lamar for three games. We're on our fourth center. Our soon-to-be elite rookie guard might be out for a while. Our best LB is out for the season. Our best blocking TE is out for the season. And we still have 9 games left for other people to get hurt. Next man up is just a saying; talent is all that matters, and our talent isn't available.
• The defense is fatally flawed and cannot be trusted. They gave up 35 points in a half yesterday. They've allowed terrible QBs to have season-best performances against us. They don't produce turnovers, can't rush the passer, can't get off the field on third down, and can't stop huge completions downfield. Even 100 percent Lamar can't score the 35 a game required to make a lead safe.

FWIW, I fall somewhere between these two poles: I think the division is lost and we're gonna have to sweat out a playoff spot all season, but we won't be truly out of it unless Lamar gets re-injured.

I have a theory and people probably aren't going to like it. But I must speak my truth in a standalone thread so here we go.

The Ravens would be a lot more enjoyable if they were 7-0, 6-1, or even 5-2 instead of 4-3. I'm pretty sure everyone from ownership to fans actually knows this. So why can't they win more? Are they stupid or something? Answering that is above my pay grade. However, I really think we'd all be better off if they'd won more games up until this point than they have.

It’s not even November and the Ravens are 4-3, yet it already feels like this season hinges on Jackson returning to save a team with a wildly inconsistent offense, a defense that folds in second halves and a special teams unit unable to create big plays.

You can probably add mental toughness and resilience to the list of Ravens’ concerns, and you likely wouldn’t get much of an argument from first-year coach Jesse Minter or many of the players, given their comments following Sunday’s mess.

They all but admitted the team’s propensity to melt down has gotten in their heads as they struggle to fight through adversity.

“In every game we’ve proven that we’re good enough to be the type of team that we want to be, and we’ve proven that we’re bad enough to be a not very good team as well,” Minter said. “There’s a consistency level that we need to find where it’s less riding the wave of momentum and more about staying even-keeled and finding a way to have each other’s back and finding a way to pick each other up. You can look at really all three phases in the second half of completely momentum-losing type of plays. That is what it is.”

And that’s what it’s been.

“I think we’re just too much [in our] heads [during] the game,” left tackle Ronnie Stanley said. “We have one bad drive and they have one good drive, we start to feel something happening in the game. For us, it’s just a refocus and just focus on our identity and what we need to do, and really just not look at the scoreboard. That’s something that we talk about a lot, but I don’t think that we’ve really put that into action.”

I’ve sat in the same seats for my entire life (since 1996). Not the first one to admit that it’s changed a lot throughout the years. Never in my worst nightmare would I imagine being told to quiet down by a stadium employee. The issue? Being loud on defense during 1st and 2nd down. No profanity, no disrespectfulness, and no anything. Simply yelling and smacking our chairs in an attempt to disrupt the opposing offense. Word for word what the M&T Bank employee said, “Y’all can be loud on third down, but please keep calm and a little more quiet otherwise.” Allegedly some Bengals fans complained a few rows back. I’m about ready to sell my PSL’s.

I found the play Vega got hurt. He went to help block for Hill down the field on the dump off on 2nd and 21 and caught a helmet to the Right knee.

He grabbed it as he went down, got back up and played another snap and did decently well and then walked to sideline.

Hopeful it's not serious and this does indeed give me hope.

I couldn’t watch the entire game on Sunday, but I did catch most of the first half. I remember this drive when we were up 10-0 believe at the time or maybe it was 7-0 we were in the red zone had a false start and a pre-snap illegal formation penalty. Seems like we’ve been having a lot of offensive pre-snap penalties that set us back behind the sticks, which sometimes isn’t as big of a deal with Lamar, but without him it’s more difficult to overcome 1 &15 or 2 and 20.