Ravens Lamar Jackson says Patrick Mahomes and Chiefs are ‘Our Kryptonite’
The Baltimore Ravens were handed their first loss of the 2020 season embarrassingly in a 34-20 drubbing by the defending Superbowl champion Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football. They had their league-high 14-game winning streak in the regular season snapped, fell out of the ranks of the unbeaten, and now sit at 2-1.
In the most highly anticipated game of the 2020 season that some were prematurely dubbing the ‘Game of the Year’, the Chiefs looked and played like champions whereas the Ravens and reigning league MVP Lamar Jackson looked out of sync and out of sorts all night.
While the Jackson led Ravens are 21-1 in the regular season against every other opponent, their Week Three result marks their third straight loss to the Mahomes led Chiefs. The two former MVPs are constantly compared to one another and Mahomes has outplayed Jackson in all three head to head matchups and owns a perfect 3-0 record against the Ravens in his career.
Baltimore has not been shy about letting their Superbowl aspirations known they’re likely going to have to do go through Kansas City to do it and they haven’t shown the ability to do thus far in three tries.
This most recent loss was more lopsided than the previous two and the Ravens have, on paper, a better team than they had is the previous two losses. Jackson was asked about losing to the Chiefs for the third time in the first question of his postgame presser and gave an answer before the question was finished being asked.
“Our kryptonite,” Jackson said of the Chiefs.
Jackson wasn’t even bothered the most that he was outplayed by Mahomes who did everything that he couldn’t in that game from a quarterback performance standpoint that included throwing under pressure, connecting on deep passes, and coming away with touchdowns in the red zone.
He was more upset that the Chiefs’ defense was able to dominate the Ravens offense for most of the night and keep them out of the endzone until late in the third quarter. Jackson was limited to a career’ worst passing performance of 97 yards passing (career-low), barely completed over 50 percent of his passes. He went as far as to compare Monday night’s loss to Baltimore’s stunning upset blowout loss to the Tennessee Titans in the divisional round of the 2019 playoffs.
“We just weren’t on point tonight,” Jackson said. “Low safeties. It looked like the same thing Tennessee did to me, to be honest.”
Including the playoffs, the Ravens are 21-6 with Jackson under center and in all six of those losses, they were down at halftime and weren’t able to complete a comeback.
However, while Jackson called the Chiefs his and the Ravens’ Kryptonite, they were the authors of their own demise in all three of their losses to Mahomes. Against elite teams with “extremely elite” quarterbacks as veteran defensive back called the reigning Superbowl MVP, you have to play a near-perfect game and not shoot yourself in the foot yet that is exactly what the Ravens as a team, not just Jackson, have done in their last three meetings in each of the last three seasons.
The Ravens have been their own Kryptonite against Kansas City in each of those three losses when facing Mahomes and that was especially the case on Monday night.
On offense, they got away from what they do best, which is running the ball, didn’t capitalize off of momentum-swinging plays, didn’t finish with touchdowns in the red zone, and couldn’t protect Jackson consistently when he dropped back to pass.
On defense, they played right into the hands of the Chiefs offense and to the strengths of Mahomes. They were overly aggressive, and Andy Reid dialed up perfectly times screens, passes, and even a lineman uncovering in the endzone for a receiving touchdown. They couldn’t generate consistent pressure on Mahomes and when they sent more defenders on blitzes, they got picked apart. There were also several blown assignments and miscommunication in the secondary that led key conversion and another long dagger of a touchdown to Mecole Hardman for the second straight year in a row.
“What they did was really good,” Ravens Head Coach John Harbaugh said. “A lot of misdirection, jet screens, ghost motions, screens, double screens, passing routes, draws off of that. A lot of stuff they do causes a lot of problems.”
The Chiefs may look invincible and after that performance in primetime with the whole world watching over a Ravens team that was slightly favored heading into the game, however, they are not because nobody is. Every team can be had just like every team can have a bad day at the office like Baltimore did last night and just so happened to be against a team theta they have struggled with in recent history.
The Ravens loss to the Chiefs, like it was in the Titans in the playoffs, was a total team collapse and shouldn’t be blamed on one player, one coach, or one side of the ball exclusively or more than the other. Offensive linemen missed blocks, defenders missed tackles and covered poorly, Jackson was off target, pass-catchers dropped passes and coaches failed to make the right adjustments.
Baltimore is capable of beating Kansas City, making and winning the Superbowl, and completing comebacks. They just have to not get in their own way, not panic when things don’t according to plan on offense, and not keep doing the same thing that isn’t working but expecting different results on defense.
