LOMBARDI'S WAY: The Ravens '07 season is looking frighteningly familiar

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Lombardi's Way - LOMBARDI'S WAY: The Ravens '07 season is looking frighteningly familiar

Posted On: 10/1/07

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Tony Lombardi

LOMBARDI'S WAY: The Ravens '07 season is looking frighteningly familiar

Sometimes the truth hurts and the truth is the Ravens are not a very good football team right now. We’ve read the hype. We’ve believed the hype. Certainly the Ravens themselves believe the hype but at the end of the day, that’s all it is – hype.

This team is beginning to frighteningly resemble the one that self-destructed in 2005. You know the team that talked the talk, didn’t walk the walk yet carried malice in their hearts. It’s a scary case of déjà vu here folks and what makes the thought even scarier, is the apparent absence of urgency amongst the players.

Down by 21 with 13:41 left in the game, the Ravens stared at a very steep and slippery slope. They were challenged to score three touchdowns in less than a quarter – a daunting task for a vertically deficient offense that had only scored 4 touchdowns in the previous 15 quarters.

Yet despite the desperation apparent to everyone but McNair, Billick & Co., the Ravens methodically went in and out of the offensive huddle. Sure they did drive 85 yards to close the gap to 27-13 but the 13 plays they required ran off 6:27 of vital game clock. Even when they got the ball back with 5:30 to go at their own 19 yard line, they hardly resembled a team fighting for survival in the game. The tempo between snaps despite the no-huddle approach was far too care free and regularly chewed up 20-25 seconds between snaps.

Hello…is there anybody in there?

Is there anyone home?

Steve McNair shows the look of someone who has become comfortably numb.

The dink and dunk is more like dink and flunk. And please save the excuses that he’s battling a groin injury. McNair said it wasn’t a factor so why should we believe that it was. So if the groin isn’t a factor per the man who is dealing with the pain or lack thereof, then we are free to judge his performance on the field. And save the first half of last week’s game against the Cardinals, Steve McNair has been a bad quarterback dating all the way back to the last regular season game of 2006.

Since then (including a QB rating of 106.7 against the Cardinals) McNair has an average QB rating of 73.8 while throwing only 2 touchdown passes in the five starts to go with 5 interceptions and four lost fumbles.

No worries, right? There’s plenty of time to fix it, right?

Wrong!

Five games of ineffective play at quarterback is enough to send the lynch mob after Kyle Boller. Yet with McNair, it’s as though the problems will magically go away.

Hey anyone up for a bowl of Lucky Charms?

Let’s face it, too many of the Ravens are casually dismissing the early season blunders. Even when trouble in paradise first started to rear its ugly head during the preseason and then again in the Cincinnati game, Brian Billick insinuated that studying that mess too long wasn’t productive. So let’s pretend it didn’t happen, right coach?

This team is in denial. The good ship lollipop isn’t going to suddenly appear and make this mess disappear. It’s going to take a ton of work, some very serious self evaluation and a true and not feigned sense of urgency.

Some say the season is a marathon. The truth is, it’s more like a series of 16 sprints and if two of the Ravens’ opponents hadn’t tripped during those sprints, they’d be staring at a 0-4 record right now.

For far too long, Billick has ridden the backs of a stout defense and the leg of Matt Stover. Clearly there are serious cracks in the defense and when they struggle and Matt Stover misses two field goals in the same game, Billick is exposed. His offense has no answer.

Last year the Ravens had no running game. This season they’ve found a running game yet Billick lacks the patience to establish it. Instead they keep dinking and dunking and throwing the ball short of the sticks on third down as though they have absolutely no clue of down and distance particularly in the red zone.

They have become so incredibly predictable from the 20 yard line in. A fade to the outside, a run to the middle, a lob pass between the uprights to the back of the end zone to Todd Heap. For the Ravens, it isn’t the red zone. It’s the dead zone!

Fortunately the team isn’t 0-4. Instead they are 2-2 and they are just a game out in the AFC North, thank you very much Arizona Cardinals.

But they better get it going now. Not in two weeks when they return to M&T – now! And like anything else in life, the first step in correcting a problem or in the Ravens’ case problems, is to admit that you have them. I’m not sure Billick gets that part of the correction equation.

When asked about his passive challenge of Jamal Lewis’ obvious failure to break the plane of the goal line, Billick failed to take the blame, preferring instead to redirect it.

"There were a number of things," Billick said. "[The refs] told me it was second down when it was third down. They told me it was third down when it was second. The officiating matched our play."

Like that has anything to do with not throwing the red flag.

Speaking of throwing, Ray Lewis tossed a few temper tantrums as he was engaged in some animated discussions with a few coaches. After the game he had this to say:

"Sooner of later, you can't trick everybody. Line up and play football. That's it. Line up and beat the man in front of you. There ain't nothing to be concerned about. Bottom line, sooner or later you have to line up and beat the man in front of you. If you're doing that, you've got nothing to hold your head down about."

Perhaps Ray has a sense of urgency but judging from his performance on the field, his words are nothing more than chest-pounding bravado. What’s next, throwing the defensive tackles under the bus – again?

It’s far too early to press any panic buttons provided of course the Ravens fix their obvious problems.

"At some point, you have to have a sense of urgency," linebacker Bart Scott said. "I'm not one to think we're 2-2 and we're OK. You say that all year and then you're sitting outside of the playoffs, saying, 'What happened?'”

Hopefully not much more of what happened on Sunday in Cleveland.

"We just got our butts beat, plain and simple," Billick said. "What happens when you get your butt whupped like that, you try to correct it and move on to the next game. There's no magical answers than that."

You’ve got to do more than try Coach.

Otherwise, it could be another season like the one in ‘o5.

It could be déjà vu all over again.