For the Baltimore Times
On the Saturday night before the Super Bowl LIX, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson will probably walk away with his third Most Valuable Player Award during the NFL Honors celebration.
He was recently voted the MVP by the Pro Football Writers Association and received first-team All-Pro Honors from the Associated Press. These are some of the same voters who will decide the MVP award.
As Jackson receives his accolades for an outstanding regular season in which he passed for 4,172 yards, threw 41 touchdown passes, ran for 915 yards, and had 45 total touchdowns, the enduring echoes of his team’s latest postseason failure will be there, too.
On that cold, frosty night in Orchard Park, New York, Jackson’s team was on the short end of a heartbreaking 27-25 loss to the Buffalo Bills in the Divisional Playoff round. In what was a winnable game, the Ravens as a team beat themselves more than the Bills did. They committed three turnovers-including two by Jackson in the first half and one by always sure-handed tight-end Mark Andrews on a crucial drive in the fourth quarter.
Disappointed Ravens fans can point to some of the questionable decisions of the Ravens coaching staff—going for two instead of kicking the extra-point or passing on that two-point try when Derrick Henry bullied his way through the Bills defense. You could also point to the lack of designed quarterback runs in which Jackson could either give the ball to Henry or run it himself.
Even worse, the loss dropped Jackson’s playoff record to 3-5 while fueling doubt among his fans, media pundits, and detractors about his ability to win football games in the postseason. To more than a few observers of the game, those MVP awards won’t mean as much to Jackson’s legacy as an NFL quarterback as a Super Bowl ring.
But the good news for Ravens fans about Jackson’s latest loss in the postseason is that this could be one of the last times we have this conversation about losing in the postseason because he is going to win more of those games than he will lose them including a Super Bowl before it’s said and done.
While I am neither a psychic nor a handicapper—I am not telling you to bet the mortgage on Draft Kings following my opinion—I saw something in Jackson in this last loss to Buffalo that tells me that he’s going to get his fair share of postseason success and will win some championships before he hangs his cleats for good.
After committing those first-half turnovers, Jackson, with help from Henry, put the Ravens on his back and brought them back into the game by leading Baltimore to two scores on their first two drives of the second half to cut the halftime deficit to two.
Trailing 24-19 after a Buffalo field goal, Jackson and the Ravens were on the move again, but Andrews, after catching a first down pass in Bills territory, was stripped of the football. That miscue ultimately led to a Buffalo field goal to put them up by an eight with 3:29 left in the game.
The eight-play, 88-yard drive that culminated in a 24-yard touchdown to tight end Isaiah Likely was Jackson’s finest and yet most bittersweet moment in his playoff career.
On that final drive through a snowstorm, Jackson calmly and methodically moved the Ravens downfield using his arms and his legs in a way that should have reminded older Baltimore football fans of the way Johnny Unitas drove the Baltimore Colts to the winning drive in sudden death overtime against the New York Giants in the 1958 NFL Championship game that was dubbed as “The Greatest Game ever played.”
Unfortunately for Jackson, the two-point conversion pass that would have tied the game slipped out of Andrews’s hands and the Ravens were eliminated from the playoffs.
In a tragic loss, Jackson had his best performance in his postseason career. That final drive showed that he has a clutch gene in the postseason that his win-loss record says he does not have.
Jackson’s time is coming a lot sooner than you think.