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The Ravens turned the ball over five times and scored just 14 points against the worst defense in football, falling to the Cincinnati Bengals in the most defaulting fashion imaginable. Here are five things we learned from the game.

Now, we panic about the state of Lamar Jackson and the Ravens’ offense

All around M&T Bank Stadium, jaws dropped for the wrong reason.

How did the two-time NFL Most Valuable Player, under pressure but not hit, drop the ball at the end of a simple passing motion? That fumble was but the tip of a horror-show performance in which he missed open receivers on passes that are supposed to be second nature, in which he seemed utterly bereft of solutions.

This wasn’t on his offensive line or the game plan or his receivers. He didn’t even look as injured as he had in previous weeks.

Once again in this season of mounting frustration, we could only wonder: What’s wrong with Lamar Jackson?

He seemed at a loss for answers during his postgame news conference, returning again and again to the same refrain: “I’ve just got to be consistent.”

When an athlete who has been so inspired over eight professional seasons suddenly cannot access his magic, or even his baseline competence, what does he do? To whom does he turn when the eyes of the football world are trained on his failings?

The one possibility no one considered going into this season was that the Ravens might come up short because their greatest player could not find himself.

“I don’t miss those,” Jackson said at one point, when asked about his many errant throws, one of them a simple flip to running back Keaton Mitchell in the flat.

Asked if the problem is mechanical, he said nothing has changed there, adding that he’s throwing accurately in practice.

Jackson didn’t start the game on a road to nowhere. In fact, the Ravens seemed ready to have their way with one of the worst NFL defenses of the last half-century (the worst as measured by DVOA). They took seven plays to cut through the Bengals on their opening touchdown drive. Jackson ran and threw for first downs. A string of tacklers failed to corral Derrick Henry after he sliced around left end on his way to a 28-yard score.

Other than a third-quarter touchdown drive that featured creative run calls, it was the last time Jackson and the Ravens looked on-rhythm all night.

Several times in the first half, Jackson had ample time to throw, zeroed in on open receivers and simply missed.

He delivered a few vintage moments, such as the play, late in the second quarter, when he whirled away from pressure, scrambled left, faked out another defender and found tight end Isaiah Likely 30 yards downfield. It wasn’t his fault that his touchdown pass to Zay Flowers, 36 yards to beat tough coverage, was erased by a penalty.

Even those flashes of his old brilliance were quickly followed by plays that undermined them. The best player on the field was the problem.

Coach John Harbaugh and Jackson’s teammates scoffed at questions about whether he’ll find his way back to greatness. They’ve watched him rebound from past failures to play quarterback at a level few have matched. What choice do they have but to keep the faith? Everything is built around Jackson, whom the Ravens hope to sign to another record-setting contract extension in the offseason.

“It’s one of those days that you have,” safety Kyle Hamilton said. “The defense had a lot of those days early in the year.”

“He’s our guy,” said tight end Mark Andrews, who has been with Jackson through each of those eight seasons. “Full trust.”

As if to hammer that point home, he clasped hands with Jackson before they exited the losing locker room.

Asked how he can rediscover that elusive consistency, Jackson gave an answer that might make sense only to someone who has bet on himself, and won, for 28 years: “Just be me. Just be Lamar.”

On a night when they were both bad and unlucky, the Ravens could not overcome a few brutal twists

Early in the fourth quarter, with his team 15 yards from a touchdown that would have cut Cincinnati’s lead to five, Jackson looked toward the end zone, only for the paw of 6-foot-5 defensive end Myles Murphy to loom directly in the path of his throw. The ball caromed into the arms of Bengals linebacker Demetrius Knight Jr., because of course it did.

It was that kind of cursed Thanksgiving evening for the Ravens, who finally lived too dangerously against an opponent they were supposed to beat.

You can’t turn the ball over five times and expect to win. Sometimes, NFL calculus is as simple as that.

“That’s the story of the game,” Harbaugh said. “You just can’t do it.”

The self-inflicted agony began when Likely fumbled a step before he would have broken the goal line for a 44-yard touchdown. Instead of leading 14-6, the Ravens trailed 9-7 after the Bengals accepted Likely’s gift and marched 74 yards for a field goal. Brutal swing.

The Ravens ate another terrible break on their next possession, when officials called an iffy offensive pass interference on Flowers — he stuck out his arm and made light contact with his defender — to wipe out another touchdown. The Ravens then failed to lay a hand (much less a shoulder) on Bengals defensive end Joseph Ossai as he bolted in from the left side to drop Jackson on third down.

It seemed their defense might save them with a series of desperate stands. Twice Jackson fumbled to set the Bengals up in the red zone. The Ravens stopped them at the 2-yard line on one and held them to a field goal on the other.

Eventually, exhaustion set in as the defense was forced to stay on the field for more than 80 plays. That’s the attrition created by so many turnovers.

A final fumble by Flowers — the Ravens put the ball on the ground four times and somehow lost all four — put an end to their fading hopes.

Jackson acknowledged the weirdness of their fumbles but declined to blame poor fortune, saying, “We’ve got to hold on to the ball.”

Andrews put the best spin he could on it, saying, “Those are controllable. That’s the beauty of them.” Hard-earned perspective from a player whose fumble and drop helped seal the Ravens’ playoff loss to the Bills in January.

What else can they say, really? The Ravens have won when they’ve gotten the better of the takeaway battle. They have lost spectacularly when they haven’t. It’s the ultimate NFL cliché for a reason.

The score didn’t tell the story for the Ravens’ defense

The Ravens were in deep trouble.

Ossai had just powered past right tackle Roger Rosengarten to knock the ball from Jackson’s grip and set the Bengals up at the Baltimore 2-yard line.

That would have meant an automatic touchdown in the first six weeks of the season. But the Ravens’ defense has fully bought into its post-bye, don’t-break identity. Four times, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow took shotgun snaps; four times, the Ravens gave him nothing.

They did it again just before halftime. Jackson let the ball slip from his hand — his arm was moving forward, but the officials ruled it a fumble — at the Baltimore 15-yard line, giving the Bengals a golden chance to go up 16-7. Instead, Ravens cornerback Chidobe Awuzie made a sharp open-field tackle to limit the Bengals to 4 yards on first down, and Burrow threw incomplete against feisty coverage on second and third downs. A comically messy half ended with the Ravens trailing just 12-7.

“The game could’ve gotten out of hand early if we weren’t doing that,” Hamilton said of those red-zone stands.

He and the team’s other defensive leaders blamed themselves for faltering as the game went on. Burrow led the Bengals to a pair of touchdown drives in the third quarter. On a few plays, his top target, Ja’Marr Chase, was simply too good. He beat Marlon Humphrey’s suffocating coverage for a 43-yard catch to put Cincinnati in scoring position in the second quarter.

But Burrow completed just 52.2% of his passes, and Chase caught just seven balls on 14 targets. Cincinnati averaged just 3.9 yards on 33 rushing attempts. Those are winning defensive numbers.

It’s hard for any defense to prevent touchdowns when its opponent runs 80 offensive plays. “We’re putting our defense on the field too much,” Jackson said. “Can’t have it.”

“We’ve got to be better for those guys,” Andrews said.

Linebacker Roquan Smith wasn’t about to shift blame, however. Asked where the Ravens go from here, he said every player has to ask himself, “Did I do all that I could to make us win?”

Such accountability helps explain why the defense, written off after six dreadful weeks, stood up to so many difficult situations Thursday. Perhaps that evolution can be a lesson to the offense as it tries to spring back from its nadir.

Chidobe Awuzie just became one of the most important players on the roster

The Ravens lost one of their most important young defenders, cornerback Nate Wiggins, to a foot injury midway through Thursday’s loss.

They weren’t the same after Wiggins, the team’s best option to go step for step with speedy wide receivers, exited. Imagine how grisly the picture might have looked without the 30-year-old Awuzie making stellar plays against his former team.

Harbaugh said Wiggins’ injury isn’t serious, but every week is precious at this juncture, and if the Ravens have to face the Pittsburgh Steelers without a starting cornerback, they’ll be mighty glad Awuzie is there to step into the breach.

After the veteran cornerback played an outsize role in the Ravens’ recent win in Cleveland, Harbaugh told general manager Eric DeCosta on the flight home that Awuzie might be “his most underrated signing.”

Recall that Awuzie was the far less hyped of two cornerback additions. Jaire Alexander was supposed to be the one who would bring moxie and playmaking juice to a secondary that needed both. Instead, a lingering knee injury undercut Alexander’s Ravens career before it really got started. Awuzie is the guy delivering picture-perfect reps to break up potential big plays.

He did it multiple times against the Bengals, living in Chase’s personal space on a deep route, making a beautiful open-field tackle in the red zone and breaking up a pass with Cincinnati driving in the third quarter.

In a season rife with injury and disappointment, Awuzie has more than held up his end of the bargain.

Now the Ravens prepare for their most important game of the year

All the work they’ve done clawing back from 1-5 was for this, a chance to lead the AFC North with a month to go.

As unlikely as that scenario seemed in mid-October and as painful a setback as they suffered Thursday, the Ravens still cling to what’s possible as they prepare to host Pittsburgh on the first Sunday in December.

“Everything we want to accomplish is still in front of us,” Harbaugh said.

It’s a game that could either return them to pole position in the division or come close to ruining their playoff chances. So much will swing on this one matchup against the foe that has stood in their way more than any other.

The Steelers face a difficult test Sunday against the Bills. Lose and they would come to Baltimore at risk of falling a game behind with four to play. Pressure would shift away from the Ravens, who have been in win-or-go-home mode for six weeks.

On the flip side, if the Steelers beat Buffalo, they would arrive at M&T Bank Stadium looking to push the Ravens to the brink of a failed season.

Steelers games are rarely easy, even when the Ravens are favored and playing at home. But Pittsburgh doesn’t move the ball in chunks, doesn’t tackle well and relies on a quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who’s about to turn 42 with a fracture in his nonthrowing wrist. If the Steelers don’t create turnovers — they ranked third in the league in takeaways coming into this week — they don’t beat quality opponents.

The Ravens hammered their archrival the last time they played, running for 299 yards in a 28-14 victory in the wild-card round of the playoffs. They ran for 220 when they beat Pittsburgh three weeks before that. They’ll be the fresher team coming off a 10-day break and playing their third straight home game. They have every reason to be confident.

But how can we assume they’ll play with that kind of abandon coming off three weeks of offensive futility and a comically frustrating loss to defensively inept Cincinnati? It’s just as likely they’ll be tense and haunted when they return to work next week.

We’re past the point of wondering if this team has greatness in it. There’s no evidence it does. But the Ravens yearn to survive; we saw that during the five-game winning streak which ended Thursday night. They’ll have to summon that instinct against Pittsburgh or face oblivion. The stakes couldn’t be higher.