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The way John Jenkins remembers it, one of the weirdest NFL games in recent memory was not supposed to turn out so spectacularly weird.

“Pretty much the game plan was like any game plan,” Jenkins said Wednesday, casting his mind back to November 2021. He was a reserve defensive lineman for the 2-7 Dolphins then, and “Thursday Night Football” was coming to Miami for a Week 10 matchup against the 6-2 Ravens.

Nobody expected the Dolphins to win. The Ravens had Lamar Jackson at quarterback. Miami had Jacoby Brissett and an injured Tua Tagovailoa.

“You’re trying to play hard,” recalled Jenkins, now in his first year with the Ravens. “You’re amped because a team is coming in on Thursday night and pretty much think they can embarrass you, right? Rightfully so.”

The game was indeed an embarrassment. But it was Miami’s defense that inflicted it. In a 22-10 loss in his native South Florida, Jackson was sacked four times, hit seven times and went 26-for-43 for 238 yards, a touchdown and an interception, unable to solve the relentless “Cover 0” riddles that Dolphins coach Brian Flores had posed.

At no point in Jackson’s Ravens career had he ever faced a defense so predictable. Yet Jackson and then-offensive coordinator Greg Roman were almost powerless against it. Excluding a kneel-down drive at the end of the first half, the Ravens punted on seven straight possessions over the second and third quarters. They didn’t score a touchdown until late in the fourth. Jackson grew so frustrated in the second half that he vented animatedly on the sideline.

“We didn’t handle the blitz well at all,” coach John Harbaugh said after the game. “We just did a poor job of it. The plan that we had wasn’t up to par.”

Four years later, as the Ravens (3-5) prepare to face the Minnesota Vikings (4-4) and a Flores-coordinated defense for the first time since their meeting at Hard Rock Stadium, the game stands as a milepost in Jackson’s development. He is now one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks against the blitz, one of the hardest to fool before or after the snap. He has so many of the answers that eluded him early in his career.

Even Wednesday, Jackson was alert to the possibility that Flores, one of the NFL’s most creative defensive play callers, could give him a completely different test inside U.S. Bank Stadium.

“Just prepare for anything,” he said. “That was like way [back] in 2021, I believe. We can’t focus on that. We’ve got to focus on everything, because we don’t know — they might play a zone [coverage] game. We’ve just got to be prepared for everything.”

Four years ago, Jackson and the Ravens had prepared for the Dolphins’ Cover 0 looks — threatening an all-out blitz before the snap, with man coverage across the board and no safety help — over their short week of practice. They were expecting pressure.

Other Ravens opponents had given Flores something of a blueprint. In a Week 4 blowout win over the Denver Broncos, Jackson went just 2-for-7 for 11 yards and was sacked once against Cover 0, according to Sports Info Solutions. Three weeks later, in a blowout loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, Jackson was 1-for-4 for 3 yards against the coverage.

Both defenses had waited until after the first quarter to test Jackson. Flores waited until the end of the Ravens’ first drive. On third-and-9, Jackson was hit by an unblocked defensive back as he lofted a pass to the back of the end zone for wide receiver Sammy Watkins. The ball was catchable. Watkins seemed to give up on it. It fell incomplete. A bad omen.

That was all the encouragement Flores needed. Like a gamer repeating an unstoppable move, he went back to Cover 0 looks over and over and over again. The Ravens ran 70 plays that night; Jackson, by one count, saw Cover 0 on 40 of them.

None of Roman’s counters seemed to work. He called wide receiver screens, only for the Dolphins to snuff them out quickly. Designed handoffs went nowhere. Option plays and rollouts were wiped out. Early-down struggles doomed the Ravens to one third-and-long after another; after the first quarter, they didn’t see a third-and-4 or closer until five minutes remained in the game.

“I just knew that we found a chink in the armor at the time,” Jenkins said, “and we were able to exploit it, right?”

The pressure on Jackson was constant. According to ESPN, Flores sent 24 defensive back blitzes after him, the most any quarterback had faced in a game since 2019. On 12 drop-backs, two DBs blitzed Jackson at once, the most in any game since 2010. On five other drop-backs, three DBs blitzed at once, the most in any game over the previous 15 seasons.

There was an elegant simplicity to Flores’ Cover 0 strategy. At the snap, Miami’s defensive front would engage the offensive linemen across from them. Then, depending on how the Ravens had adjusted their protection to account for the potential unblocked defender, one or two Dolphins defenders would quickly drop into shallow zones, muddying Jackson’s throwing windows over the middle. Most plays didn’t play out like true Cover 0 blitzes, but the effect on the Ravens’ pocket was the same.

“It’s the old saying: ‘If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,’” Jenkins said. “You always hear, ‘Football is an easy sport. Just make it simple.’ And at the time, that’s what happened. That was the result of making the game simple.”

In the fourth quarter, the Ravens’ passing game finally found a rhythm with a handful of quick out-breaking routes, but too late. Jackson’s final throw was a red-zone interception, hurried by another unblocked pressure.

The Ravens’ season soon spiraled out of control. With Jackson sidelined by an ankle injury, they lost their final six games and missed the playoffs for the first time since he became a full-time starter. A year later, after another uneven season on offense and against the blitz, Harbaugh replaced Roman with Todd Monken.

The results were immediate. Monken’s partnership with Jackson has produced one NFL Most Valuable Player award (and nearly two) and one of the league’s best blitz-beating attacks. Jackson, taking what Monken has called a “very intentional” approach to preparing for pressure packages, led all starting quarterbacks last season in passing yards against the blitz (1,490). He finished fourth in both accuracy (68.3%) and yards per attempt (9.1) and averaged an absurd 0.39 expected points added per attempt against five or more pass rushers, according to SIS.

This year, playing behind a struggling offensive line, Jackson’s sack rate against the blitz has nearly doubled, from 4% to 7.7%. But his accuracy (73.3%), yards per attempt (9.5) and touchdown rate (15.6%) have all leveled up from a record-breaking 2024.

“He’s gotten better each and every year at seeing the game,” tight end Mark Andrews said Wednesday. “He sees the full picture of everything. … [He’s] able to get the ball out to the open guy, time after time, blitz after blitz. I think he’s continued to get better and better. It’s tough to blitz a guy like that because of how good he is with, obviously, his arm, but his feet, too."

As Jackson has evolved, so has Flores. What the Vikings lack in their volume of Cover 0 blitzes — they rank 20th league-wide in usage rate (3.1%), well behind the fourth-place Ravens (5.6%), according to FTN — they more than make up for with their pre-snap creativity. In Minnesota’s season opener against the Chicago Bears, Flores showed a Cover 0 look on one third down, with his DBs guarding the first-down sticks, only to shape-shift into a two-deep coverage shell just moments before the ball was snapped to quarterback Caleb Williams.

Two weeks later, Flores showed Bengals quarterback Jake Browning a Cover 0 look on another third down, only to have three would-be blitzers drop back 15 yards from the line of scrimmage before the snap, the coverage possibilities changing by the second.

This Vikings defense has not throttled opponents as often as it did last year — it enters Week 10 ranked just 15th in opponent-adjusted efficiency, according to FTN — but Flores can still leave quarterbacks as bamboozled as Jackson was four years ago. Harbaugh on Monday called that loss to Miami “a key game in the evolution of the offense, for sure,” showing where their armor was weakest.

On Sunday, the Ravens will need Jackson to prove how far their offense has come, how much he’s learned. Or else another season could soon be on the brink.

“You have to be prepared for everything,” Harbaugh said. “Offensively, we have all the tools to do that. Lamar, he’s been doing really well with that really for a long time now, but we’re going to have to be on point. This game is going to be a challenge that way.”