The Baltimore Ravens are 7-8 after Sunday’s loss, and their playoff fate hangs in the balance of needing to beat the Packers Saturday night, have Pittsburgh lose to Cleveland Sunday, and then defeat the Steelers in Week 18 to win the AFC North on a tiebreaker.
A loss in either game would mark the first losing season here since 2021, and just the third in the John Harbaugh era – but also a stark drop from 13 wins, an AFC Title Game appearance, and Lamar Jackson MVP in 2023, and 12 wins and a second straight division crown last year.
Not great in a year where the Ravens replaced most of their defensive assistants and promoted Wille Taggart to assistant head coach and pass game coordinator, and if you ask Jason La Canfora – like The Sports Junkies did Tuesday morning on sister station 106.7 The Fan in DC – the performances on both sides of the ball could be enough to make a change at the top of both siloes.
“You could make the case that both coordinators should be fired,” JLC said, “but, like, when you get to that situation where it's like, is it going to be one coordinator, or two coordinators, and the team's been underachieving and some of these terrible sorts of trends and traits seem to be embedded in your culture, then it might be time to reboot.”
And tat could mean perhaps the end of the Harbaugh era after 18 years…or even GM Eric DeCosta, VP of Player Personnel George Kokinis, and maybe more in a front office that has been together in some form since the beginning of the Ozzie Newsome era almost a quarter-century ago?
“My only thing is, for me, you need to fire the GM too, and you need to clean house; you need to get everybody out of here who's living on the laurels of what was accomplished10 years ago when Ozzie Newsome was still in charge,” JLC said. “Like, you want to truly change your culture, you want to build your teams differently, you want to admit all the faults and failures in multiple off-seasons and multiple trade deadlines that brought you here and is wasting the best years of Lamar's career, then you need to get everybody out of here, and you need to start over.”