Childs Walker: Are the Ravens blind to their own reality?

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When you’ve spent many years thinking of yourself one way, it’s difficult, painful even, to accept that you’ve become something else.

Pride, stubbornness and sheer inertia work against this evolution in self-awareness.

Rebuilding has long been a dirty word around the Ravens’ offices in Owings Mills. General manager Eric DeCosta, like Ozzie Newsome before him, prefers to retool on the fly, with draft picks and prudent extensions buoying his team from plunging into irrelevance.

This philosophy, never willingly allowing the window to close, has worked.

Whatever frustrations fans might feel regarding the Ravens’ inability to get over the top, they’re almost never an afterthought midway through the season. It’s why their current state — losers of four straight, outscored 117-43 during that stretch — feels so peculiar, so dismal.

Without Lamar Jackson at quarterback, they are, by any metric you choose, plummeting not just out of playoff contention but toward the bottom of the league.

We saw the latest evidence of this bitter truth Thursday, when they were hopelessly outgunned against the Jacksonville Jaguars, averaging a pathetic 3.1 yards per play outside of Justice Hill’s 65-yard garbage-time touchdown run. They displayed few redeeming qualities, making a convincing case that there’s little to be salvaged from a season that will drag on for another two months.

The Ravens aren’t some slumbering giant. They stink. If the last four weeks have taught us anything, it’s that.

Coach Jesse Minter acknowledged as much Monday, saying his team needs a “reset.”

“If you really just say screw all that and look at it realistically, that is what we are right now,” he said of the team’s recent losing streak.

The chasm between what they were supposed to be and what they are has set up a Rorschach test, not just for fans but for the men who run the team.

Is this wayward season a mere hiccup attributable to the superstar quarterback’s ankle and thumb injuries? Think the 1996-97 San Antonio Spurs, who lost 62 games because All-Star center David Robinson was hurt, took advantage of that dip to draft Tim Duncan and won their first NBA championship two years later.

There’s no Duncan equivalent coming to the Ravens in next April’s draft. But they could allow themselves to hit rock bottom over the next eight games and pick an excellent prospect at a key position to accelerate their roster tuneup around Jackson.

Or they could view this as a true inflection point in the history of the franchise, a crossroads at which to ask foundational questions about where they’re headed.

Owner Steve Bisciotti did that to some degree last January, when he fired coach John Harbaugh after 18 years and replaced him with a younger, play-calling defensive specialist in Minter. At the same time he changed one key piece, however, Bisciotti doubled down on his faith in Jackson as on-field leader and DeCosta as chief football architect.

With an even greater failure staring him in the face less than a year later, is it time for Bisciotti to wipe the board clean?

That has never been the Ravens’ way. Even during its most transformative shifts — Art Modell to Bisciotti, Brian Billick to Harbaugh, Joe Flacco to Jackson — the franchise has remained grounded in its own past. The faces changed. The method did not.

But with the 2026 Ravens bearing no resemblance to the contender of a few years ago and Jackson’s intentions beyond this season more inscrutable than ever, perhaps the moment for deeper reckoning has arrived.

Did the Ravens pick the right coach to succeed Harbaugh? Are they built around a player sturdy enough to carry them for the next half-decade (the length of a typical top-of-market quarterback contract)? Has their front office stagnated under DeCosta?

Bisciotti might wrestle with these questions and decide he is, in fact, marching forward with the correct lieutenants. Continuity at the top remains the most likely scenario. But this season has become dire enough that it’s at least worth asking.

The team we saw against the Jaguars can stand (stumble?) alongside the worst in the history of Baltimore professional football. Hello, winless 1982 Colts. Hello, coach-killing 2007 Ravens. You have company.

But here’s a hopeful counterpoint: The bleakest stretches in Ravens history have laid the foundation for some of their best teams.

The 2007 collapse pushed Bisciotti and Newsome to accept that they needed a new coach (Harbaugh) and quarterback (Joe Flacco) to avoid wasting the late primes of Ray Lewis and Ed Reed.

The 2015-17 wilderness years led Harbaugh to reimagine his entire operation around Jackson’s once-in-a-lifetime talents.

In neither case did the Ravens tear the franchise down to its studs. But they did realize some fundamentals had to change.

This feels like another one of those times, even if that just means jettisoning the likes of Roquan Smith, Ronnie Stanley, Marlon Humphrey and Mark Andrews in the offseason.

The rub is that, with the trade deadline at hand, the Ravens aren’t entirely acting like a team that would be better off pointing all roster building toward 2027, when Jackson will be back, assuming he and DeCosta navigate the thorny matter of his next contract.

To wit, the next time they play, against the Los Angeles Chargers on “Monday Night Football,” they’re expected to start 33-year-old Jacoby Brissett at quarterback. They traded for Brissett because they could not stomach going through their final eight games with Joe Fagnano (or Kedon Slovis) leading their offense.

The question is, why not?

Is Brissett, who threw 23 touchdown passes as the Arizona Cardinals’ primary starter last season, more qualified to run a competent NFL offense than Fagnano? He is.

Will he give the Ravens a better chance to steal a win or two over the next month? He will.

Minter called the trade a “much-needed move.”

“I think he’ll operate our offense at a level required to be successful,” he said. “He’ll hold guys accountable.”

But it’s not at all clear that going 7-10 is a better result for the Ravens than going 5-12. Assuming Jackson sticks around, they will be back to chasing a playoff berth in 2027. They will do so without the spending power — they’re projected to be well over the salary cap, with more than 60% of their total going to five players — to hunt big game on the open market. The first round of the draft will be perhaps their best avenue to add a major talent to the fold, on the offensive line or at another understaffed position. Wouldn’t it be better under those circumstances to have as high a pick as possible?

The last time the Ravens fell so hopelessly out of contention, in 2015 when they went 5-11 and lost Flacco to a knee injury, they picked No. 6 the following April. They took Stanley, who’s still their starting left tackle a decade later.

DeCosta loves building through the draft as much as anyone. He knows the star power the Ravens have added on the rare occasions when they’ve picked in the top 10.

So why did he just make a win-now move at quarterback for a team with little chance — 6% before Thursday’s loss, according to FTN’s DVOA projections — to make the postseason?

There are a few possible answers, the most tantalizing being that the Ravens might still think there’s a chance Jackson will return from his thumb injury to play in December. An ESPN report over the weekend said he has told teammates exactly that. Clinging to such hope would be one explanation for asking Brissett to keep them within shouting distance.

The other, less uplifting possibility is that the Ravens have not fully accepted the truth of what they are at this point in 2026. Maybe they want Minter to have a fair shot at a respectable record in his first season. Maybe they think Brissett will give them a more honest chance to evaluate their young blockers and pass catchers. Or maybe it’s too hard to accept that a season marketed on rebirth after 18 years of Harbaugh is instead up in flames with eight games to go.

To be fair to DeCosta, what we saw Thursday night is unacceptable and potentially unhealthy, even for a team well aware that there is no gold at the end of a rainbow. You can’t ask players such as Derrick Henry and Zay Flowers to give their best week after week when your quarterback can’t even function.

No one’s telling Minter’s staff or the players to stop seeking victory. That’s not the way pro football operates. Every person involved has incentive to put good work on film. It’s the only way to keep getting paid in a league that moves on faster than any other. You can’t be half-in.

DeCosta’s in a different spot. The big picture is his job. He’s the one tasked with turning the page on a lost season. Trading for Brissett feels more like a half-measure, a way to keep one foot in the present.

It’s a defensible decision, given how dire Fagnano looked. The trouble is that it could hurt the Ravens’ draft position in 2027 without helping them meaningfully over the remainder of 2026.