Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh told his quarterback Lamar Jackson to “stand tall” despite his team’s 17-10 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in Sunday’s AFC Championship game.
Jackson helped the Ravens dominate the conference in the regular season and Baltimore were strongly fancied to reach the Super Bowl with their quarterback the favourite for the Most Valuable Player award.
But Jackson, whose career has been a story of playoff disappointments, since he took over as starting quarterback in 2018, struggled to impose himself against the blitzing Chiefs defense.
Jackson, threw for one touchdown, one interception and 272 yards, completing 20 of 37 passes and suffering four sacks.
Normally a dual-threat, he was restricted to 54 yards on the ground from his eight carries.
But Harbaugh was quick to back his man.
“I told him to stand up tall. He’s had a great season. His performance today was all heart,” the coach told the post-game press conference.
“He fought. He went out there and gave it everything he had, so I don’t think that’s anything that I’d be disappointed in,” he said.
Jackson himself said he was left ‘mad’ about the loss because the team didn’t play up to their usual standards when it mattered the most.
“We’ve got the disposition that we were one game away from the Super Bowl that we all have been talking about all season, and we fell short,” he said.
Offense to blame
Jackson praised the defense for restricting the Chiefs potent offense to just 17 points and said the blame for the loss lay with the offense.
“We didn’t put nothing on the board. We scored once. That’s not like us, you know. We drove the ball down the field, that’s cool, but we got to put points on the board.
“I feel like my team are just angry, you know, not frustrated. We are just angry because we know how hard we worked to get here,” he added.
In the regular season, Jackson threw for 3,678 yards and 24 touchdowns with career highs in completion percentage (67.2) and yards per completion (8). He also led the Ravens (821 yards) in rushing and had five rushing touchdowns.
There is likely to be a focus on the contrast between those numbers and Jackson’s performance in the championship game but linebacker Roquan Smith defended the quarterback.
“There’s always gonna be questions, comments, opinions…people are gonna do that day in and day out. So, who cares?
“Honestly, that’s how I think about it. I really don’t care about the opinions of him nor the team. At the end of the day, he’s the leader of this team, led the offense all year long,” he added.
“So, it’s nothing (to be) dropping our head about, we didn’t get the job done at the end of the day. That’s truly what it is. It’s not pointing fingers at the end of the day. We didn’t get the job done as a team.
“It’s like (you can) point fingers at each 11 of us on the offensive side of the ball, as well on the defensive side of the ball.
“It’s no one man, no one man show by any means, it’s a team thing. It’s a team that gets the job done,” he said.
Harbaugh said he had told his team not to forget the way they had performed throughout the season.
“I was proud of them. I’m proud of the season that they had. I feel like it was a team that had a lot of challenges. I don’t think it was a team that was too highly touted coming into the season by the pundits and the prognosticators and all that,” he said.
“I think they proved a lot of people wrong all year. The quarterback made a statement all year,” he said.
