Coming into the 2025 NFL season, the Ravens were considered favorites to win the Super Bowl. Even though they had fallen short again in the playoffs, their defense still featured multiple Pro Bowlers. And of course, they still had Lamar Jackson. How things have taken a turn for the worse in Baltimore.
Here we are just five weeks into the season, and the Ravens are holding a 1-4 record as Jackson nurses a hamstring injury and is expected to return only in Week 8. Baltimore’s 34-point loss to the Houston Texans at home in Week 5 tied the record for the biggest in the history of the franchise.
Their season is clearly in free fall now. And Chris Simms feels the Ravens’ slide is a lesson for everyone, not just Baltimore.
“The league is more than just quarterbacks… Lamar Jackson is the closest thing I’ve seen to Superman, but that doesn’t mean anything. What does that mean? They still can’t play defense. They are in trouble. There are no signs of hope… The AFC North is shockingly bad,” said Simms, who acknowledged that some of the blame falls on the avalanche of injuries that the Ravens have endured in the first month of the season.
“I know there [are] injuries. I don’t expect you to win the game, I know that, but I did expect you guys to manage and put up a fight and not just get… Like literally, after the first drive of the game, go ‘Oh, the game’s over.’ They just got slowly beat down as the day went on,” he added.
Simms, however, put most of the blame on the Ravens’ front office, which he felt hadn’t done a good job at finding depth pieces. “There [are] some guys out here that I have to look up who they are… That does say something,” he said.
Baltimore has one more match-up before it will be able to get to their bye week. And the Los Angeles Rams are rightfully favored to give the Ravens their fifth loss of the season this coming Sunday.
They’ve now gone from Super Bowl favorites to having the sixth-longest odds in the league. And there are now eight other quarterbacks who are more favored to win the MVP award than Jackson. The Ravens are currently -170 favorites to make it to the playoffs. But those odds are sliding in the wrong direction as well.
Moving forward, Baltimore will simply have to hope that by the time Jackson returns, there’s still enough time left for him to salvage this season. The only problem with that plan, however, is that, as Simms pointed out earlier, it’s going to take much more than some dual-threat QB heroics to cover for their struggling defense.
For better or worse, this is still Ravens football, even if it feels more like 2015 than 2025.
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