Ravens Bully The Packers To Stay Alive With A Frustratingly Dominant Derrick Henry Performance

Michael Reaves. Getty Images.

Yay, Ravens live to see at least one more day.

I mean that was a Derrick Henry asskicking every which way. The kind of performance that you go out and get a guy like that for. Backup quarterback or not, the guy is a force of nature and we made Green Bay feel every bit of that tonight.

It’s just so goddamn frustrating that it took this long to lean on the guy as much as we did tonight. I get that success breeds success and there’s been other games where he hasn’t necessarily shown the signs of dominance like he did from the jump tonight. But that’s kinda the point. You gotta have faith that the dam is going to break if you keep feeding him the rock.

Failure to recognize that sooner is probably going to cost the Ravens their season. I wrote about it in depth after the awful Patriots loss last week and there’s been plenty of other games where between Cooper Rush, Tyler Huntley, and a clearly less than 100% Lamar Jackson where the focal point of the offense should have been 22. Tonight, for the first time all year, it felt like it was unapologetically Derrick Henry’s offense for 60 minutes.

Part of what I think has contributed to a reluctance to lean this heavy on 22 is a panic that there isn’t a strong defense on the other side to complement him. The defense was honestly pretty poor tonight! They lucked out by way of a fumble off their backup QB’s face and a tipped pick from their 3rd string QB. But that’s the entire point! If the Ravens had sooner recognized that their offense isn’t the explosive quick strike team it had been the past two years (or at least didn’t have the pieces healthy enough to be), they would very likely have been in a position to celebrate tonight’s win without reservation and be fired up to go to Pittsburgh for an AFC North title game next week without needing help.

Alas, that’s the hole they’ve dug. Gotta pray Shedeur and Cleveland pull it out of their ass tomorrow and give us our shot.

I don’t expect them to and this fun win will all be for nothing. Maybe I’m wrong and I hope I am. 

What’s done is done and I hope we’ve learned a lesson for the future.

Go Browns (vomit).