Leave it to the 2025 Baltimore Ravens to finally win a game with the season on the line — only for everyone to be talking about the mysterious circumstances surrounding why someone didn’t play.

To hear John Harbaugh tell it, the reason the Ravens wrongly listed Lamar Jackson at full participation for Friday’s practice is a simple misunderstanding of the injury rules.

“I don’t know those particular rules,” he said. “I think, in their defense, he practiced a full practice. I think they felt like, because he did the same number of reps [as he usually does], it was a full practice. But when you dig in and you read the rule, at the end of the day, it wasn’t right. So, that’s what it was.”

Who knows what Harbaugh, general manager Eric DeCosta and senior vice president of communications Chad Steele (who by NFL rules is responsible for ensuring correct participation information is disseminated) were discussing Friday afternoon in an unusually prolonged post-practice conversation before Harbaugh addressed the media. But I’m guessing it didn’t involve consulting a rule book.

The guidelines provided to NFL teams actually could not be more clear. Jackson should have never been given a full participant designation.

“A player who participates in individual drills, but for medical reasons does not take his normal repetitions during the team portion of practice and is assigned to the scout team should be listed as ‘Limited Participation,’” the rule reads. “Participation on the scout team, no matter how extensive ... would not alter the player’s proper designation as ‘Limited Participation.’”

When asked for clarification on how the incorrect status was reported to the league, Steele deferred to the organization’s statement on Saturday that the Ravens had changed Jackson’s status after conferring with the league.

The Ravens shouldn’t have given their fans false hope that Jackson might actually play. As distasteful as legalized sports gambling and secondary ticket markets can be, these economic forces make transparency all the more important so regular folks don’t get gouged — or at least gouged any more than usual.

Harbaugh defended the organization from the gaffe, saying incorrectly reporting an injury status wouldn’t give the Ravens any extra help: “Nobody is trying to hide anything. There’s no advantage to be gained with that.”

Except that when the Ravens don’t have to report injuries, they don’t — precisely because it helps muddy the water for opponents. When asked in September about the seriousness of an injury to Kyle Van Noy, Harbaugh only said it was not season-ending: “There’s really no advantage for us in sharing that information today for our opponent. So [I will] probably stay away from it.”

It’s also worth noting that the snafu actually did give the Ravens an advantage. The Bears reportedly prepared for Jackson to start, with safety Jaquan Brisker telling media “it was a big difference” to switch gears from prepping for Tyler Huntley instead.

It’s a careless self-own that will almost certainly cost the Ravens money, and at its most extreme a draft pick. If it helped the Ravens win the 30-16 game with playoff-extinguishing implications, maybe a relieved Baltimore group might feel that the misdirection was worth it in the end.

But the mistake hints at a larger issue for the Ravens that isn’t so quickly resolved by paying a fine.

Do any of these guys have a strong understanding of Lamar Jackson’s approach to recovering from his hamstring injury? Do the Ravens, as an organization, have any reliable way to anticipate what Jackson will do next?

Anyone who has followed Jackson for the last few years understands he’s extremely private and sometimes mercurial. His mom is his business manager. He represents himself in contract negotiations. He rarely does one-on-one tell-all interviews outside of lifestyle pieces like he did for GQ last year. For all of Jackson’s incredible talent, it seems like there’s volumes that the outside world has never quite cracked.

That’s well and good when it comes to one’s personal life, but when the inscrutable practices carry over on the field, there’s a different feeling to it. When Jackson ran out for Wednesday’s practice last week 20 minutes after it had started, was anyone on that field expecting him there? A handful of his teammates reacted with apparent surprise.

Jackson plays into this sense of mystery with unsatisfying disclosures about his health. While he implied that he made the decision not to play against the Bears (“Only I understand my body”), when asked how close he was to playing on Sunday, he was frustratingly opaque: “I don’t know. I can’t call it.”

What Jackson is really saying with those responses is only he can know when he’s healthy enough to play, and he’s not sharing that information freely.

When it comes to the Ravens’ handling of his injury status, is this part of the problem? Do they always know what’s going on?

The Ravens’ murky updates on Jackson are nothing new. This was a problem in 2022, when Harbaugh (who in fairness is sometimes asked to speak to issues the front office should probably be addressing) sounded positive about Jackson’s return from a knee injury — but he never played again that year.

But the recurring cycle raises questions about how the Ravens, who seem to have more issues with their franchise quarterback’s health updates than any other player’s, communicate with the organization’s top pillar.

This has to fall on Jackson’s shoulders, too — teammates and coaches rely on him to be available and accurately convey his readiness to play. But it’s so head-scratching that a player who has been in the building for seven years now still seems to vex the coaches and front office folks who are charged with keeping him healthy and happy. It feels like an outlier among pro franchises that it’s so hard to properly set expectations for Jackson’s availability, especially in such high-stakes games.

It’s natural that fans and everyone else are going to want much more out of this preseason Super Bowl favorite that is now just 2-5. And undoubtedly the Ravens themselves have helped set the bar so high that the current troubles do, sometimes, feel a bit like the sky is falling.

But asking for a straightforward assessment of the entrenched starting quarterback doesn’t feel like much of a stretch. This is supposed to be the most important relationship with a player the Ravens have, yet half the time, it feels like they’re guessing, too.

It’s something Jackson and the Ravens have to consider, especially with an expected offseason contract negotiation coming up. The communication and transparency, perhaps even between Jackson and the Ravens themselves, needs to be better than it has been for the last three or four years.

The upside of Jackson is as good as just about anyone in the NFL. But on the other side of the ledger, too often it feels like all of us are being left in the dark.