NFLNFLThe divisional round game between the Bills and Ravens and their MVP-candidate QBs lived up to the hype. Only Jackson wasn’t able to rewrite his postseason story.
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By Nora PrinciottiJan. 20, 7:22 am UTC • 6 min
With a mere 93 seconds left, Sunday night’s AFC divisional round game between the Bills and Ravens was up for grabs. Baltimore was lining up for a game-tying two-point conversion after slicing through the Buffalo defense on an eight-play, 88-yard touchdown drive. The game of the year had already lived up to the hype. Even on a sloppy, snow-soaked field, these looked like the two best teams in the AFC, if not the entire NFL, each led by an MVP-candidate quarterback. Anyone’s game. The Ravens picked the right play in that moment—a Jackson sprint out to the right looking for tight end Mark Andrews, who ran to the right pylon uncovered. Jackson’s pass was on target. And then Andrews, who may have slipped, dropped the ball.
Bills win. Ravens lose. Winning makes you zen, and Josh Allen after the game was grateful for the randomness of the universe. “I had a conversation with [linebacker] Von Miller in the offseason and we just kind of talked about, sometimes the ball will roll your way, or it won’t,” Allen said. “That one rolled our way.”
In the other locker room, Lamar Jackson was thinking about human error, not higher powers. “As you can see, we’re moving the ball wonderfully,” he said. “Hold on to the fucking ball. I’m sorry for my language, but this shit is annoying. I’m tired of this shit.”
Bills-Ravens was not a game that one team deserved to win and another deserved to lose. In many ways, the game here at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, where it seemed like Bills fans were on the verge of combustion as the stadium PA blared “Mr. Brightside” and “Wonderwall” in the fourth quarter, felt like the true AFC title game. These were the top two teams in the conference by DVOA this season, and this matchup was a heavyweight fight between two squads entirely capable of winning the Super Bowl that went down to the wire.
But that’s how quickly a season, and a story, changes. There’s only one winner, and in that split-second that the football hit the snowy turf on that conversion attempt, the Bills and Allen became the ones moving on to Kansas City, and the Ravens and Jackson became the ones who, once again, can’t get it done or get out of their own way.
Allen and Jackson have had their seasons held up against each other because they’ve both been really, really good. It’s almost certain that one of them will win MVP, and it could go either way. Voting for the award closed nearly two weeks ago, so this game won’t have any bearing on the winner, though it will, of course, color the conversation around the award because that’s the way it goes with quarterbacks. Though ironically, for all the ways this game could have played out, this one was relatively not QB-centric.
Despite the famous names under center, both teams seemed primarily interested in running into each other really hard. Somewhat shockingly, this strategy favored Buffalo. The Bills racked up 147 rushing yards and three touchdowns on 36 carries, while Allen threw the ball only 22 times for 127 yards on 16 completions. Buffalo’s ability to attack the Ravens run defense was a major change from the regular-season matchup between these teams in late September, when Baltimore won 35-10 and the Bills managed only 81 yards on the ground.
The Ravens spent much of the first half running with futility into the Bills defensive line, but eventually they started finding cutback lanes and getting Derrick Henry going as the game went on. Baltimore was by far the more successful offense overall, with 416 total yards and 7.3 yards per play to Buffalo’s 273 and 4.6, respectively. The difference was Baltimore’s three turnovers, plus Andrews’s costly drop, that essentially cost them the game.
In the first quarter, Jackson threw his worst pass of the game, a bad overthrow that was picked off by Bills safety Taylor Rapp. On Baltimore’s next possession, Jackson lost the football while being sacked by safety Damar Hamlin. The ball was recovered by Miller, setting up a touchdown drive for the Bills.
The Ravens’ third turnover came in the fourth quarter when Andrews fumbled as he tried to get away from Bills linebacker Terrel Bernard after a 16-yard catch. It was the beginning of a nightmare quarter for Andrews, who was in the midst of one of the best—and most reliable—seasons of his seven-year career.
Jackson wasn’t targeting Andrews with his postgame frustrations. “He’s been busting his behind. He’s been making plays out there for us,” the quarterback said.
Jackson was far more critical of himself for misplaying the coverage on his interception, targeting Rashod Bateman who was facing man coverage, but not holding off the safety, Rapp, from coming over the top. Jackson said the ball simply slipped out of his hands on the fumble.
The loss, and the fact that his turnovers played a part in it, is especially vexing for Jackson given his postseason history. This was the fourth time in eight playoff starts that Jackson has turned the ball over at least two times, all losses. Especially on the heels of a regular season in which Jackson had nine turnovers total, it’s hard not to see that shift feeding a pattern of playoff underperformance. Jackson is the only two-time MVP winner without a Super Bowl ring.
Football discourse is brilliantly maddening because it’s a sport of small sample sizes. Jackson has now lost five playoff games. But in those games, he has had what feels like more than his fair share of bad playoff bounces—last year, it was Zay Flowers who fumbled late, and at the goal line, against the Chiefs in the AFC championship game. Those bad moments pale in comparison to the totality of great football Jackson has played. But in football, they’re more than enough to establish a reputation for losing the big ones.
The discourse around both quarterbacks in this game (though especially when it comes to Jackson) has grown tiresome enough that there’s now a separate discourse about how tiresome it is, which of course has gone on long enough that now that discourse is getting old. Who is to blame for this? Bad posters and pundits, sure, but also the Kansas City Chiefs, since all of this would go away if any of these other AFC teams could get a real taste of postseason glory—but Patrick Mahomes and his teammates are the ones always in the way.
The Bills got the bounces Sunday. And now, for the fourth time in five seasons, they’ll face Kansas City in the playoffs. By most metrics, the Chiefs have been a worse team this season than the Bills and the Ravens, but getting the bounces and doing all the little things that just add up to winning is what they do. Andy Reid and Mahomes’s team is a hurdle that Allen and the Bills have yet to clear in January, and the relatively muted celebration of most players postgame Sunday suggested they knew how easily it could prove premature.
On the other side of that hurdle is what Buffalo got a tiny taste of against the Ravens—the ability to be at peace with the breaks you get, the randomness in any game, and to be excused from all the narratives grounded in those choice moments about who can get it done. Or, of course, they could just be going home again.
Nora Princiotti covers the NFL, culture, and pop music, sometimes all at once. She hosts the podcast ‘Every Single Album,’ appears on ‘The Ringer NFL Show,’ and is The Ringer’s resident Taylor Swift scholar.
