Nothing is Ever Lamar Jackson's Fault

yes I'm avoiding engaging with the inauguration

Two months ago, I wrote a post expressing my continuing confusion over how Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson is discussed in the football media. As I said, he’s a truly incredible quarterback whose overall numbers put him in the upper echelons of the position’s history. (With the caveat that the modern NFL inflates passing stats and offense.) He’s a deserving two-time MVP and, it appears, will win a third one for a 2024 season that was more impressive than the first two. He’s great… but. He has a tendency to play his worst in high-leverage games, such as when the Ravens lost in Pittsburgh this season to a team that now looks clearly inferior. And unfortunately, an unusual number of these bad games pop up in the playoffs. What I find weird, as I said in that earlier piece, is that there’s a tendency for the football media to make excuses for his bad games that’s not extended to (say) Dak Prescott, Justin Herbert, Jalen Hurts, etc. While it’s true that, as they say, “wins are not a quarterback stat,” QBs simply are judged for how well their team performs overall, particularly in the postseason, and that’s always been true. Except, seemingly, for Jackson.

With the Ravens losing a winnable game against the Bills last night and costing themselves a trip to the AFC Championship game, this tendency has gone into overdrive. Jackson showed his usual ability to uniquely threaten a defense, and was greatly aided by the ongoing brilliance of running back Derrick Henry. But Jackson also showcased his fumble problems and odd tendency to badly overthrow random passes, a problem that’s plagued him throughout his career. He made two terrible decisions that led to turnovers, chucking the ball far over the head of receiver Rashod Bateman and into the arms of Bills safety Taylor Rapp; after a snap that he bobbled, rather than going down and accepting a sack, he tried to make something out of nothing and ended up fumbling, leading to a long Bills return that set up a touchdown. You’d think that would be enough to attract a fair amount of criticism, but the excuses are coming out, in just the way I described in November.

Consider, for example, this piece from the Athletic’s Mike Silver, which bends over backwards to excuse Jackson while throwing as little credit possible to the team that won.

Because of the giveaways, it’s easy for critics to pin Sunday’s defeat on Jackson. Yet think about how dumb that line of thinking is, and how much it depends on circumstances outside the quarterback’s control: If Andrews had caught his two-point conversion toss and tied the game — as the tight end would maybe 98 times out of 100 — the onus would have been on Allen to direct a game-winning drive. Had the Ravens held, they’d have felt good about their chances heading into overtime.

There are a lot of different ways it could have turned out, but scapegoating either quarterback would have been a stretch. Yet because Andrews dropped the ball, Jackson’s critics dropped the hammer. That’s absurd.

Hey, Mike - why were the Ravens in the position to need a fourth-quarter comeback in the first place? Because Lamar Jackson had two ugly turnovers! Yes, Mark Andrews killed the Ravens, no doubt. His fumble ended a Ravens drive that could have given them command of the game. And the cost of the two-point conversion drop is obvious, although many seem to be ignoring that the Bills would have had 1:33 of gametime and two timeouts left needing only a field goal. (They put up 27 points, it’s not like they couldn’t move the ball at all on the Ravens D.) Yes, Jackson was frequently brilliant, and had the game gone on much longer, I would have predicted a Ravens victory. But they play four quarters of football, not two and not five, and in the game we got, the Bills won. Jackson’s two back-breaking turnovers absolutely played a huge part in that. They just did! You can’t pick and choose which plays in the game to celebrate and which to criticize. The headline of the Athletic piece tells us to “Appreciate Lamar Jackson’s brilliance, even if football cruelty dealt Ravens a loss.” “Football cruelty” is responsible? If the Bills had lost after their early lead, would Josh Allen’s failings be dismissed as the work of football cruelty? Would they not get blamed for the seeming timidity of their late-game play calling? Come on.

It feels like a lot of the football media was salty that their predictions didn’t come true. (A very large majority of the pundits I saw were picking the Ravens to win.) Check out this clip from the NFL Network’s Good Morning Football, who spent all of last week talking about how it was inconceivable that the Bills could possible stop Ravens back Derrick Henry. (Who finished with a pedestrian 84 yards.) The GMFB team sure doesn’t seem to want to give any credit to the Bills at all! It’s like they think that Buffalo just happened to be on the field when the gods intervened and cruelly stole a game from the Ravens. The loss was far from only on Jackson, obviously, and one thing I’m not seeing enough discussion about was the Bills offensive line pushing around the Ravens vaunted front seven, which had helped the team to the league’s best run defense during the season. Either way, that’s something that the Bills did, not something bad that happened to the Ravens. Just a lot of weird excuse making for this Baltimore team, and it starts with the kid gloves deployed for discussing Jackson.

There’s plenty of lawyering of individual plays, too. Many people are rushing to say that the interception wasn’t Jackson’s fault.

This ball shouldn’t have been thrown regardless of what Bateman was doing. Rasul Douglas had safety help over the top, as Taylor Rapp’s interception shows, and I think it’s an overthrow even if Bateman keeps running. You’ve got a dominant run game, the field is slick with snow, you’re on the road in a tight playoff game, you can’t throw that ball. You can’t throw that ball! An overthrow was likely regardless of what the receiver did. And the fumble was even more indefensible. As soon as he bobbled that snap and saw the pass rush in his face, he should have gone down, taken the sack, and lived to fight another day. (Funnily enough, turnovers born of trying to do too much have been Allen’s big failing in the past.) Maybe the best of Jackson’s many virtues as a quarterback is turnover avoidance, and yet he had two killer turnovers in this playoff game, after only giving away the ball nine times all season. That’s fair to criticize.

It goes on and on. “Don’t Blame Lamar Jackson,” says the 33rd Team. Stephen A. Smith, one of the loudest Jackson apologists out there, called the game “tragic” and demanded that the loss wasn’t on Lamar. Chris Canty, another aggressive Jackson booster, insists that Jackson “deserves” a Super Bowl, whatever that means. “Lamar Jackson brought the Baltimore Ravens to the brink of a dramatic come-from-behind victory with the chance to secure their second straight berth in the AFC championship game,” reads the subhead on this WaPo piece, never mind that the two-point conversion would only have tied the game with plenty of opportunity for the Bills to win it in regulation. Doug Farrar says “Lamar Jackson's Playoff Legacy Is Still Complicated, But It Wasn't All His Fault.” I would say that a QB with a playoff record of 3-5, including four losses as a betting favorite, has a rather uncomplicated playoff legacy. There’s plenty of talking head shows going out of their way to make excuses for Jackson’s ongoing playoff failures, and of course social media is stuffed with it. This roundup of online reactions summarizes it well: “Mark Andrews gets all the hate on social media after mistake that cost Ravens elimination.”

It’s of course true that quarterbacks can’t ensure victory for any team; it wasn’t Jackson who was getting pushed around by the Bills O-line in the first half, putting them in the hole they were in to begin with. Just like Josh Allen was helpless to prevent the Chiefs offense from winning the game after he did everything he could in the infamous “13 seconds” game. Judging QBs by playoff wins doesn’t fully make sense, but it’s just a thing people do and we’re never going to fully get away from it. As always, it’s a question of consistency and fairness. If Allen was the one who had two backbreaking turnovers in the game, costing the Bills a win at home, he would be getting absolutely roasted today by the same people who are defending Jackson. Aaron Rodgers’s failure to get back to a Super Bowl has dogged him for a decade and a half. And as much as people want to make Allen vs. Jackson into a race war, the fact is that plenty of Black quarterbacks take tons of blame for playoff failure too. If Dak Prescott had played a statistically identical game in a loss, he would be getting killed out there today. Jalen Hurts is taking a ton of criticism over the Eagles game yesterday, and they won. As the kids say, you have to keep the same energy.

I’ve got a Nick Wright tweet up at the top there, part of several he shared yesterday that captured the situation well. As you know, Wright is one of my favorite people. And he’s been on this beat for a long time - it’s not just that Jackson has struggled in the playoffs, it’s that a) he’s so much worse in the playoffs than in the regular season and b) the football media seems intent on making excuses for him. The 2019 Ravens team that saw Jackson win his first MVP award didn’t lose a game after September of that season until suddenly, spectacularly imploding in their first playoff game behind multiple turnovers from their quarterback. There’s a pattern here. I do not get the resistance to seeing it. A lot of people are comparing Jackson’s career thus far to that of Peyton Manning, who famously struggled in the playoffs and couldn’t get past Tom Brady’s Patriots until he finally broke through. Jackson could have a similar arc. I completely agree! He’s got remarkable talent. He has every opportunity to get to the top in time. But for now, as he’s won (probably) three MVP awards and set all number of records in advanced analytics, he’s deserving of criticism for not turning that into postseason success. And when it comes to discussing a truly great quarterback and their reputation, efforts to shut down fair criticism aren’t benevolent. They’re condescending.

Jackson gets that too.