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Five things we learned from the the Ravens’ 33-19 win over the San Francisco 49ers

childs walker, baltimore sun
·12 min read
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The Ravens took their season to another level on Christmas night, handling the San Francisco 49ers, only the NFL’s hottest team, as Lamar Jackson made his case for a second Most Valuable Player Award.

Here are five things we learned from the 33-19 win.

Merry Christmas, the Super Bowl favorite plays in Baltimore

Let’s begin with a bit of perspective on the opponent the Ravens handled by two touchdowns. No one had stopped the 49ers over the past six weeks, a stretch in which they outscored opponents — five of them realistic playoff contenders — by an average of 35-16. They exited that stretch with the third most efficient offense through 14 games since 1981, according to FTN Fantasy’s defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA), which breaks down every single NFL play and compares a team’s performance to a league-average baseline based on situation and opponent. Quarterback Brock Purdy, the 262nd and last player picked in the 2022 NFL draft, entered Monday night as the MVP favorite. The 49ers convinced oddsmakers to list them as nearly a touchdown favorite over the best team in the AFC.

The Ravens knew they were flying 3,000 miles to take stock. Cornerback Marlon Humphrey called it the “game of the year” for just that reason. They had spoken with increasing confidence about their chance to do something remarkable with this season. “I’m betting on us 10 times out of 10,” linebacker Roquan Smith said as he looked ahead to San Francisco. But how would that bravado play when they actually shared a field with the one opponent that was, on paper, playing better than them?

Well, darned if the Ravens did not race ahead of expectations — ours and certainly those of the NFL’s opinion-making class — yet again. Projection systems might still list the 49ers as the Super Bowl favorite because their path through the NFC is probably easier than the Ravens’ path through an AFC that features four of the top five teams by DVOA. But we saw what we saw: 33-19 on the road as their defense confounded, then pummeled Purdy while Jackson eluded and dissected his foe.

A week earlier, coach John Harbaugh had talked about his team’s maturity, its unusual ability to solve the specific problem in front of it each week. Not the sexiest description of a team closing in on the AFC’s top seed but an accurate depiction of what the Ravens had accomplished through 14 games. Their win over the 49ers was something else, a declaration that they could not only hang at the highest level but set a new bar.

San Francisco did its thing in the first half. Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle were just as impossible to bring down as advertised. The ball moved not in sips but in gulps. A few timely counterpunches allowed the Ravens to nose ahead, but our Yuletide battle of the titans was on. Only the Ravens turned out to be way more titanic in the second half, with their defense slamming the door on four straight drives and Jackson exhibiting his mastery. The Ravens have played plenty of championship-level football in 2023, but they hit a new peak.

Even the scariest moment of the night — wunderkind safety Kyle Hamilton limping off after his sore left knee appeared to fold up under him — didn’t turn out badly, according to Harbaugh’s postgame update.

And now, the Ravens have every right to spit back at their doubters. Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio took the brunt of it, with Jackson ripping his “very disrespectful” prediction of a 49ers blowout. But let’s be honest: most of us in the Baltimore press corps also picked against them.

“We’ve worked too hard for people to be writing us off already,” linebacker Patrick Queen said, recounting his message to teammates as he broke the pregame huddle. “We were 11-3 just like they were 11-3. We kind of feel a certain way about stuff like that when somebody writes you off before you even get a chance to even play the game. My message was just [to] go out there and take what we want.”

They keep resetting our expectations, and there’s really no reason left to put a limit on what they can accomplish over the next seven weeks.

Lamar Jackson is headed for another MVP

Purdy is not a “system” quarterback; rather, he has been a terrific point guard, putting the ball in position for his playmakers to do wondrous things with it. What he is not is an offense unto himself. That’s where he and Jackson are different.

ESPN analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman summed it up perfectly before the game: “I don’t think there’s a quarterback in the game who’s asked to do more than Lamar Jackson does.”

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Statistics cut through so much baseless nonsense in sports, but they do not capture what Jackson is to the Ravens, how his gravitational pull sets up everything they do and his ability to escape any straitjacket rips the heart out of an opponent.

His 252 passing yards, 45 rushing yards on seven carries and 105.9 passer rating would amount to a nice night for any quarterback. He ranked a fine eighth in ESPN’s QBR measure of all-around quarterback play going into Monday evening. But do any of those digits capture the hell opposing coaches and pass rushers feel as they try to bottle him up with a game hanging in the balance?

“I think if anybody watched the game [or] if anybody watches football this season and watched the Baltimore Ravens, they know for a fact Lamar Jackson is the MVP, hands down,” Smith said. “Anyone that watches football and knows football and [can] see the type of impact he has on the game — not even stat-wise, but just individually, the plays that he makes quarter in and quarter out — compare his film to anyone else in the league. Then, I would love to hear what anyone else has to say after that.”

Jackson could not have started much worse, completing just one of his first five passes and handing the 49ers two points when he tripped over a fallen official in the end zone and flipped the ball away for an intentional grounding penalty.

But that would be his last serious mistake. Each time he got the ball from there, he probed more successfully.

He was at his best on the Ravens’ first drive of the second half, floating away from pressure and spotting Gus Edwards, who had released from a block, for an improvised 39-yard catch and run. Two plays later, Jackson again danced away from pressure until he could find Nelson Agholor, posted up in the front corner of the end zone for a touchdown.

Coordinator Todd Monken spoke last week about how off-script plays will always be Jackson’s bread and butter. He’s a two-play quarterback — the one designed and the one he creates after that one falls apart. The Ravens drill relentlessly on how to play off his improvisations, and we saw the payoff as Edwards and Agholor moved astutely to present options.

Jackson didn’t throw a lot after that. He didn’t need to. He’s all about what it takes to win the game in front of him.

Aikman’s broadcast partner, Joe Buck, had no doubt what he was watching, describing Jackson as “head and shoulders the best player on the field tonight.”

Harbaugh wasn’t about to disagree. “I thought Lamar had an MVP performance tonight,” he said. “It takes a team to create a performance like that, but it takes a player to play at that level — to play at an MVP level — it takes a player to play that way. And Lamar was all over the field doing everything. He operated a pretty complicated game plan.”

The Ravens’ defense did what it had to, counterpunching with the NFL’s most efficient offense

The Ravens started the game doing what you cannot against the 49ers: safety Marcus Williams whiffed on tackling Kittle and allowed the league’s best tight end to turn an intermediate catch into a 58-yard gain.

Hamilton erased that drive with an interception in the end zone, duping Purdy into misreading his coverage intentions and setting the template for how the Ravens would build a lead despite allowing chunk gains — the 49ers outgained them 8.6 yards per play to 4.6 in the first half — to San Francisco’s elite playmakers.

You can tear your hair out, saying the league’s top scoring defense should not be gouged for double-digit gains on the ground or on yards after the catch. But no one has stopped this fully healthy edition of the 49ers. You have to answer their chin shots with chin shots of your own, and that’s what the Ravens did.

On the 49ers’ third drive, cornerback Brandon Stephens, nearly as bright a 2023 breakout star as the more acclaimed Hamilton, stopped dead in the center of Purdy’s throwing lane to tip his hot-read throw into the arms of Marlon Humphrey. That flash of instinctive brilliance led directly to a Ravens go-ahead touchdown drive.

The next time the 49ers had the ball, Hamilton hopped up from a chop block and hustled back into the play to intercept a ball deflected by Humphrey. Again, the turnover led directly to points.

As the 49ers’ deficit grew in the third quarter, the Ravens bore down on Purdy, sacking him twice and ultimately driving him from the game. They kept the heat on his replacement, Sam Darnold. But they never would have had their chance to seize the initiative had they not answered San Francisco’s big plays in the first half. That’s NFL football circa 2023. The league’s best offenses can’t be stopped, but you must wound them as they march.

“We couldn’t care less about all the pretty stuff you do, gimmick stuff,” Queen said. “You still have to get touched. So that’s our mindset.”

Fans feared a catastrophic evening for the Ravens’ offensive line; it was anything but that

Panicked would be a fair adjective to describe the tone of social media discourse around tackles Ronnie Stanley and Morgan Moses after the Ravens’ win over the Jacksonville Jaguars. Stanley could not impede Jacksonville’s quick, powerful edge rusher Josh Allen as he struggled to plant on his injured right knee. Moses played only about half the time as he did his best to compete with one healthy arm.

If that was the picture against Jacksonville, fans worried Jackson might be in mortal danger against the 49ers, with Nick Bosa closing in from one edge, Chase Young closing from the other and Javon Hargrave pushing up the middle.

What seemed a leading subplot going into the game turned out to be a minor one, however. Bosa and Hargrave did manage multiple pressures, and Young shared a sack with Randy Gregory, but they never kept Jackson from playing his game.

Which means Stanley and Moses deserve credit for holding up better than expected, and Ravens coaches deserve credit for the tackle rotation they’ve implemented over the last three games.

The Ravens’ next game against the Dolphins was always the one

As emphatic a stamp as the Ravens just put on their season, they will turn around and play a more important game six days later.

They invested plenty of pride — the Ravens did not see why they should be substantial underdogs — in their Christmas showdown with the NFL’s hottest team, but in brass-tack terms, this was not a game they had to win.

It’s the next one, on New Year’s Eve against the 11-4 Dolphins, that will likely determine the difficulty of their postseason path. Win and they’ll seize the AFC’s No. 1 seed and the first-round bye that comes with it. Lose and they’ll open themselves to some anxious possibilities, including a road trip in the wild-card round.

Beyond their quest for the No. 1 seed, the Ravens still need to protect their flank in the AFC North, where the Cleveland Browns have won three straight thanks to Joe Flacco’s reborn right arm. Cleveland might not win out but will be favored to do so with only the New York Jets and Cincinnati Bengals left to beat. The Ravens need 13 victories to guarantee divisional supremacy and home-field advantage in their first playoff game.

Regular season games don’t come a lot more portentous than Sunday’s contest between the AFC’s top two teams. The Dolphins humiliated the Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium 15 months ago, rallying from a 35-14 deficit entering the fourth quarter to win 42-38. Their offense, with Tua Tagovailoa throwing to Jaylen Waddle (who suffered a possible high-ankle sprain Sunday) and the incomparable Tyreek Hill, can run away with any game. On Christmas Eve, the Dolphins showed they could survive a grungier, nip-and-tuck battle with the talented Dallas Cowboys. No longer can it be said they have not stood up to a top opponent.

The Dolphins aren’t as consistently devastating, as packed with All-Pros, as the 49ers. They’ve faltered on the road. But they’ll come to Baltimore ready to win if the Ravens let up even a little.

“We wouldn’t like it any other way,” Smith said. “We prefer the rough, rigid road.”

Week 17

Dolphins at Ravens

Sunday, 1 p.m.

TV: CBS

Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM

Line: Ravens by 3