ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — Mark Andrews quickly got up from the end zone, springing to his feet and jogging to the sideline. If only it would be that easy for the veteran tight end and Baltimore Ravens to get over another crushing playoff loss.
“This one is going to hurt for a while,” Ravens left tackle Ronnie Stanley said from a quiet locker room. “This is probably the toughest loss of my career so far. I know we’ve been in situations before, similar situations. This one kind of feels worse.”
That’s probably because, to a man, the Ravens felt like they again beat themselves in a 27-25 defeat to the Buffalo Bills in the AFC divisional playoff round at Highmark Stadium. It would be hard to argue.
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Three turnovers. The Bills had none. Forty-three yards of penalties. The Bills had one for 10 yards. And finally, two failed two-point conversion attempts when there were wide-open receivers on both.
The Ravens nearly overcame all of those things, but they ran out of time to make up for Andrews’ drop on a two-point conversion pass from Lamar Jackson that would have tied the game with 93 seconds to go.
It was an especially brutal fate for Andrews, who also had a bad second-quarter drop and lost a fumble in Buffalo territory earlier in the fourth quarter with the Ravens trailing by just five.
“The turnovers. We can’t have that s—,” said Jackson, who defended Andrews while blaming himself for his two giveaways. “That’s why we lost the game, because as you can see, we’re moving the ball wonderfully. It’s just, ‘Hold on to the f—ing ball.’ I’m sorry for my language. I’m just tired of this.”
Jackson’s display of frustration continued in the locker room after the game. He knows this season was supposed to be different. This was supposed to be the Ravens’ year. Baltimore was certainly good enough.
Jackson, a candidate to win his third NFL MVP award, had never played better and had an accomplished sidekick this season, too. He no longer had to shoulder an inordinate amount of the offensive burden, because the Ravens now had Derrick Henry. The two drove arguably the top offense in the sport.
They were battle-tested, having to play through Week 18 to win the AFC North and participating in 10 regular-season games against teams in the postseason field. Other than wide receiver Zay Flowers, they were healthy. Their four wins to close the regular season, plus their dominant performance against the rival Pittsburgh Steelers in the wild-card round, was evidence that they were peaking at the right time.
The Ravens were a team on a mission, motivated by what happened one year ago when they were denied by the Kansas City Chiefs with a Super Bowl berth on the line.
There will be no Super Bowl for the Ravens again this year. There won’t even be a return trip to the AFC Championship and a chance to enact revenge on the Chiefs. That honor goes to the Bills, who built a 21-10 halftime lead and then desperately held on down the stretch, getting plenty of help from Baltimore in the process.
“At the end of the year, there’s obviously only one team that’s hoisting that trophy. But personally, I would rather get my heart ripped out every time at that game or competing for that,” said Ravens middle linebacker Roquan Smith. “At the end of the day, any loss sucks, and obviously, this one, knowing that this is the last time that each and every guy will be in that locker room together. That’s what life is about: creating memories. We didn’t play good enough to create more memories with each other. Thinking about that, it sucks.”
The Ravens have qualified for the playoffs in six of the past seven seasons, but they have little to show for those appearances beyond a ton of regular-season wins (70, to be exact), a litany of league and team records, and four AFC North crowns. The Ravens are just 3-6 in the playoffs since the start of 2018 and haven’t won consecutive playoff games since their Super Bowl run following the 2012 regular season.
Much of the criticism will fall on the shoulders of Jackson, because that’s usually how it works in the NFL with star quarterbacks. He has now lost five of the eight playoff games he’s started through his first seven NFL seasons. None of those three postseason victories came against elite quarterbacks, like the one the Ravens faced Sunday night. He’s now 0-3 in the postseason against the Bills’ Josh Allen and the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes. And he’s turned the ball over 11 times in those eight playoff starts.
Josh Allen went right to Lamar. Respect 🤝 #BALvsBUF pic.twitter.com/iBrg5PIsqH
— NFL (@NFL) January 20, 2025
On Sunday, Jackson threw an interception and lost a fumble in the first half, the latter turnover leading to a Bills touchdown. Otherwise, he played valiantly and was at his best when he drove the Ravens 88 yards in eight plays in less than two minutes and hit tight end Isaiah Likely for a 24-yard touchdown that gave Baltimore a chance to go for the game-tying two-point conversion.
“Lamar is what makes this team go, and he’s the reason why we still had a chance, so I’d tell him the same thing: hold his head high,” Henry said. “He’s a Hall of Fame player, had a great season. It’s a team effort. We came up short together. It’s not on him. Forget what anybody else outside of what we have going on says. We believe in him.”
The third-seeded Ravens’ loss to the second-seeded Bills borrowed so many of the elements from Baltimore’s AFC Championship Game loss to Kansas City last January, from the divisional-round loss in Buffalo following the 2020 regular season, from the stunning home divisional-round defeat to the Tennessee Titans after the record-breaking 2019 regular season, and from the one-and-done wild-card showing versus the Los Angeles Chargers in Jackson’s rookie season in 2018.
The offense, so efficient and explosive for the majority of the season and in last weekend’s wild-card victory over the Steelers, was rendered mistake-prone by the Bills. Baltimore’s three turnovers matched the number it had in the previous seven games combined. The Ravens have lost the turnover battle, 15-2, in their six playoff losses since 2018.
“It’s how football works,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. “If you want to draw some big cosmic thread, you draw it for every single team in the league except the team that wins. It’s a big challenge. That’s why the Chiefs — you have to admire what they’ve done. It’s tough to win playoff games. It’s tough to get in the playoffs. Then it’s tough to win playoff games. Now you have to stack four playoff wins to win a championship, and when you don’t win it, you’re going to start drawing threads. There’s no thread. It’s football. This game went the way it went. You talk about all that. There’s plenty of playoff games that we have had that we didn’t turn the ball over.”
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The Ravens, who managed only 25 points despite not punting, were also forced to settle for a field goal after having first-and-goal from the 2-yard line in the second quarter. Flowers’ absence clearly was a factor, as the Bills played more man-to-man than they had all season. The offensive line had some struggles early against a defense it pushed around during a 35-10 win in Week 4. Defensively, the Ravens allowed three first-half touchdowns and the Bills to gain 147 yards on the ground.
“You can draw up all the plays you want to. If you don’t have dudes going to hit people, then it’s not going to work,” said Ravens safety Kyle Hamilton. “I didn’t think we were physical enough in the first half. Second half, I thought we did better. I think they ran the same duo play like 10-plus times tonight, and that honestly is just not a good showing of what we can do as a defense. I feel like that’s somewhat disrespectful, and for us to allow them to do that, that’s just out of character for us. We can pinpoint different things that happened this and there. At the end of the day, it just wasn’t enough to get the job done.”
Hamilton was one of many Ravens to defend Andrews and say he’s not the reason the team lost. Andrews was not available to talk to reporters after the game.
“S— happens in this league. I dropped a pick earlier in the year. People don’t turn on one another. We go through so much from fall camp to now. One play doesn’t define anybody,” Hamilton said. “He’s the all-time leading touchdown receiver in Ravens history, so for anybody to say anything about him, you have to look in the mirror and really evaluate your thought process (given) what he’s done for this franchise, what he will do for this franchise in the future. He’s been a consistent beacon of success the whole time he’s been here, and for anybody to take anything away from him and his work ethic, I think it’s just unfair.”
The Ravens understand the business by now. They’re no stranger to gut-wrenching endings. There will be outside calls for owner Steve Bisciotti to make significant changes under the premise that annually making the playoffs isn’t good enough. Of course, there’s no indication that Harbaugh is going anywhere. There will be suggestions for general manager Eric DeCosta to shake up the roster, but that’s highly unlikely with Baltimore not having a ton of Grade A free agents and expected to be tight against the salary cap. There will be plenty of finger-pointing, and Harbaugh, Jackson and Andrews figure to bear the brunt of that.
What there won’t be are immediate answers for why a team that looks like one of the league’s best for the better part of four months becomes its own worst enemy in the postseason. This year, the Ravens had a potential league MVP, a league-high nine Pro Bowl selections and a league-high-tying four first-team All-Pros.
Yet, despite that and all the momentum they took into the playoffs, the Ravens again couldn’t get it done. Sunday’s ending was all too familiar and all too painful.
“I have to get over this, because we’re right there,” Jackson said. “I’m tired of being right there, we need to punch it in. We need to punch in that ticket.”
(Photo: Tina MacIntyre-Yee / USA Today via Imagn Images)
