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The Ravens unraveled in all phases in a 37-20 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday. A hamstring injury to quarterback Lamar Jackson took the day from dispiriting to potentially nightmarish. Here are five things we learned from the game.

Here we are, the season from hell

What would constitute maximum devastation for the Ravens and their fans, who had seemed fed up and haunted even before the team took the field in Kansas City? An injury-fueled defensive collapse against Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs, who relish reminding the Ravens how scary they’re not? Utter failure to adapt to the puzzles crafted by Kansas City defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo? A 1-3 start with each defeat feeling more resounding than the one before?

All of that happened Sunday, and all of it felt like a violent liver punch to players and fans who entered this month feeling 2025 might be the Ravens’ year.

But nothing compared to the sight of Jackson plastered to the sideline with a wrap on his injured right hamstring.

If there was a reason for Baltimore football partisans to retain hope for their unraveling season, Jackson was it: the most brilliant playmaker in his franchise’s 30-season history and the one man who makes his teammates feel they’re never out of any game.

We don’t know how long Jackson will be out, so definitive pronouncements will have to wait. But the mere picture of him unable to compete was enough to invite dark thoughts about how low this season could sink.

A month ago, pundits lined up to declare the Ravens the favorite to win Super Bowl 60. That’s out the window. It took all of four games for a projected juggernaut to be reduced to a desperate team with despairing fans.

“The Ravens, you’re like, ‘They’re going to be fine.’ But If Lamar’s out, there’s no guarantee you’re going to make the playoffs,” CBS analyst Tony Romo summarized as the network’s cameras captured Jackson’s glum expression in the waning moments.

The Ravens started 1-3 just once previously in John Harbaugh’s 18 seasons as coach, and they finished that year, 2015, well out of the playoff race at 5-11. An injury to quarterback Joe Flacco sealed their tale of woe.

If Jackson is out just a few weeks (or not even), it’s difficult to imagine this year’s team falling that far. If he’s gone longer, no degree of misery is inconceivable.

If the worst happens, could sweeping change be around the corner? Could a losing season prompt owner Steve Bisciotti to decide the Ravens have gone as far as they can under Harbaugh?

Though many fans have reached the breaking point with their head coach and his staff, Bisciotti abhors rash action. Harbaugh will get his chance to dig out of this hole, to repair his team on the fly as he did in the late stages of the Ravens’ 2012 Super Bowl run and after an 0-2 start to last season. But Sunday’s loss and the accompanying injuries were bad enough to invite apocalyptic thoughts.

“I’m concerned, but I’m not overwhelmed by it,” Harbaugh said of the 1-3 start. “We’ve played — the three losses are against probably three of the top teams in the league, for sure. That’s just the hand we’ve been dealt, but it doesn’t really matter. We have to win the next game.”

This team was headed in the wrong direction going into the showdown with the Chiefs, who’d also been humbled by a 1-2 start. But the Ravens’ concerns in the wake of their 38-30 loss to Detroit felt almost innocent compared to the abyss they’re facing now. With Jackson’s status uncertain and the defense in shambles, it’s not clear they have the tools to reverse course, at least not immediately.

The Ravens’ defense does not have the front-line talent to compete right now

After linebacker Roquan Smith trudged to the locker room flanked by team doctors, the Ravens were down six defensive starters, with Travis Jones, Kyle Van Noy, Broderick Washington and Nnamdi Madubuike either inactive or on injured reserve and cornerback Marlon Humphrey having already exited with a calf injury.

Left amid the ashes, with more than a half of football to play, was a defense more suited to start a preseason game than to face the great Mahomes and offensive mastermind Andy Reid.

The Ravens couldn’t pressure, couldn’t close inside running lanes, couldn’t cover the middle of the field and couldn’t take the ball away.

They didn’t have much luck in those areas even when they had Smith, Jones and Humphrey a week earlier against the Lions, but this felt more hopeless. The NFL is, above all, a talent league, and the Ravens don’t have enough to compete right now. It’s a shock, given the lofty expectations for this defense coming into the season, but there’s no arguing with the evidence.

A Chiefs attack that had spent three weeks stuck in grind-it-out mud was reborn, scoring on seven of its first eight possessions.

The Ravens have given up 133 points through four games, the most in team history and more than they allowed over any four-game stretch in 2021 or 2024, two recent seasons in which their defenses did not live up to the stingy tradition established by Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, etc.

“The product that we’re putting on the field right now is not up to par with what the Ravens have been in the past and have been in the recent past,” said safety Kyle Hamilton, one of the few defensive stalwarts still standing. “I think we know that. We’re trying our best to correct it, but obviously, something is wrong, so it’s up to all of us to try and fix that.”

Somehow, the picture grew even more horrifying in the fourth quarter, when cornerback Nate Wiggins, one of the few genuine bright spots from the last month, lay on the field clutching his right arm after a third-down hit. The game was lost by then, but nothing could stop the damage from metastasizing.

Where aren’t the Ravens decimated by injury?

Their troubles started on the interior, with Madubuike, Jones and Washington missing at the start of the day. Veterans John Jenkins and Brent Urban started, but C.J. Okoye and Josh Tupou, both called up from the practice squad, saw early action as the Ravens tried everything to mount a competent defense. The young fill-ins were hardly the worst performers on the field, but a poor Kansas City rushing attack kept the chains moving with 118 yards.

Smith hadn’t played well against Detroit and wasn’t off to a good start against the Chiefs, but he’s levels above Trenton Simpson or rookie Teddye Buchanan as a defensive fulcrum.

The pass rush, whether schemed by coordinator Zach Orr or relying on edge defenders Odafe Oweh, Tavius Robinson and Mike Green, has failed to create any discomfort for the three top quarterbacks the Ravens have faced: Mahomes, the Lions’ Jared Goff and the Bills’ Josh Allen. Van Noy, who practiced Friday, can’t return soon enough.

The secondary, now potentially down Humphrey and Wiggins, has struggled with communication lapses and poor tackling. Turnovers, which the Ravens gabbed about obsessively in the offseason, have remained elusive.

Calls for Orr’s removal will intensify this week, an unhappy result for anyone who admired him as a Ravens linebreaker and saw great promise in his work overhauling last season’s defense. Orr can’t be blamed for the injuries that have robbed him of All-Pro talent, but it is dismaying to watch his group start another season looking so out of sorts and so in need of basic repairs.

Even before Jackson hurt his hamstring, Spagnuolo was back in his head

Jackson threw his first interception of the season in the face of a trademark Spagnuolo blitz, judging incorrectly that tight end Mark Andrews could outfight linebacker Leo Chenal for an imprecise ball.

He looked genuinely rattled on the Ravens’ next drive, taking two delays of game and an intentional grounding that buried them at third-and-26. The combination of deafening crowd noise and Spagnuolo’s unrelenting blitzes undid the two-time Most Valuable Player, a reminder that no opponent bedevils Jackson quite like Kansas City.

His personal bugbear was back when the Ravens went for a fourth-and-1 in their own territory late in the first half. This time, the pressure came straight up the middle and Jackson could only fling the ball out of bounds.

Harbaugh didn’t defend the Ravens’ play calling on that and other short-yardage downs in the first half, when the game was still hanging in the balance.

“Maybe we have to do a better job of game-planning in those plays,” he acknowledged. “That’s what I would say. I think that we need to put our guys in better positions and give them opportunities to make plays in those situations, because in a game like this, you have to be aggressive. You have to go for stuff.”

Linebackers Nick Bolton and Chenal were the tips of the pressure, deployed by Spagnuolu as spies who could trap Jackson in the pocket or sprint at him once the sea of blockers parted. The Ravens’ inability to counter that strategy, similar to the one used by Detroit six days earlier, was a black mark for Jackson and offensive coordinator Todd Monken.

Monken’s offense, as orchestrated by Jackson, might still be the NFL’s most beautiful, balanced machine in its best moments. We glimpsed that briefly as the Ravens marched to a touchdown on nine plays to start their afternoon in Kansas City.

But the reality is their best moments come few and far between against a Chiefs defense that has handed Jackson some of his most stinging defeats (1-6 against Kansas City in his career). The Ravens always say they know what’s coming from Spagnuolo, that it’s a simple matter of execution. Why then do the venerable coordinator and his smart, talented defenders put Jackson on his back foot again and again?

If the wrap on Jackson’s hamstring will be the enduring image from this defeat, we can’t forget the earlier pictures of him slamming his helmet on the sideline after the Chiefs stopped him again.

It didn’t help that left tackle Ronnie Stanley couldn’t stay in the game after he tried to give it a go on his injured ankle. He’s Jackson’s most important protector. But this was about more than a shaky offensive line.

Marlon Humphrey looked like a liability before his injury

Humphrey was called for a 15-yard face mask on Kansas City’s first drive and torched by Xavier Worthy for a 37-yard catch on the Chiefs’ second.

Six days earlier, he’d played one of the poorest games of his career against the Lions, committing a holding penalty and then still watching helplessly as ace slot receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown dusted him on a crucial fourth-down conversion. “We’re just not very good,” Humphrey said afterward, building on his recent campaign to hold the Baltimore defense, and himself, accountable.

The 29-year-old badly wanted to make it right in Kansas City, yet the Chiefs picked on him with impunity. One play, it was Worthy’s speed. The next, it was tight end Travis Kelce’s size and unmatched feel for finding crevices. Humphrey found answers for neither, and then he was gone, clutching at his calf in the end zone before he limped off.

Humphrey deservedly made his fourth Pro Bowl last season and seemed set for a strong follow-up, with Wiggins, Chidobe Awuzie and Jaire Alexander (at some point) on hand to allow him to play the slot, where he thrives. He keeps himself in impeccable shape and practiced as diligently as any Raven throughout training camp.

But he has been one of the team’s worst starting defenders through four weeks and now he’s hurt, leading to inevitable questions about how much elite football he has left. Humphrey is the dean of the Ravens’ defense, with a 2026 salary cap number north of $26 million. He has earned some benefit of the doubt, but it’s also fair to wonder if his best work down the line might come at safety, where he’d be less responsible for matching steps with the likes of Worthy and St. Brown. Former Raven Rod Woodson extended his Pro Bowl shelf life with such a switch.

Humphrey has said there can be no sacred cows on the defense, that players who don’t meet the team’s standards cannot be on the field. He surely hoped those words would never apply to him, but they might if he can’t put this stretch, probably the roughest of his career, behind him.

If the Ravens are going to salvage their season, the schedule is about to help

It’s worth remembering that a lot of us thought 2-2 would be an acceptable start given a September schedule that featured trips to Buffalo and Kansas City sandwiched around a home date with the high-octane Lions.

Now, 1-3 is worse, and as we’ve discussed, the arrow for this team is pointing aggressively downward given its injury woes and the nature of its last two defeats.

That said, if the Ravens get back a few of their wounded stars and regain any semblance of defensive footing, they’ll have a chance to go on a winning streak, with three straight home games up next and dates against offensively challenged foes such as the Texans, Bears, Dolphins, Vikings and Browns. An early bye week, coming after home games against Houston and the Rams, is actually their friend given how many key players need recovery time.

The Ravens are also helped by their divisional context. They’re two games behind the Steelers in the AFC North, but Pittsburgh’s record belies its serious cracks on both sides of the ball. Meanwhile, the Browns are squandering an excellent defense with a hopeless offense led by Flacco (or whichever rookie replaces him), and the Bengals will be without franchise quarterback Joe Burrow until at least mid-December. The Ravens don’t have to be great or even particularly good to remain afloat in such a tepid pool.

Now all of this lukewarm optimism will become moot if Jackson is out for an extended period. The Ravens still have Derrick Henry and an above-average collection of pass catchers, but all of their magic begins and ends with No. 8.

With him, the path ahead is jagged but manageable. Without him? Well, we don’t even want to talk about that.