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At one point in our conversation late Sunday afternoon, maybe a half hour after his Ravens had finished dismantling the Lions, John Harbaugh made a point that could’ve been taken as a cliché, a way of tamping down the hype from this sort of win.
“What is this? Week 7? Week 8?” he asks. “We’ve got a lot of football left to play.”
You’ve heard it before, I’m sure.
But, as Harbaugh kept talking, it became clearer and clearer how the point he was trying to make was more deeply rooted. That, in this case, the Ravens’ 38–6 rout of Detroit didn’t prove anything about his team’s toughness when measured against the similarly rugged Lions. That the way his team played Sunday wasn’t some culmination of anything. That Baltimore wasn’t trying to prove anything to the pundits ignoring its presence.
This was much simpler than that, and a story Harbaugh told about the waning moments of the game would illustrate where his Ravens are at perfectly.
Baltimore and Detroit were in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter, when Harbaugh noticed his defensive staff hadn’t gotten veteran corner Rock Ya-Sin into the game. So Harbaugh sought secondary coach and defensive pass-game coordinator Chris Hewitt out on the sideline.
Harbaugh said, smirking at Hewitt.
Hewitt smiled back and sent Ya-Sin in with 3:08 left, and the final score already on the board. The Lions immediately threw at Ya-Sin, who knocked away a go-route to Jameson Williams, a deep out to Amon-Ra St. Brown, and he tackled St. Brown short of the sticks on third down. It gave Harbaugh more ammo for later. It also, in a roundabout way, illustrated what’s happening in Baltimore.
“We’re able to kind of get after each other in a good way, that nobody takes personally,” Harbaugh says. “And everybody knows that we love each other. When you know where you stand with one another, you can just be so much more honest and real in the relationships.”
In turn, Harbaugh believes, with players and coaches able to critique and criticize, and playfully poke each other, too, a team can get better faster.
That, truthfully, is what Harbaugh sees in his 2023 Ravens. He knows, of course, the team’s thorough trashing of Detroit—as well as the Lions were playing coming in—will turn heads and draw headlines. But this one was different from the Ravens outlasting the Bengals in Cincinnati in Week 2, or blasting the Browns in Week 4, because the team is different now.
And that’s the whole thing here—the Ravens are getting better, and getting better fast. So Harbaugh wasn’t going to use Week 7 to make any declarative statements.
But surely, he can see where his team is going. Now, the rest of us can, too.
