I want to reject the premise at face value.
It feels like reasonable folk should be dismissive of the “Super Bowl or Bust” concept in general. It’s too polarizing. How can there possibly be no wiggle room between winning the conference or abject failure? There’s so much that can happen in a single football game, much less a season. How could a season possibly be quantified in such black and white terms?
There’s just no way this is a fair way to judge the success of a season, right?
Right?
As the Ravens prepare to play their playoff opener against the Houston Texans Jan. 20, this evaluation moves back into focus. Can the Ravens’ 2023 season be considered a success at this point if it doesn’t involve at least an appearance in Super Bowl LVIII?
“Super Bowl or Bust” acknowledges the opportunity in front of the Ravens. They’ve definitively proven themselves to be the best team in football going into the postseason and have a distinct home-field advantage. They have perhaps their most complete roster in franchise history. Their quarterback is playing the best football of his career, a level even higher than his first MVP season in 2019. It would be crushing for all of that to be wasted by coming up short of the Super Bowl.
But even more than that, the notion carries the weight of the Ravens’ recent postseason failures. For context, the Dallas Cowboys are currently a national laughingstock after another postseason failure. But if the Ravens were to lose their divisional round matchup with the Texans, the Cowboys (3) would actually have more playoff victories in the last 10 years than the Ravens (2).
What are the Ravens if they again fail to translate regular-season success into significant postseason accomplishments? At the moment they’re the model team in the NFL, with their competitors looking to replicate their success by perhaps poaching members of their front office and coaching staff. But if they were to lose another home playoff game, are they no more than mid-market Cowboys?
Yet what’s still frustrating about the “Super Bowl or Bust” premise is that accepting it seems to require some amount of dismissal about anything that has happened thus far. If a loss this weekend is a declaration of failure, did none of this matter? That’s a tough pill for me to swallow. I stated this in the immediate aftermath of the team’s stunning back-to-back blowout wins against the 49ers and Dolphins late in the season, and I truly stand by it. If experiencing two such wins didn’t allow you to feel truly pure, unbridled joy, then I don’t know what the point is of being a sports fan.
Why have such an emotional investment in a team if two remarkable, division and No. 1 seed-clinching victories against good football teams in dominant fashion would leave you to say “it doesn’t matter because it isn’t the Super Bowl” instead of allowing yourself to celebrate? But if we accept the premise of “Super Bowl or Bust,” it kind of feels like we couldn’t possibly have reveled in those spectacular late-season wins without whipping ourselves into a bit of a paradox.
We have a bit of a football constitutional crisis on our hands, no?
Because unlike the Backstreet Boys, I want it both ways. I both want to be able to appreciate and celebrate everything the Ravens have accomplished to this point. It has been a remarkable season, one that I acknowledge might be even more meaningful for me because it is the first season in which my two young sons have been fully engulfed throughout the year. The late-season injuries to Lamar Jackson the last couple of years have prevented full-on Ravens fever from taking over the city around the holidays. But this year, my boys have been invested all season, with the added bonus of having met some of the players (thanks to “The Tyus Bowser Show” and some charitable events I’ve been involved with) adding to their fervor.
I watched the Dolphins game with my boys, and their excitement was so palpable that my reaction became overwhelming. I was truly emotional during our “Project Gameday” postgame show because it was so special for me to share this with them the way I had shared special sports memories with my own father — albeit not the Ravens specifically because they hadn’t arrived yet — when I was their age.
So yeah, it’s really difficult for me to accept the “Super Bowl or Bust” premise. Those emotions were real and those victories were real and this season has been special.
And yet … I get it. I have to. Lamar Jackson needs to change his postseason narrative. John Harbaugh needs to change his post-Super Bowl XLVII postseason narrative. The Ravens as a franchise need to change their recent postseason narrative. I have faith that they are more than capable of doing so.
I wish there was a softer term than “bust” to describe this because “bust” really isn’t fair.
But anything short of a Super Bowl appearance would be wildly disappointing given all of the circumstances in play.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox