KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Every once in a while, a game comes along and demonstrates, in brutal and exacting terms, a team’s precise margin for error. The Ravens played such a game Thursday night, and they were left not with a margin that can be best described with figurative language or literal descriptions but one that could be measured with an actual ruler.
Kansas City Chiefs 27, Ravens 20, by thismuch.
It’s always something for the Ravens in this one-sided AFC rivalry, but this something has never been this small, almost microscopic. Tight end Isaiah Likely had come down with a game-tying 10-yard touchdown catch in the back of the end zone as time expired. Then he hadn’t; a toe had landed out of bounds. The difference between losing and maybe winning the NFL’s season opener — coach John Harbaugh was signaling for a 2-point conversion after officials initially ruled it a touchdown — was no bigger than a Tic Tac.
“I thought he was in,” wide receiver Rashod Bateman said. “I mean, I was in his face celebrating, so I thought he was in. But, in the end, it got overturned. So Chiefs Kingdom, man.”
When the Ravens finally caught their breath, a sigh would have sufficed. The defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs have ruled the conference for so long that the Ravens enter every showdown fighting off not just one of the NFL’s best teams but also an air of resignation to the whole proceedings.
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Even their stirring comeback Thursday night seemed doomed in retrospect. Quarterback Lamar Jackson, who took over the game’s final drive with 110 seconds remaining and no timeouts available, had three shots at the end zone after leading the Ravens on a 77-yard drive. But he overshot Likely in the far left corner, missed wide open wide receiver Zay Flowers over the middle on a pass intended for Bateman, and aimed just high enough on Likely’s would-be catch for linebacker Nick Bolton to push him (barely) out of bounds.
Jackson’s 395 yards of total offense were not enough to keep him from falling to 1-5 against Kansas City and quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The NFL’s reigning Most Valuable Player needed 405. When a reporter started a question at Jackson’s postgame news conference by mentioning that he had called the Chiefs his “kryptonite,” as he did in 2020, Jackson shook his head and interjected. “It ain’t my kryptonite. It’s not my kryptonite.”
It’s always something for the Ravens, though. Or, rather, a couple of barely believable things.
In 2018, it was Mahomes hitting wide receiver Tyreek Hill on a miraculous fourth-and-9, across-his-body bomb to help force overtime in an eventual Chiefs win.
In 2019, it was a leaky first-half defense and a questionable 2-point-conversion strategy that doomed the Ravens again in Kansas City.
In 2020, it was a 97-yard passing performance from Jackson, and a pass defense that allowed four passing touchdowns in a prime-time blowout.
In last season’s AFC championship game, it was an abandoned running game, an ill-timed goal-line fumble, a bad fourth-quarter interception and more Mahomes magic that ended the Ravens’ Super Bowl dreams in Baltimore.
Only a 2021 upset at M&T Bank Stadium has denied the Chiefs’ claim to total mastery, and the Ravens had no margin for error in that one, either. They needed two fourth-quarter touchdowns, a Chiefs fumble in a late-game kill-the-clock drive and a bold fourth-and-1 conversion from Jackson to eke out a win.
The Chiefs, blessed with a Hall of Fame-bound coach in Andy Reid and transcendent talents up and down their roster, have a way of making things hard on the Ravens. But the Ravens also have a way of making things hard on themselves.
“I believe our offense has a lot of new additions, and we’re just getting adjusted,” Jackson said when asked how the team measured up against Kansas City, the preseason favorite to three-peat. “I don’t want to say preseason was the reason, because it wasn’t; we battled. You can see it; we put points on the board. We just have to do what we have to do to win those games.”
“The adversity throughout the course of the game is a challenge,” Harbaugh said. “I thought our guys met all those things — all those setbacks at times — and fought like crazy to overcome it.”
Inside linebacker Roquan Smith said the Ravens would “definitely see” the Chiefs again, and it’s not hard to come up with a checklist of things that probably wouldn’t go in Kansas City’s favor again in a postseason rematch. Like, say, the illegal-formation penalties that tormented left tackle Ronnie Stanley. Or the coverage bust from a normally buttoned-up Ravens secondary that let rookie wide receiver Xavier Worthy walk into the end zone for a third-quarter receiving touchdown. Or the time management issues that hurt the Ravens at the end of the first half. Or the timeout-requiring problems that ultimately hurt the Ravens at the end of the second.
With a rebuilt offensive line and a first-time defensive coordinator in Zach Orr, the Ravens may well be leaps-and-bounds better in Week 18 than they were in Week 1. The problem is that the Chiefs always seem to find their level, then surpass it. The heights they can hit in January may well be miles higher than those they glimpsed Thursday, too. Kansas City dropped passes, couldn’t establish a running game and didn’t have former Ravens wide receiver Marquise “Hollywood” Brown available because of a shoulder injury.
It’s always something for the Ravens. On Thursday, it was something small, something very small indeed. But it signaled something bigger.
