When the Ravens and Washington Commanders met last summer, they acted as if they didn’t much care for each other.

In a pair of joint training camp practices at the Ravens’ facility, fights broke out on the first day. Less than a week later, ahead of their preseason matchup at Landover’s FedEx Field, Commanders right guard Sam Cosmi called the Ravens’ 24-game winning streak in preseason “a stupid record” — then celebrated in the end zone after a touchdown with a Griddy. When kicker Joey Slye hit the game-winning kick in Washington’s streak-breaking win, he flashed an “L” with his fingers toward the Commanders’ bench as their sideline erupted.

“I don’t care about their team. I care about ours,” Ravens kicker Justin Tucker said after the loss. “I will leave it at that.”

One year later, the stakes of the teams’ first regular-season meeting since 2020 — a claim as the NFL’s best offense, a divisional lead, game-of-the-week hype — have trained a spotlight on whatever embers of the regional rivalry might still be burning.

They’re hard to find. Safety Kyle Hamilton said the Ravens’ AFC North schedule takes up most of their emotional energy. Tight end Mark Andrews, who was involved in one of the training camp dustups last summer, said their meetings last year are “not in my mind.” Quarterback Lamar Jackson wasn’t invested in any notion of a rivalry, either: “Just trying to come out with a ‘W,’” he said Wednesday.

It won’t be easy. The Commanders (4-1) have won four straight games and lead the NFL in scoring (31 points per game). Star rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels is the only player in league history besides Jackson to average 200-plus passing yards and 50-plus rushing yards per game over his (admittedly short) career.

The Ravens, meanwhile, are searching for defensive answers as they push for a fourth straight win. Here’s what to watch in the teams’ Week 6 matchup Sunday at M&T Bank Stadium.

1. Running back Derrick Henry’s best game as a Raven came against a run defense unaccustomed to playing with heavier formations. The Buffalo Bills preferred to line up in nickel (five defensive backs) and dime personnel (six DBs), and Henry steamrolled them in Week 4 for 199 rushing yards.

The Commanders could be in a similar predicament. Washington has played just three snaps in its base defense (four defensive backs) all season, according to TruMedia, usually matching heavier looks with lighter personnel groupings. The Commanders have survived against 12 personnel (one running back, two tight ends and two wide receivers), 21 personnel (two backs, one tight end and two wide receivers) and 22 personnel (two backs, two tight ends and one wide receiver), allowing just 4.2 yards per carry with five or more defensive backs on the field.

But the Ravens’ run game is a different beast. In those heavier formations, it has averaged 6.9 yards per carry against nickel and dime looks. Its 59% success rate (the percentage of plays with positive expected points added) is almost 20 points higher than the league average (41.7%). Washington’s defense, which has allowed the most explosive runs in the NFL overall (17 carries of 12-plus yards), looks especially vulnerable.

“It’s a new week, a new opportunity,” Henry, who rushed for 92 yards (6.1 per carry) Sunday and a touchdown against the Cincinnati Bengals, said Wednesday. “What happened last week really doesn’t matter; you’ve got to prove it again. I think momentum is a big part. When you’re in a rhythm and you’re executing plays very well, there’s a lot of stuff you can build stuff off.”

2. The Ravens have by far the NFL’s best offense, according to FTN’s efficiency metrics. That’s partly because they’ve had some of the league’s best situational execution.

The Ravens rank third in the NFL in third-down-conversion rate (50%) and fourth in third-and-long rate (34.6%), according to TruMedia. On fourth down, they’ve converted three of four opportunities, tied for the fourth-highest rate (75%). In the red zone, they’re tied for second in efficiency after scoring a touchdown on 15 of 20 trips (75%) inside the 20-yard line.

That expertise was evident Sunday in Cincinnati, when the Ravens went 10-for-15 on third down, converted their one fourth-down attempt and scored touchdowns on their first five red-zone trips. They might’ve finished 6-for-6 in the red zone, too, if not for coach John Harbaugh’s decision to kick the game-winning field goal in overtime.

“We’re always sitting there going, ‘OK, what’s next? What can we do now?’” offensive coordinator Todd Monken said Thursday. “Because we understand how important that is to winning. It’s one of the top five reasons you win, is scoring touchdowns in the red zone. I think our staff has done a great job; we have really good players. To me, that’s the biggest thing — really good players and a staff that does a great job of game-planning and developing how we attack somebody.”

Washington’s offense can be just as difficult to get off the field. The Commanders lead the NFL in third-down-conversion rate (51.7%) and are 8-for-8 on fourth-down tries.

3. Historically, the Ravens are a headache for first-year quarterbacks.

In Harbaugh’s 20 regular-season and playoff games against rookie starters in Baltimore, just two — the Chicago Bears’ Mitchell Trubisky and Pittsburgh Steelers’ Kenny Pickett — have left M&T Bank Stadium with a win. Even the Houston Texans’ C.J. Stroud, one of the best first-year passers in NFL history, struggled in his two road starts last year, completing just 61% of his passes for 208.5 yards per game and zero touchdowns

Overall, rookies in Baltimore have completed 54.1% of their passes against Harbaugh’s Ravens teams, thrown 10 touchdowns and 24 interceptions and taken almost three sacks per game, according to TruMedia.

“Us as a defense, we give things that a lot of other teams don’t really give throughout the league, in the sense of our disguises, coverages and just the way we play the game of football,” inside linebacker Roquan Smith said Wednesday. “So it’ll definitely be something new. He definitely hasn’t seen a defense like ours this season.”

Of course, the Ravens haven’t seen an offense quite like the Commanders’, either. Washington has run 158 no-huddle plays this season, by far the most in the NFL and over half of its offensive snaps overall. The Commanders are averaging 7 yards per no-huddle play, too, well above the league average (5.6).

The Ravens have faced just 25 no-huddle snaps this season, most of them coming against the Dallas Cowboys in Week 3. Despite recurring communication breakdowns, the defense has held up well against up-tempo looks, allowing just 5.5 yards per play.

“We’ve gotten to the point of the season where guys are comfortable in spots and different things that we’re asking them to do, and then we get good work at it here in practice,” defensive coordinator Zach Orr said Thursday. “We’re all adjusted, myself included, to the game speed, have a great plan for it, so I fully anticipate us being able to get to everything we need to get to, to do what we’ve got to do.”

4. The Ravens have the NFL’s best run defense, but they haven’t faced an improviser at quarterback like Daniels — outside of their own practices, anyway.

Washington is second in the league in rushing (892 yards), largely because of Daniels’ out-of-structure work on passing plays. The rookie easily leads all quarterbacks with 235 scramble yards, 110 more than Jackson. Daniels is averaging 8.4 yards per scramble and has scrambled for 12 first downs, the most in the NFL.

“If it’s not there, he’s creating plays on the run with his legs,” Harbaugh said Wednesday. But he pointed out: “He’s not just running.”

Excluding play-action passes, which typically move the quarterback around by design, Daniels has 121 yards on 6-for-7 passing outside the pocket this season. His most impressive such completion came Sunday against Cleveland, when he stiff-armed a pass rusher, rolled out to his right and hit top wide receiver Terry McLaurin downfield in stride for a 66-yard completion.

The Ravens know that pain well. In Week 4, Bills quarterback Josh Allen’s scramble near the right sideline ended with a 52-yard strike to wide receiver Khalil Shakir. Two weeks earlier in Baltimore, Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Gardner Minshew improvised his way to a pair of explosive completions.

“You’ve got to get that dude to stop his feet,” Orr said of Daniels. “If he gets a straight line, he can go, he can pull away. He’s got some real burners. I don’t know exactly what he ran in the 40[-yard dash], but I know it was really fast, and I see what I see on film.”

5. The best indicator for the interest in Sunday’s game might be the ticket prices.

According to TickPick, a secondary-market reseller, the “get-in” price earlier this week was $302, a 232% increase from the start of the season ($91). On StubHub, another reseller, the lowest price for a single ticket as of Thursday night was $337.

“My take is, it’s going to be loud,” Ravens defensive lineman Nnamdi Madubuike said Wednesday. “There are going to be a bunch of [Commanders] fans here. Obviously, it’s going to be rocking. It’s going to be a great game. It’s going to be high excitement, but I feel like all of us in the locker room, we’re not really dialed into all of that; we’re dialed into just executing the plays and just making it about us at the end of the day.”