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Mark Andrews scored a game-winning touchdown off a glorious remix of the “tush push” after the defense kept the Ravens alive for most of a windswept afternoon in Cleveland as the Ravens won 23-16 and got to .500. Here are five things we learned from the game.

Mark Andrews deserves to go down as an all-time Raven

It’s quite a day when you set your franchise’s all-time receiving record and that’s not your most memorable moment.

Those of us who’ve admired Andrews’ work the last eight seasons could only cackle when he took that direct snap with the game on the line and, instead of diving forward, rolled away from the dumbfounded Browns defense for a 35-yard score.

What inspired mayhem from coordinator Todd Monken and what a beautiful way to remind us how essential Andrews has been to this franchise.

If the Ravens defy the odds by rising from the dead to make the playoffs, Andrews’ touchdown, in what might be his final season with the team, will go down as an indelible lifesaver.

“That was crazy,” quarterback Lamar Jackson said of the play dubbed “Hurricane.” “I was celebrating the whole time. We were practicing [the play] earlier on in the week, and it was looking pretty good. We just needed a couple yards but, for him to go for a touchdown; that was amazing.”

By contrast, the 11-yard pass Andrews caught to vault Derrick Mason in the team record book was the essence of routine. That too was fitting for a player whose greatest gift has been his innate feel for getting open.

We’ve seen Ravens offenses reach previously unimaginable heights over the last eight seasons. Jackson rightly receives most of the credit, but he’ll be the first to say Andrews was the target he trusted most as he developed into an elite professional passer.

He’s not as dependent on No. 89 as he was in 2021, when Andrews made first-team All-Pro. Wide receiver Zay Flowers is clearly the team’s most dangerous receiving threat these days. But Andrews’ hands are as dependable as anyone’s when the Ravens need a first down.

We can say that even after his fumble and drop helped seal the Ravens’ playoff exit last January. Those failures prompted calls for Andrews — a free agent after this season — to be traded. Plenty of fans wanted him gone in exchange for a draft pick as recently as the trade deadline this month.

General manager Eric DeCosta correctly realized that a third-day pick would not outweigh the contributions Andrews might make for a team clinging to postseason ambitions.

By holding on, the Ravens also gave Andrews his chance to pass Mason. It just feels correct for a tight end to hold this franchise’s major receiving records. We know the Ravens’ star-crossed history with drafting and signing wide receivers. We know how aerial production eluded even some of their greatest teams. We know their football architect, Ozzie Newsome, was one of the greatest tight ends in league history.

We can’t know yet if Andrews will achieve his redemptive playoff moment. We can’t know what jersey he’ll wear next season. What we do know is that he’ll enter the Ravens Ring of Honor one day as an emblem of intensity, professionalism and sheer pass-catching acumen. We also know that, on a tense, blustery afternoon in Cleveland, he saved his team’s bacon by making giddy art of the tush push.

The defense won another one

As soon as he saw Cleveland’s final pass hit the ground, swatted down by linebacker Roquan Smith, Harbaugh pulled defensive coordinator Zach Orr into an appreciative hug.

Their embrace summed up the Ravens’ new reality. It’s Orr’s defense — so badly outclassed through six weeks that fans wanted the popular former linebacker fired — keeping them on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ heels in the AFC North.

No, Cleveland’s offense, last in the NFL in yards per play and second to last in scoring, was not a difficult assignment. The Browns started one overwhelmed rookie quarterback, Dillon Gabriel, and replaced him with another, Shedeur Sanders, after Gabriel suffered a head injury.

But three Ravens turnovers and some futile red-zone possessions stacked the deck, meaning the defense had to be almost impermeable for Baltimore to claw back from a 16-10 halftime deficit. Aside from a few Sanders completions on Cleveland’s desperate last drive, Orr’s crew was up to that no-margin-for-error task.

And the story wasn’t all Smith or Kyle Hamilton delivering his usual positionless brilliance.

Unsung veterans John Jenkins and Brent Urban were pillars of power in the middle, helping limit Cleveland’s most dangerous playmaker, rookie running back Quinshon Judkins, to 3.5 yards per carry.

Rookie linebacker Teddye Buchanan was a high-level complement to Smith for a second straight week. Cornerback Chidobe Awuzie, who has made the failure of the Jaire Alexander signing irrelevant, did not put a foot wrong on the outside. Rookie Keyon Martin did good, feisty work filling in for an injured Marlon Humphrey in the slot.

Orr dialed up the right pressures to menace Sanders on third down, understanding the assignment against a hyped rookie rattled by his first taste of NFL aggression.

The defense covered for another deeply frustrating offensive performance. There’s no other way to put it.

Is this formula sustainable? Almost certainly not. The Ravens have figured plenty out on defense, but they’ve had the luxury of doing so against mistake-prone foes with few means to punish them.

That won’t be the case against the Bengals if Joe Burrow is back under center or against the Patriots with Drake Maye and the Packers with Jordan Love.

It won’t be the case in the playoffs if the Ravens get there. Even if we take their defensive improvement at face value, they’re not going to hold the league’s best to 3.5 yards per play or 2-for-14 on third down.

What they have yet to do this season is get their offense and defense humming in unison. This was supposed to be the most balanced team in football. That’s why so many analysts picked the Ravens to win the Super Bowl.

Kudos to the defense for giving this team a foothold as it climbs back from 1-5, but the Ravens are still searching for an all-facets breakout to show us they’re back to being a legit contender.

There’s something very wrong with the red-zone offense

After they scored just two touchdowns on five red-zone chances in Minnesota, the Ravens again settled for three points at the end of an impressive opening drive in Cleveland. It’s where they’ve slipped the most from last season, when they scored on a league-best 74.2% of their red-zone trips.

Their inefficiency in the cramped space near the goal line made sense when Jackson was injured, but now that he’s back, they’re operating with essentially the same playmakers who made them so deadly in 2024. And still defenses keep stuffing Derrick Henry and blanketing Jackson’s targets at a puzzling rate.

We saw it again after Henry busted loose for 59 yards, his longest run of the season, to set up a potential go-ahead touchdown at the start of the fourth quarter. The Browns smothered the great running back on first-and goal and second-and-goal. On third-and-goal, they chased Jackson from the pocket and gave him nothing to look at in the right corner of the end zone. Hello, field goal.

Have the Ravens become too predictable? Is it that Jackson’s mobility is diminished in the wake of the hamstring injury that sidelined him for three games? It’s easier for defenses to key on Henry if they don’t fear a Jackson keeper or rollout.

Or perhaps we should blame an offensive line that can’t move bodies when the defense knows a run is coming and can’t keep an elite pass rusher — they don’t come more elite than the Browns’ Myles Garrett, who finished with four sacks and five tackles for loss — from destroying Jackson’s pocket.

Garrett is a hellish matchup even for a fully healthy Ronnie Stanley, and the Ravens’ left tackle probably isn’t 100% as he tries to play through an ankle injury. On the other side, the fans’ favorite punching bag, right guard Daniel Faalele, struggled through one of his worst performances of the season.

The Ravens’ talent evaluation could not be clearer; they don’t see Ben Cleveland or Corey Bullock or late-to-the-party rookie Emery Jones as superior to Faalele or left guard Andrew Vorhees, both of whom have graded as below-average players at their positions. If they had an exciting lever to pull, they would have done it. But they missed on their preseason calculation that a developing, relatively cheap offensive line would be consistent enough to support another elite offense.

With that unreliable front struggling to protect a Jackson who isn’t making magic with his legs, their offense feels terribly ordinary when it’s time to make the touchdowns.

The Ravens are walking a perilous tightrope

We knew Cleveland would require aid from dark forces to stay in the game and, sure enough, Ravens rookie LaJohntay Wester misread a punt seized by the tricky wind gusting off Lake Erie. His muff handed the Browns first-and-goal from the 6-yard line.

The Ravens held Cleveland to a field goal, but on the second play of Baltimore’s ensuing drive, a Jackson pass bounced off Keaton Mitchell’s hands and into linebacker Devin Bush’s eager grasp. Bush returned it for a touchdown, and just like that, the pitiful Browns — despite their home fans raining boos on Gabriel — led 13-3.

Later in the second quarter, the Ravens gave Cleveland another three points because veteran special teams ace Jake Hummel lunged into the neutral zone in his overeagerness to block a punt.

In the third quarter, after the Ravens seemed to grab momentum with a Nate Wiggins interception deep in Cleveland territory, the Browns immediately answered by deflecting another Jackson pass and, yes, picking it off

You couldn’t make up the goofy crap this team does in AFC North road games.

As a result, the Ravens spent the second half mounting a nerve-racking comeback against an opponent that scored zero offensive touchdowns and completed 11 of 26 passes at a pathetic rate of 4.4 yards per attempt. If the Browns had managed even one substantial drive in the second half, they could have dealt a devastating blow to the Ravens’ playoff chances.

Games like this are going to happen. The Ravens rarely play sparkling football in Cleveland. They certainly didn’t last season, when Jameis Winston handed them a head-smacking 29-24 defeat. But they had so much more room for error a year ago, when they were 5-2 going into that road test.

That’s what a 1-5 start cost them, breathing room to absorb the bizarre slings and arrows that come with AFC North football. And, my lord, they have two games left against the Steelers, true connoisseurs of winning in defiance of logic.

Tyler Loop passed his most important test to date

The rookie kicker had flirted with the uprights too often in recent weeks, nudging a 56-yard attempt wide left as the Ravens attempted to build their lead in a close win in Minnesota. That miss did not end up mattering, but we knew that, at some point, Loop would face a crucial kick in one of the difficult environments endemic to his team’s conference.

His moment arrived in Cleveland, with the Ravens trailing 16-13 in the fourth quarter — 44 yards into a wind that had wrought havoc. Yes, the gusts had calmed by then and, yes, 44 yards is a relative chip shot for Loop. Still, if he was nervous, it would be easy to cut it too close to an upright.

Instead, Loop hit a perfect draw with plenty of distance, moving to 3-for-3 on the day and 19-for-21 on the season. He has yet to be the weapon on long field goals that the Ravens hope he will become, but he has given them no reason to believe they erred in picking him as Justin Tucker’s successor.

With colder weather and many must-win games ahead, Loop’s rookie assessment will only grow more trying. Tucker has served his 10-game suspension and is free to sign with another team. If he ends up making clutch field goals for some rival contender, the comparisons between him and Loop will no longer feel so abstract.

Loop has done an admirable job ignoring the pressure associated with filling those shoes. Will he make his bones, as Tucker did at the end of his rookie year, by drilling field goals with playoff games hanging in the balance? He’s on the right track.