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The Ravens never came to fight in a 44-10 loss to the Houston Texans that raised grave questions about their ability to save their season. Here are five things we learned from Sunday’s game.
It’s time to wonder if there’s any road back
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
Dante Alighieri did not know the despair of an NFL fan base confronted with its team’s utter inability to compete. The Italian poet was born seven centuries too soon. But the words he inscribed at the gate to his “Inferno” capture the spirit at M&T Bank Stadium on Sunday as demoralized fans watched the Ravens capitulate meekly in a game they badly needed to win.
It’s difficult to remember the last time the Ravens looked this overmatched. Perhaps the day after Christmas 2021, when they started Josh Johnson at quarterback and Joe Burrow’s Bengals hung 41 points on their beleaguered pass defense?
That was also the last Ravens team not to make the playoffs, a possibility that looms larger every week for this injury-shredded, misfiring, increasingly lifeless 2025 edition.
Only 16 teams have made the playoffs after starting 1-4. Only three since the NFL-AFL merger — the 2018 Colts, the 2015 Chiefs and the 1970 Bengals — have made it after starting 1-5.
In other words, when you dig this deep a hole, there’s almost no margin for error over the remainder of the season.
And what have the Ravens shown to suggest a turnaround is in the offing? They went from battered by the Lions to outmaneuvered by the Chiefs to overwhelmed by the Texans, who also, by the way, came in 1-3.
“Just a complete disappointment,” coach John Harbaugh said of an all-facets meltdown he did not see coming based on his team’s week of practice.
Any rational person understood the Ravens faced a thorny test, with franchise quarterback Lamar Jackson and a half dozen other Pro Bowl talents sidelined by injury. But they’ve faced difficulty before and fought back urgently.
This felt far bleaker as players and coaches found themselves repeatedly bereft of counterpunches. The home fans, who first booed and then vacated the premises, sensed how quickly their team accepted defeat.
Harbaugh and the team’s leaders said it wasn’t a failure of effort. But is this group still wholly invested in a potential turnaround? “We better be,” center Tyler Linderbaum said. “We better be.”
“We gotta get our shit together, just to be brutally honest,” outside linebacker Kyle Van Noy said. “Coaches can give us the plays, but we’ve got to execute.”
Everyone seemed to agree they came nowhere close to meeting that standard and injuries — which, as Van Noy noted, didn’t stop the 49ers from upsetting the Rams on Thursday — were an insufficient explanation.
The Ravens’ task will get no easier next weekend, with many stars hurting and the cranky, rested Rams coming to town devoid of merciful intent. Another loss would put them in that aforementioned 1-5 hole and decrease their playoff chances to almost nil.
But that’s math. The crisis the Ravens see when they stare in the mirror is more elemental.
“We’re going to have to find ourselves,” Harbaugh said.
They’re running out of time.
Without the right parts, talk of repairing the Ravens’ defense is pointless
The Ravens played without Pro Bowl safety Kyle Hamilton, Pro Bowl linebacker Roquan Smith, Pro Bowl defensive tackle Nnamdi Madubuike, Pro Bowl cornerback Marlon Humphrey and starting cornerback Chidobe Awuzie. If we had made a list of the team’s most important defenders going into the season, that would basically have been it.
The defense that took the field in their place had little chance to succeed, even against a Houston offense that started the season as disjointedly as any in the sport.
Five weeks ago, Keyon Martin and Reuben Lowery III were delightful underdogs fighting their way onto one of the most loaded rosters in the NFL. Sunday, they were underqualified rookies asked to hold a fort that was supposed to be defended by Hamilton and Humphrey.
It didn’t go well.
We can talk all we want about coordinator Zach Orr and his staff fixing (or not fixing) what ailed this defense. But how well can you repair a car that’s missing its transmission, two tires and rear brakes?
That’s not an excuse or an attempt to pretend the defense performed well in Week 1, when its stars were on the field. It’s an acknowledgment that on-the-fly repairs, which we saw last season when the Ravens played superb defense over the season’s final six weeks, will be almost impossible with the roster in this state.
Orr has tried to put an optimistic face on this mess. “Just the way we roll here is, the expectation is, whoever goes out there on Sunday with that black helmet and that purple jersey on, the expectation is to go out there, go be great and to go play dominant,” he said last week. “So it’s not tough at all. I’m confident in the group that we have, whoever goes out there on Sunday, because you are here for a reason.”
We wouldn’t expect any other message from a man who defied the odds to start in the NFL, then bounced back from the devastation of a career-ending injury to become his former team’s coordinator at age 31.
But talent trumps belief again and again in this most bottom-line of worlds, and the Ravens did not have enough of it against an opponent that had averaged just 16 points and 5.1 yards per play through four weeks.
Houston quarterback C.J. Stroud toyed with the Ravens’ second- and third-stringers, leading eight straight scoring drives to start the game.
We know the story by now. They can’t pressure consistently, can’t close off running lanes, can’t turn the tide with fumbles or interceptions. There’s not a single thing about them that would scare a competent NFL offense.
Will Orr be the first to pay for this all-points failure? Harbaugh famously fired offensive coordinator Cam Cameron when the 2012 season appeared to be slipping away. He brought back Dean Pees to give Orr a backup set of eyes last year. He could attempt to shock his defense into rhythm with a staff shake-up, possibly during the team’s bye week, which falls after next Sunday’s game against the Rams.
“I do not think that’s the answer,” Harbaugh said Sunday. For teams this disappointing, however, all votes of confidence are temporary.
The voices shouting for change at the top will only grow louder
Over 18 years as Ravens head coach, Harbaugh has confronted blown leads, horrid clusters of ill health, mini locker-room mutinies and playoff failures. Never has he truly lost his grip on a season. It’s one of his defining traits.
Think back to 2022, when the Ravens, without Jackson, played their hearts out in a one-score playoff loss to the Bengals. Or the year before, when, also without their franchise quarterback, they lost a pair of late-season games to the playoff-bound Packers and Rams by a combined two points.
Those were disappointing seasons, but never did anyone feel the Ravens gave up.
There will be critics who point to this listless defeat as evidence that Harbaugh can no longer stoke his team’s fire.
He did not pretend otherwise in his postgame comments, saying the dire scenario confronting his team “becomes a measuring stick for all of us.”
Given all the games he’s won and the benefit of the doubt he’s earned with owner Steve Bisciotti, Harbaugh will likely have the rest of this season to prove his naysayers wrong. If the Ravens put terrible injury luck behind them and mount a charge in November and December, he’ll be able to argue that, once again, he didn’t lose the team in the face of adversity.
That feels like a steep climb from what we witnessed against the Texans.
Several players were asked after the loss if Harbaugh’s message (and by extension that of his staff) is no longer getting through.
“I think their messaging is fine,” Van Noy said. “We’ve got to be the group to take that and do the simple things right.”
He and others acknowledged that the answers for why they haven’t are hard to come by.
The defense isn’t all that’s broken with a team no longer adept at power football
The recipe for an upset win seemed obvious. The Ravens needed to rediscover the brutal identity that made them the bane of so many teams, including the Texans, in the closing weeks of last season. They’d hand the ball to Derrick Henry, who had carried plenty of underwhelming Tennessee rosters to tough victories, and leave the fancy stuff for later weeks.
The problems with that blunt plan became apparent from the jump. For one, the Texans knew what was coming and keyed their defense to gang tackle the All-Pro running back. Even as the Ravens moved the ball well on their first drive, Henry carried just five times for 6 yards.
Then came the sinking realization that the Ravens’ offensive line simply isn’t very good at moving bodies off the line of scrimmage. The grades and statistics had told us so for weeks, but Houston’s front is vulnerable to a persistent ground attack, as the Ravens demonstrated by rumbling for 251 yards last Christmas Day. They had every incentive to seek a repeat this time and couldn’t come close to pulling it off.
Henry averaged 2.2 yards on 15 carries. Justice Hill and Keaton Mitchell, finally active after so much fan clamoring, were nonfactors.
No one performed adequately, not even Linderbaum, normally the standout run blocker in the group. Guards Daniel Faalele and Andrew Vorhees continually struggle with that half of their job. Right tackle Roger Rosengarten is better when he’s moving his feet to cut off an edge rusher than when he’s trying to demolish the man in front of him. Joseph Noteboom had played fairly well a week earlier but faltered in his second week standing in for left tackle Ronnie Stanley.
No matter how much they downplay the impact of Patrick Ricard’s absence, the Ravens miss his powerful lead blocks.
And of course we can’t ignore how much worse everyone looks when Jackson, always the greatest factor in the Ravens’ running success, isn’t around to draw defenders’ attention.
“It just wasn’t good enough, us as a whole,” Henry said. “It takes all of us, but I still believe we can get to where we need to be, as far as in the run game, to help this team, to be efficient and to make plays. Because we’ve done it before. We all saw it last year. It’s just not clicking right now. We just have to find ways to make it click, and when it goes, go, dominate the line of scrimmage, be explosive.”
Even when they were rolling up points over the first three weeks, they were doing so with quick, explosive drives, not by stringing together first downs.
The Ravens still want to think of themselves as the team that can batter an opponent into submission. It’s part of their essence. There’s just not a lot of evidence that the old hammer is part of their current arsenal.
Cooper Rush wasn’t that bad
Jackson’s absence dominated national discourse going into the game and will no doubt be the story of this week as the Ravens hope for his return. That’s the gravitational pull of a two-time Most Valuable Player at the most scrutinized position in American professional sports.
The hope was that his backup, Rush, would justify the Ravens’ offseason investment by providing a steady enough hand to keep them competitive.
They weren’t competitive, of course, and Rush’s three interceptions and 58.1 passer rating will make it look like he was a major reason. In reality, he played about as well as anyone could have expected, given the quality of Houston’s pass rush, the absence of a functional running game and the subpar play of his offensive line.
One interception bounced out of tight end Mark Andrews’ frantic hands. Another came on a deep ball that wide receiver Rashod Bateman struggled to track.
Rush brings none of Jackson’s dynamism as a runner or downfield thrower, but we knew that. He started the game well and made some decent throws when given the opportunity. He’s not going to pull the Ravens from their tailspin. He also wasn’t a leading reason they came up empty.
“Coop took command of the offense,” Linderbaum said. “I thought he did a great job today and, ultimately, we have to play better around him.”
