We’re going to be overdramatic about this game.
“It’s the most important regular-season game of Lamar Jackson’s career” is the type of thing we’ll say. Hell, I said it the last time the Ravens played the Steelers. I’m definitely going to say it again.
So let’s get it out of the way. The Ravens’ upcoming Week 16 home matchup against the Steelers is the most important regular-season game of Lamar Jackson’s career. Full stop.
Now that I’ve said it, allow me to tell you why I’m actually wrong. You see, the game may or may not actually mean something. While the Ravens could move into a tie with the Steelers for the AFC North lead with a win, they still wouldn’t even control their own destiny with a victory. Should the Steelers beat the Chiefs on Christmas Day in Week 16, they would have the common-opponent tiebreaker and the home playoff game.
(Of course, the Steelers could still lose to the Chiefs in Week 17. So if the Ravens do beat the Steelers on Saturday, Ravens fans will need to root like hell that the Patriots don’t upset the Bills and allow the Chiefs to clinch the No. 1 seed before the Christmas Day matchup in Pittsburgh. But that’s a conversation for another day.)
The point is that this game, from a tangible standpoint, is really only a divisional eliminator. If the Ravens lose, the Steelers lock up the AFC North title with two weeks remaining in the season. And if the Ravens don’t win the division then … well … they don’t win the division. That’s part of what makes it tough to try to stress the significance of this game.
We want the Ravens to win the AFC North, but there’s no bye at stake. They’re not actually at risk of missing the playoffs. The only practical volatility here is the range from the third to sixth seed. Of course they’d rather be at home for their first playoff game, but reaching the Super Bowl is going to have to require multiple road playoff wins no matter where the first one is.
Even if the Ravens lose this game, they might get another shot at Pittsburgh three weeks later! This result just isn’t really all that important.
But it’s the most important regular-season game of Lamar Jackson’s career.
I don’t have to explain it to you. The Steelers are 8-1 in their last nine games against the Ravens. There are lots of anomalies in there, sure, but their Week 11 win wasn’t. It had nothing to do with COVID or backup quarterbacks or receivers dropping footballs. It was the Pittsburgh Steelers getting the Ravens away from what the Ravens do so well. It was what led to cornerback Marlon Humphrey saying “they’ve kind of had our number” after the game.
There’s no hiding from it anymore. Jackson is 1-4 in his career against the Steelers. He’s never played well in a win in the rivalry. And while it’s certainly not specifically his fault that the Ravens lost the Week 11 matchup, the context is staggering. Jackson posted a quarterback rating of 154.6 in the Week 15 win against the Giants. It was his 11th game of the season with a QB rating in the triple digits. The Steelers held him to a 66.1 rating, which wasn’t just his lowest of the season, it was 15 points lower than his second lowest. It was the lowest rating he had posted since … the previous time he played the Steelers.
(To be fair, that Week 5 matchup last season isn’t fair to Jackson. Seven flat-out drops played a particularly significant role in that number. But it adds to the Steelers of it all.)
Jackson absolutely has to rewrite his history against the Steelers. Well, he at least desperately needs to write a new chapter in history against the Steelers. The entire team does, of course. As Humphrey expressed after the last game, this thing is real. The number of players who aren’t “real Ravens” is growing by the week. (The saying is that you aren’t really a Raven until you’ve beaten the Steelers. Desmond King, for example, recently joined that list.)
You can argue that beating the Steelers rap isn’t really all that important because it’s hypothetically possible the Ravens could win a Super Bowl without beating the Steelers. But it’s spiritually overwhelming. It’s a cloud hanging over this organization. Another loss to the Steelers would be crushing. A single win won’t deliver them a Super Bowl run. But it would lift a 10,000-pound weight off their collective shoulders. (Maybe I should say 10-million-pound weight. Justin Madubuike and Michael Pierce might be able to lift 10,000 pounds on their own.)
So yeah, the game isn’t really that important. It’s only the most important regular-season game of the Lamar Jackson era.
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