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The Bizarro Ravens made their 2025 debut Monday night, and what a show they put on. Do you like a sack-prone quarterback, a wobbly ground game, a porous run defense and a string of high-leverage failures? Does a team that can’t uphold its proud traditions or realize its awesome potential in the most basic ways interest you? If so, M&T Bank Stadium was the place to be in Week 3.

What other explanations are there for the Ravens’ 38-30 loss to the Detroit Lions? Under coach John Harbaugh, the Ravens have lost games, but not like that. Not at home. Not in prime time. Not these Ravens.

“Our guys fought, but we didn’t do the things we needed to do to win the game,” Harbaugh said after his team dropped to 1-2, with a crucial Week 4 road trip to the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium looming.

That might be the understatement of this young season. The Ravens looked like the Ravens for spurts Monday night, equal parts fearsome and fierce in their all-black uniforms, but not for long. The Bizarro Ravens took their place time and again, offering only a pale imitation of a would-be Super Bowl contender.

No player or position was immune from the sudden identity crisis. The biggest offenders were the franchise building blocks believed to be among the most stable.

Quarterback Lamar Jackson went 21-for-27 for 288 yards and three touchdowns, but he also tied a career high by taking seven sacks, three of which effectively ended drives. Sometimes his pass protection and receivers failed him; other times he held on to the ball for too long. The results were the same either way: Jackson’s been sacked 12 times in three games this season after being sacked 23 times in 17 games last season.

“I’m going to read the coverage out and then try to make something happen,” said Jackson, who noted that the Lions (2-1) limited his scrambling with a spy on some plays.

Running back Derrick Henry finished with just 50 yards on 12 carries — and 14 yards on eight carries after the first quarter. The Ravens’ run blocking, which had paved the way for 146 yards (5.4 per carry) in a 38-6 win over the Lions two years ago, was again inconsistent.

Last season, the Ravens’ ground game was nearly automatic in goal-line scenarios. This year, they’ve needed help from Jackson’s arm. In their Week 2 win over the Cleveland Browns, the Ravens couldn’t score from first-and-goal at the 1-yard line. On Monday, they went backward — again. Second-and-goal at the 1 turned into a turnover on downs late in the second quarter, wasted points that loomed large late.

“When you’re down that close, there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to just run the ball in,” right tackle Roger Rosengarten said.

Nor should there have been any reason to doubt Henry’s ball security. But he has fumbled in three straight games to start the season, losing two at the start of fourth-quarter possessions. The Lions turned their short field Monday into a field-goal drive that extended their lead to 31-24.

That set the stage for perhaps the Ravens’ biggest failing. Their run defense had started “Monday Night Football” with promise, stopping running backs Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery behind the line of scrimmage on their second carries of the game. Maybe the Ravens could withstand the losses of Pro Bowl defensive lineman Nnamdi Madubuike and starting outside linebacker Kyle Van Noy. They led the NFL in run defense last year, after all.

Or maybe not. Detroit rushed for 224 yards (5.9 per carry) and four touchdowns, the third-most yards the Ravens have allowed in a single game in franchise history. Montgomery had a 72-yard sprint, almost three times as long as the longest run the Ravens surrendered all last season. He later added a 31-yard rushing score that gave the Lions a 38-24 lead late in the fourth quarter, sending thousands of Ravens fans to the exits, unsure of how to consider a team that suddenly looked vulnerable.

“We’re blessed to have guys who can make big plays, Pro Bowl and All-Pro guys all over the field,” said star safety Kyle Hamilton, who lamented his poor tackling on a night when almost all of his teammates struggled. According to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, the defense missed 20 tackles in the loss. “And shame on us if we need a Pro Bowl guy to play good defense. I think we have a plethora of guys who have accolades, but there are teams in the league that don’t have that and play good defense.”

Not the Ravens. Not on Monday night. Too often they struggled to get the big problems fixed or the small stuff accounted for. Kicker Tyler Loop was flagged for dropping another kickoff short of the landing zone. Cornerback Marlon Humphrey was twice penalized in coverage and allowed a touchdown pass to wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown. Quarterback Jared Goff wasn’t sacked once. The defense didn’t get a stop on fourth down, allowing conversions from 1, 2 and 3 yards out. The Lions reached the end zone on each extended drive.

Asked to assess the Ravens’ defense, which gave up at least 38 points for the second time in three weeks and allowed 426 yards, Humphrey stammered before coming to a blunt conclusion: “We’re just not very good.”

Or at least not as good as the Lions.

“We’ve got enough guys that were here the last time,” Detroit coach Dan Campbell said, referring to the team’s 2023 thrashing in Baltimore, “and they know you’ve got to be blind not to see what that team does and how they play, the physicality, the toughness, the nature of everything they’re about and their identity. You’d better be ready. You’d better be ready. You can’t come in here and tiptoe. So we were ready.”

The Ravens weren’t. Or maybe the Bizarro Ravens were. The team’s performance seemed to come from a house of mirrors, normalcy rendered into something abnormal, even ugly.

Maybe Week 4 will look a little more conventional for the Ravens. It has to. They know it can’t look like it did Monday night.