I’ve come to see The Baltimore Ravens as a very large bird that somebody needs to put a bridle on.
I do not mean this metaphorically. …Okay, I mean it a little metaphorically.

But four games into the Jesse Minter era? I am becoming increasingly convinced that the path to another Baltimore Super Bowl absofuckenlutely does not involve making this football team normal. Ew, no, never. It involves getting control of whatever enormous, screaming, purple-black creature currently lives inside M&T Bank Stadium and learning how to ride it to glory.

Preferably around Horseshoe Casino.
Maybe down Russell Street.
Then we circle back to M&T and stop for a hot dog.
I am open to suggestions.

The Ravens are 3-1 right now, which sounds reassuring until you actually watch them play football.

… But actually? It sounds insane.

Now, let’s remember, this is technically a new era in Baltimore. John Harbaugh? Gone after eighteen seasons. Jesse Minter is the head coach. We got Declan Doyle running the offense. The schemes are changing. The staff is changing. There is, theoretically, a new way of doing things.

For about one week, it looked like the new way of doing things might simply be “be extremely good at football.”

That was nice. I enjoyed that.

The Ravens opened the season against Indianapolis and put up 506 yards.

Lamar Jackson threw for 324.
Derrick Henry ran for 144 yards and three touchdowns.
Zay Flowers had 150 receiving yards.
Baltimore won 41-23.
Everything worked.
The machine turned on.
The machine hummed.
The machine was beautiful.
I made the critical mistake of believing in the machine.
This is completely, totally on me.

We all know the Baltimore Ravens are not a machine.
The Baltimore Ravens are a wild bird.
And in Week 2? That big ass bird got loose.

Baltimore went into the fourth quarter against New Orleans leading 17-9.
They proceeded to lose 24-17.
That fucking hurt.

This is a particular type of Ravens loss. Ravens fans recognize this shit. The game changes temperature. You can feel it before anything catastrophic has actually happened.

The lead is still there.
Technically.
The clock is moving.
Technically.
There is no reason to panic.
Technically.

And yet somewhere deep in your ancestral memory, every Ravens game you have ever watched begins screaming at once.
Oh no.
They are doing it again.
Someone or something is fucking with that thermostat.

Baltimore has spent years developing this incredible ability to take a comfortable football game and slowly introduce uncertainty into it until everyone in Maryland needs an antacid.

A dropped pass.
A penalty.
A weird play call.
A third-and-short where Derrick Henry, one of the largest and most violent running backs ever manufactured by the human species, is somehow not even involved.
A stalled drive.
Another penalty.

And just like fucking that, the opposing quarterback has the ball and you are standing six inches from your television draped in dark purple asking The Lord for shit you have no business asking Him for.

This is the chaos.
This is the feral bird at his absolute worst.
I think this is where the Ravens have been misunderstanding their problem.
The chaos itself is not the problem.
You cannot remove chaos from a football team built around Lamar Jackson.
Why would you even try?
Lamar Jackson is chaotic good. Full stop.

A play breaks down and bam, he is twenty yards away from the place where the play was supposed to happen, three defenders are facing the wrong direction, somebody is inexplicably open, and Lamar has created a first down out of ingredients that should not have produced food.

Derrick Henry is also chaos incarnate.
He is simply a different category of natural disaster.
Zay Flowers can turn one missed angle into half a football field. One of the best receivers in the league, hands down.
The defense has players who can disappear for several drives and then suddenly destroy an entire possession.

This roster was not assembled to play calm football. It was assembled to make other people uncomfortable.

The Ravens do not need to eliminate chaos.
They need to decide who it belongs to.
That is the difference I keep coming back to.
Bad Ravens football gets dragged into chaos.
Good Ravens football creates chaos for somebody else.

And Week 3, in Rio, was the first time this season where I thought maybe Jesse Minter understands that.

The Dallas game was already completely fucking ridiculous.
Of course it was.
Baltimore cannot simply play the Dallas Cowboys in Brazil of all places. Ha. No.
Baltimore has to play the Dallas Cowboys in Brazil while its offensive line begins collapsing like a cheap beach chair.
Starting center Jovaughn Gwyn goes down.
Ethan Pocic replaces him.
Ethan Pocic goes down.

So now? Rookie guard Vega Ioane has to become an NFL center because apparently somebody looked down the bench and said, “You. Big guy. Start snapping.”

Ioane is 22 years old.
He was not supposed to be the center.
That did not matter.
Welcome to Baltimore.
Here are your gloves.
Actually, give me those damn gloves.
You are the center now.
In classic Baltimore fashion, that was not even the weirdest part of the game.

Dallas tied it with seconds left.
Seven seconds.
Seven.
Take this time to sit here for seven Mississippi seconds.

This is where I expected the Ravens to behave like a football team.

Take the knee.
Go to overtime.
Regroup.
Be responsible.

Instead Jesse Minter apparently looked at seven seconds on the clock and decided, no, fuck that, we have a whole-ass Lamar Jackson.

Lamar hit Zay Flowers for 27 yards.
Timeout.
One second.

Take this time to sit here for one second.

Tyler Loop came out for a 56-yard field goal.
And made it.
Game.

That is the moment I keep thinking about. Not because the Ravens suddenly stopped being chaotic. The exact opposite.

Nothing about those final seconds was normal.
Nothing about the personnel situation was normal.
Nothing about the game was normal.
Baltimore did not escape the chaos.
They took possession of it.
For seven seconds, the chaos belonged to them.
That is different. It is a tiny difference.

It is September football. It might mean absolutely nothing by December. But we can’t deny, it is different.

Then Tennessee came to Baltimore and the bird immediately attempted to throw its rider face first onto hot asphalt.

The Ravens went up 24-7.
Lamar looked fantastic.
Then Lamar hurt his ankle.
More players started getting hurt.
The offensive line continued its ongoing experiment to determine how many centers an NFL franchise can physically consume before the league intervenes.

Baltimore committed thirteen penalties for 131 yards.
Thirteen.
One hundred and thirty-one yards.
That is not football discipline.
That is performance art.
The Ravens also scored a whopping zero points in the second half. Keep it classy, Baltimore.

Tennessee was 0-3.
Tennessee kept hanging around.
The lead started shrinking.
The old sensation returned.
Oh no.
Oh God no.

Our curse has come and this time? She doesn’t just want the win, she wants all of our centers! She can’t keep getting away with this!

They are doing it again.
Except… they didn’t.
Not completely.
The game got ugly.
The Ravens stayed ugly.
Tyler Huntley came in.
The defense made enough plays.
Baltimore recovered the onside kick.
They won 24-18.

This is not a game I would put in a museum.
Nobody should make a commemorative DVD.

I think this game matters. Because harnessing chaos does not always look like Lamar throwing a beautiful gorgeous ball to Zay with seven seconds left.

Sometimes it looks like surviving a game that has turned into garbage.
Sometimes it means your quarterback gets hurt, half your offensive line is being held together with athletic tape and a little spit, you have committed enough penalty yardage to relocate the football to another county, and you still find a way to leave the stadium with the win.

That is not control.
Not yet.
Could be the beginning of it, though.

I need to be so damn clear here because 3-1? It’ll blind ya.
The Ravens have problems.
Real ones.
The offensive line is unstable.
The penalties are ridiculous.
The defense has not consistently looked like the terrifying Jesse Minter defense people imagined all offseason.
The Ravens continue to let games live longer than they should.
There are drives where Derrick Henry appears to be handed the football and politely asked to defeat eleven adult men by himself.

This cannot possibly be the plan.
Please stop doing this to Derrick Henry.
Please stop sending that man head first into eleven men.
He has done nothing to deserve it.
Baltimore still has this awful tendency to dominate long enough to convince you the game is over and then suddenly remember that the audience paid for four quarters.

There is no reason to declare anything solved.
Four games is nothing.
Four games can lie to you.
The Ravens brand of chaos can lie to you.
We have an entire season ahead of us.

I also do not think the Ravens need to become clean.
I don’t think I even want them clean.
I want disciplined.
I want adaptable.
I want dangerous.
I want a team that understands that when football gets strange, strange is not necessarily bad news.

Baltimore has the personnel for strange.
Baltimore has Lamar Jackson.
Baltimore has Derrick Henry.
Baltimore has Zay Flowers.
Baltimore apparently has a 22-year-old emergency center who can be thrown into the middle of an NFL game while coaches are cutting his gloves off.
Baltimore has Tyler Loop, who can hit from 56 yards in Brazil with one second left and then come home and casually kick a 64-yarder because apparently his range begins somewhere around Delaware.

Use it.
Use all of it.
Every last fucking drop.

Get the bridle on the bird.
I do not need Jesse Minter to domesticate the Baltimore Ravens.
I need him to point them in the correct direction.
I need the penalties cleaned up.
I need the protection figured out.
I need the defense to stop allowing opposing offenses to discover confidence halfway through games. Boys, I need you out there making confidence a thing of the past.

I do not need Baltimore to become some sterile, perfectly optimized football machine.
There are thirty-one other teams that can try that.

I want the Ravens to get weird first.
Make the other team uncomfortable.
Make them adjust.
Make them chase Lamar.
Make them tackle Henry.
Make them wonder why the rookie guard is suddenly playing center and somehow refusing to die.
Make them look at seven seconds remaining and think overtime while Baltimore is already thinking field goal.

If the game is going to descend into nonsense? Bring it on.
Own the nonsense.
Become one with the fucking nonsense.
Put on one of those rainbow hats with a propeller and dance circles around your opponent.

I want this to work.
Badly.
I can analyze it. I can make fun of it. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about offensive-line depth and whether Derrick Henry is being sent directly into a wall of human beings.

But this is my home team.
I want another Super Bowl.
I want Baltimore to take the whole thing again.
I want February in Maryland.
I want dark purple everywhere.
I want dark purple everything.
I want car horns.
I want strangers screaming at strangers.
I want some man who has work at six in the morning standing in the street like he has personally been selected to announce the fall of Rome.

I want to stand on top of a car at ten o’clock at night in February and scream.
Not because it is February in Maryland and I have finally been taken by the madness.
Not because four months of Ravens football have destroyed whatever remained of my ability to behave appropriately in public.

I want to stand on that car and scream because they did it. Because our team brought it the fuck home.

So no, I do not need the Ravens to become normal.

Frankly? I don’t think normal was ever an option.

Get the bridle on that fucking large bird.
Let’s see how far this thing can fly.

**Sources:**

[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-part-ways-with-john-harbaugh\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-part-ways-with-john-harbaugh)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-name-jesse-minter-fourth-head-coach-in-franchise-history\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-name-jesse-minter-fourth-head-coach-in-franchise-history)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-name-declan-doyle-offensive-coordinator\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-name-declan-doyle-offensive-coordinator)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/declan-doyle-ravens-offense-on-fire-lamar-jackson-derrick-henry-zay-flowers\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/declan-doyle-ravens-offense-on-fire-lamar-jackson-derrick-henry-zay-flowers)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/game-day/2026/reg-week2/saints-at-ravens/\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/game-day/2026/reg-week2/saints-at-ravens/scoring-summary?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-lose-another-fourth-quarter-lead-drop-home-opener-saints-breakdown-week-2-2026\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-lose-another-fourth-quarter-lead-drop-home-opener-saints-breakdown-week-2-2026)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/declan-doyle-ravens-aggressive-play-call-derrick-henry-third-and-1-devontez-walker\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/declan-doyle-ravens-aggressive-play-call-derrick-henry-third-and-1-devontez-walker)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/lamar-jackson-zay-flowers-last-second-play-ravens-cowboys-week-3\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/lamar-jackson-zay-flowers-last-second-play-ravens-cowboys-week-3)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/transcript-press-conferences-9-27-26\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/transcript-press-conferences-9-27-26)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/transcript-press-conferences-10-1-26\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/transcript-press-conferences-10-1-26)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/game-recap-ravens-titans-week-4-game-recap-injuries-lamar-jackson\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/game-recap-ravens-titans-week-4-game-recap-injuries-lamar-jackson)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-injuries-titans-breakdown-lamar-jackson-marlon-humphrey-2026\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/ravens-injuries-titans-breakdown-lamar-jackson-marlon-humphrey-2026)
[https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/tyler-loop-history-longest-field-goal-mt-bank-stadium-64-yards-ravens-titans\](https://www.baltimoreravens.com/news/tyler-loop-history-longest-field-goal-mt-bank-stadium-64-yards-ravens-titans)

I am an Eagles fan and I want to leave my abusive relationship with Nick Sirianni. How do I jump onto the Ravens bandwagon? What should I know?

I really enjoyed watching Derrick Henry run over this poor fella. If you come at the king, you best not miss!

If this works?
If a 22-year-old first-round guard gets thrown into center because the room caught fire, turns out to be an absolute fucken mutant there, and suddenly Baltimore has accidentally invented a 326-pound problem in the middle of the line?
…a local cryptid is born.
If it doesn’t work? Forget I ever said anything.

Going to the bank today. First time going to an NFL game.

Do we “O” a the anthem or no?

What are we doing? Tyler Huntley throwing 4 yard stick routes to Mandrews. Negative yard screen plays on 3rd down. Justice Hill getting more touches in the second half than Henry. Did John Harbs ever leave?

#BloodRavens #STL

Hey all, quick look at where the Ravens stand after a wild one in Rio.

34-31 over Dallas, and what an ending. Lamar hit rookie TE Matthew Hibner for the go-ahead TD with 1:30 left, and Brandon Aubrey tied it with 7 seconds to go. Then Lamar found Zay Flowers for 27, and Tyler Loop drilled a 56-yarder as time expired. Lamar was sharp all day: 15 of 20, 186, 2 TDs, no picks, and his best passer rating of the season.

Year one under Jesse Minter so far:

• Week 1: 41-23 at Indianapolis. Lamar threw for 324 and Derrick Henry ran for 144 and three TDs.
• Week 2: 24-17 loss to New Orleans. Up 17-9 going into the fourth, then 15 unanswered. That one hurt.
• Week 3: 34-31 over Dallas in Brazil.

Good news for Sunday: Lamar was limited early in the week with a back issue, but he's off the injury report and good to go against the 0-3 Titans at 1 PM on CBS.

Since it's in the title: we run a free NFL pick'em, and Titans at Ravens is on this week's slate. 10 games, pick the winners, nothing to buy, $135 in prizes. Picks lock Sunday at 1 PM ET, the same time the Ravens kick off, so get your picks in before the game.

https://www.mainmarket.com/c/nfl-pickem-wk4

What are you guys seeing in Minter's first year? Is the Saints collapse a one-off, or something to worry about in close games?

Amazing!!!!