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The Lions repeatedly gashed a wounded Ravens defense and dropped Lamar Jackson seven times in a thorough butt kicking worse than the 38-30 score suggested. Here are five things we learned from the Monday night game.

The Ravens earned a kick in the teeth, and it might do them good

There’s no rationalizing this defeat, no way for the Ravens to say, “We were the better team, but …”

It’s difficult to remember the last time an opponent came to Baltimore and handed it to a Jackson-led team on both sides of the ball. The Ravens made mistakes, tons of them, from Derrick Henry’s third fumble in three games to 20 missed tackles. But this wasn’t a story of brilliance undermined by maddening lapses. The Lions were just better.

They ran at the heart of a Baltimore defense diminished by the absences of Kyle Van Noy and especially Nnamdi Madubuike. They picked on the Ravens’ most decorated defenders with nary a hint of fear. They took repeated advantage of the Ravens’ subpar blocking and used spies to keep Jackson from slipping loose to create havoc.

The Lions didn’t shut down the Baltimore offense. No one really does. But they stayed ahead of it most of the night. Never did the Ravens feel like the more punishing, audacious team.

And now they have to sit with the fact that no matter what they believed about themselves coming into the season, no matter how many analysts picked them to win the Super Bowl, they’re not nearly good enough right now.

Maybe that’s what this team needs after two seasons of feeling that only the Ravens could beat the Ravens. Maybe it’s healthy for them to look within and conclude, “We’re not good enough to take anything for granted.”

The franchise’s most successful seasons pivoted on such reckonings. The 2012 Ravens nearly careened off the rails, switching offensive coordinators less than two months before they celebrated amid a shower of Crescent City confetti. The 2000 team went five straight weeks without a touchdown and changed quarterbacks in the process.

If such a change is required for this team, it’s not clear what it might be. But, after their opening collapse in Buffalo and this all-points spanking, sandwiched around a messy win over offensively challenged Cleveland, the Ravens must accept that the time for unforgiving self-examination is here.

Coach John Harbaugh wasn’t ready to speak in sweeping terms immediately after the loss.

Neither was safety Kyle Hamilton, who said he and his fellow defenders fell short at the essence of their jobs: running to the ball and hitting.

“That’s a good football team we just played,” Harbaugh said. “So we go to work on the next tough team we’re going to play and try to find a way to get that win, and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep it simple, lock in on that and go to work.”

But an unusually sober tone prevailed in the postgame locker room as team leaders sat with their disappointment. Few mustered defiant words as they had after previous defeats.

“I feel like Week 1 was a wake-up call, not just this loss,” Jackson said. “Week 1 was a wake-up call. Last week was a wake-up call, because we started off slow last week. And we got beat tonight.”

Yes, they did, and there’s no use pretending everything is fine.

No Nnamdi Madubuike or Kyle Van Noy = uh-oh

A defense that was helpless to stop the Bills’ furious comeback in Week 1 couldn’t afford to hemorrhage talent, much less its best lineman and most productive edge rusher.

But that was the pickle confronting the Ravens as they prepared to host one of the league’s most deadly all-around offenses.

Could coordinator Zach Orr scheme up enough pressure to bother Lions quarterback Jared Goff? Could rookies Mike Green and Aeneas Peebles, coming off promising training camps, perform passable imitations of Van Noy and Madubuike?

The short answer was no.

The Ravens tried a pair of cornerback blitzes on Detroit’s first drive. Goff punished both. He’s as efficient as any thrower in the league when the picture in front of him is clear.

With their conductor operating stress-free, the Lions converted six of their first nine third-down attempts and thus controlled the ball for nearly two-thirds of the first half. Goff was hit just five times all night and sacked not at all. That’s untenable against a quarterback of his quality.

Madubuike’s absence was also felt against the run. The Ravens did a nice job stringing Detroit’s big-play back, Jahmyr Gibbs, out wide, but the Lions repeatedly gashed them on inside runs. David Montgomery finally broke one for 72 yards in the second half to set up a touchdown.

The failure wasn’t only, or even mostly, on the young guys filling in for Madubuike and Van Noy. Hamilton and All-Pro linebacker Roquan Smith played poorly by their standards. So did defensive tackle Travis Jones, who needs to be a monster in the middle for this group to function.

Marlon Humphrey played one of the worst games of his career, missing multiple tackles and getting cooked by Detroit’s top receiver, Amon-Ra St. Brown, on the fourth-down conversion that sealed the Lions’ victory.

“No excuses can be made at this point,” Hamilton said. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

Harbaugh offered no update on Madubuike’s condition after the game, but neck injuries always lead us to fear the worst. It’s a disquieting setback for a young athlete who competes so ferociously and does so much for the players around him. The Ravens don’t have another Madubuike in waiting. There aren’t many like him in the NFL, and we saw the void left in his absence.

That said, the Ravens need more from the other stars who were expected to make their defense one of the best in the league. Doing it against the Browns and 40-year-old Joe Flacco was fine, but Detroit’s offense is the kind the Ravens will need to corral in the postseason. Right now, their defense is nowhere close.

The offensive line has too few reliable parts

One low-key alarming takeaway from the 41-17 win over the Browns was the degree to which Cleveland’s excellent defensive front outplayed the Ravens’ offensive line.

The Ravens had reason to believe they’d do better against a Detroit front seven short on playmakers not named Aidan Hutchinson. The Lions’ strategy of constricting Jackson’s pocket had failed two years earlier, when the Ravens thumped them 38-6. So perhaps this would be a chance to rebuild confidence for a unit depending on three young blockers in right tackle Roger Rosengarten and guards Andrew Vorhees and Daniel Faalele.

The line began its evening in fine form, with picture-perfect blocking on Henry’s 28-yard touchdown run to cap the Ravens’ first drive, but the news grew steadily worse from there.

Like the Browns, the Lions largely smothered the Ravens’ vaunted running game with defenders focused on swarming Henry and tightening the space around Jackson.

The Ravens could not afford empty possessions, so a second-down sack on their second drive of the third quarter felt borderline disastrous. The blame for that one fell on the right side of the line, where Rosengarten is off to an uneven start to his second season. The Lions’ rush bothered Jackson again on third down, forcing an incompletion that effectively put the Detroit offense back in control of the game.

With the Ravens in the red zone on their next possession, looking to tie the game at 28, the Lions dropped Jackson twice in a row to force a field goal. That was a credit to Detroit’s coverage and attention to keeping Jackson in the pocket as much as it was the fault of the line, but there’s no excusing seven total sacks and almost 30 pressures.

Perhaps we did not worry enough about the line coming into the season. Left tackle Ronnie Stanley and center Tyler Linderbaum are minted standouts. But, with Rosengarten suffering growing pains, Vorhees failing to meet expectations and Faalele disappointing as a run blocker, the Ravens haven’t found consistency.

Derrick Henry was at a loss to explain another fumble

We don’t expect to see the greatest running back of this generation obviously shaken by his own failings. But that was Henry’s vibe as he invited reporters to speak with him in the postgame locker room.

He wanted to atone and made no effort to brush off his pain.

He could find no comparison in his long career for what had just happened, another crucial fumble that cost his team its chance to drive for a go-ahead touchdown midway through the fourth quarter. Yes, Hutchinson had made a terrific play, punching the ball from his grasp. But had Henry been gripping it too casually? He couldn’t say.

Henry could only apologize to fans and teammates.

“I didn’t see the guy coming from behind,” he said. “I just have to hold on to the ball. He made the play, and I don’t know. You just have to keep working. That’s all I can think of. It sucks right now. I’m not going to lie to you all.”

No athlete holds himself to a higher standard of preparation. No one has more reason to trust his muscle memory. So what does Henry even do to put this string of fumbles behind him? Does it require mental work as well as physical repetition?

He didn’t seem to know. “It’s just playing through a little adversity,” he said. “But adversity is a terrible thing to waste, so I’m just going to keep going.”

The Ravens won’t stop feeding Henry. They can’t. He’s too great, too essential to everything they do. For the rest of us, it was poignant to watch so mighty a figure confront his fallibility so nakedly.

The Ravens can no longer afford to play little brother to the Kansas City Chiefs

It’s no secret the Chiefs have owned the Ravens since Patrick Mahomes and Jackson became their teams’ starting quarterbacks seven years ago. The teams have met six times in that span, and the Ravens have won once, 36-35 in Week 2 of the 2021 season.

As they prepared to host Kansas City in the 2023 AFC championship game, they had every reason to believe they were the superior team. Every conceivable metric and every game they’d dominated to secure the conference’s No. 1 seed told them so. But, with a trip to the Super Bowl dangling in the air, the Chiefs spent three hours reminding the Ravens and every fan in M&T Bank Stadium that they were still big brother in a rivalry that wasn’t.

If their point wasn’t clear enough, they outlasted the Ravens again in the 2024 season opener.

Which brings us to chapter seven of Mahomes v. Jackson, to be contested Sunday afternoon in Kansas City. No one expected both these perennial contenders to enter 1-2, which adds an unusual note of desperation for Week 4.

Again, football logic tells us the Ravens will go in with major advantages, particularly on offense, where they’ve only grown more explosive while the Chiefs have become an unsightly, dink-and-dunk operation.

Crafty though Mahomes remains, the numbers don’t lie. His attack putters along at 5.2 yards per play. The Ravens average more than 6. Tight end Travis Kelce has made more headlines with his marriage plans than his clutch receptions this year. Rashee Rice, Kansas City’s most dangerous wide receiver, is suspended. Speed demon Xavier Worthy is coming back from a dislocated shoulder.

These aren’t the Chiefs of two years ago, much less five.

So why does every matchup with them still feel like a Rorschach test for the Ravens? It’s not just Jackson’s 1-5 record against the AFC’s reigning king. It’s that the Chiefs represent everything the Ravens do not to the wider football world: grace under pressure, resourcefulness, potential not just met but exceeded.

If the Ravens are to change that narrative, a win in Kansas City would be an apt way to start. The analytics and odds say they’re primed to do it. They need it to flush the doubts inspired by Detroit. This is their moment to stop playing little brother.