But after the way they dished out similar beatdowns to the Lions and Seahawks earlier in the year, they don’t seem to think anyone should be surprised by what transpired Christmas night in Santa Clara either.
You saw what I did—Baltimore totally choking out the presumed best roster in football.
The final was Baltimore Ravens 33, San Francisco 49ers 19, and this one didn’t even seem that close. Lamar Jackson played like the MVP candidate he clearly is. The defense picked off Brock Purdy four times, then scored a fifth off Sam Darnold for good measure. Eight different guys caught passes, and the run game got the yards it needed.
And if you watched the ABC broadcast, you might’ve caught how it sounded a lot like it’d been relayed to Joe Buck and Troy Aikman just how overlooked and disrespected Baltimore felt coming in, like they weren’t capable of a game like the one they wound up playing. So afterward, I caught up with Patrick Queen, who had one of those picks, and seven tackles to go with it, to ask him about that.
“Yeah, they tried to write us off,” Queen told me. “We all felt a certain way about that. You don’t want to give us a chance to play the game. You try to write us off. I think everybody hates the Ravens. We don’t know why. We just go out there and play football. We don’t play the football that everybody wants to see, though.”
At this rate, America’s not going to have any choice.
With the win Monday, the Ravens are 12–3, and a home win Sunday against Miami away from clinching the top seed, a bye and home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs. So we’re all, in all likelihood, going to get a steady diet of the bruising, old-school game Baltimore brings.
And all of that was on display in California on Monday night—and it started with a bet the Ravens’ players and coaches made during the week.
Quite simply, it was that the Niners, great in their own right, hadn’t quite seen a team like theirs.
“We definitely knew,” Queen says. “People don’t want to play the style of football we like to play. They are a physical team. They are that aggressive team. But I think our brand of football outmatches anybody. … We know they don’t believe that people can tackle them for four quarters. We’re the team to do that.”
The belief, from there, went that eventually if Baltimore kept swinging, with physicality and creativity, the dam would break, and the interceptions wound up manifesting that. Purdy’s second pick came when Brandon Stephens got free and tipped the ball in the air to Marlon Humphrey. The third came when Humphrey popped the ball loose from George Kittle and Kyle Hamilton was waiting for his second pick of the day. The fourth came when nose tackle Travis Jones collapsed the pocket, and hit Purdy, sending his throw wayward and into Queen’s arms.
“Those guys up front, when they eat, we’ll be able to make plays on the back end,” Queen says. “[Purdy is] a great quarterback. He made some miraculous throws these weeks leading up. We knew that there are plays out there that you can capitalize on. There are plays where he does mess up, but people just don’t capitalize on it. We knew we could take advantage of that.”
And all four of those were important—the first one stopped the Niners’ first drive deep in Baltimore territory, and the next three led directly to 17 points.
Meanwhile, Jackson was surgical, averaging 6.4 yards per carry, posting a 105.9 passer rating and staying in total control throughout. Back in early November, a panel of 38 NFL executives voting on my annual midseason awards made Jackson the overwhelming pick for MVP (he got more than half the votes) before many people were talking about him that way.
Now, everyone is. Including his teammates.
“He proved that tonight,” says Queen. “I think he proved that over and over again. He’s going to continue to do that. We’ve got all faith in him. That’s the MVP in our eyes. We’ve got two more games left in the season before the stretch in the playoffs. We just got to have his back.”
And really, that alludes to the best thing about these Ravens—that there’s enough there, as complete as the roster is now, for everyone to have everyone’s back. As is the case with the Niners, there may not be a discernible hole on the Baltimore roster.
Maybe it’s time for everyone to take notice of it.
“We just proved that we got a chance,” Queen says, slyly. “When you got chances in life, you got to take advantage of those.”
I’d say the Ravens look ready to.
