With the Baltimore Ravens’ 44-10 drubbing at the hands of the Houston Texans in Week 5, this edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s Birds set a new milestone. After losing 37-20 to the Kansas City Chiefs the week before, they became the first Ravens team to lose consecutive games by 17+ points (or 3+ scores) since 2015. A full decade.
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Now, the Ravens have about as many injuries to as many impact players as you can imagine. You can start and end the list with QB Lamar Jackson, who’s currently sidelined with a hamstring injury, and it would still be devastating. But the list goes on, especially on the defensive side.
And yet, the Ravens have experienced injuries before, surely within the last 10 years, and they have not been beaten so soundly in back-to-back weeks in all that time. Injuries aside, are there larger questions to be asked and bigger decisions to be made by the Baltimore brass?
Could the message of Super Bowl winner John Harbaugh … the second-longest tenured coach in the league with one team (18 years, second to Mike Tomlin at 19) … be falling on deaf ears?
Former six-time Pro Bowl RB LeSean McCoy, for one, believes we need to start being more harsh when evaluating established and proven head coaches.
“With 44-10, you gotta try to lose that bad. Where the fight at? You’re the type of coach that’s well-respected in this league … you can’t go out like this… We gotta start re-evaluating these coaches the same way we do with these players. When a player can’t get it done, you know what they do? They trade him or get rid of him!” McCoy said on Speakeasy.
Coaches—and referees, if we’re on the topic—should be evaluated and fined and punished the same way as players.
But when you win a Super Bowl for a franchise, you can expect a certain amount of respect. Harbaugh was booed off the field last weekend, and the video is hard to watch even for a fan of a division-rival. It would be hard to imagine something like this happening to a Chuck Noll or a Tom Landry or a Don Shula, even though they all overstayed their welcomes as well.
While the booing is in poor taste, it does seem like the 63-year-old head coach no longer has the belief or trust of his locker room. Even his veterans have been reluctant to praise anything about his approach this season. And as Emmanuel Acho says, if they’re not listening to him, he doesn’t really need to be there.
“So if the players aren’t changing their behavior, and the players are a reflection of the coach, then the coaching has to be bad. It’s not to say that Harbaugh’s bad, but it’s to say that his message is falling on deaf ears. The players are no longer listening to what Harbaugh’s saying … so if you’re not listening to what Harbaugh’s saying, then he might as well not be saying it … then he might as well not be there.”
At this point, it seems like a question of allowing a revered and legendary coach for the Baltimore Ravens franchise to go out in a respectable way. Let him go out on his sword. He’s put in nearly two decades with this city and this team. He deserves some grace in a rocky final season.
And let’s not forget, if Lamar Jackson was not hurt, despite all the other issues, we likely would not be having this conversation. There is some level of unluckiness mixed in here for Harbaugh, and that should be recognized. T
his may be his last year, but as long as Jackson is out, it wasn’t going to be a year where the Ravens accomplished much anyways. So no need to disrespect a franchise legend on his way out the door here.
