Written by Childs Walker at Baltimore Sun.com
) The Ravens can’t be a good team if they can’t put away lousy opponents at home.
Just a few years ago, the Ravens were one of the surest bets in the NFL when playing a poor team at home. Stick that opponent with a rookie quarterback, and John Harbaugh’s crew was unbeatable.
That era is over.
If we had any doubt, the Ravens screamed it out in bold letters on Sunday. They did their best to lose to the lowly Bears in regulation. Then they lost to them again after a miraculous special teams performance pushed the game into overtime.
A team with playoff aspirations should not need two return touchdowns to defend its home turf against a 1-4 opponent coming to town with the league’s 27th best offense. And those two return touchdowns, weird and spectacular as they were, still didn’t do the trick.
So it goes when you’re stuck with an offense that hands away points with fumbles and botched catches, that can’t capitalize on the stops delivered by a still-solid defense.
Despite a decent effort by quarterback Joe Flacco, the Baltimore offense scored zero touchdowns for itself and served the Bears two scores on a platter.
It was a dispiriting step back after the offense played its best game of the season the previous week in Oakland.
A skeptic could look at the Ravens through six games and say they rode an unrealistic turnover margin to two early wins and beat a Raiders team without its star quarterback. They got smashed by the Jaguars and Steelers, and now they’ve lost at home to a flat-out bad opponent.
It’s impossible to say which team will crawl out of the mediocre AFC North. But the Ravens do not have the resume of a legitimate contender.
To continue reading this article, click here.
