The Ravens looked like a Super Bowl contender when they sat 4-1 through five weeks, but the season has rapidly unraveled in Baltimore.
Not only have the Ravens lost four consecutive games to fall below .500, but they don’t know when or even if Lamar Jackson will be back this season after thumb surgery.
Baltimore’s 33-10 loss to the Jaguars on “Thursday Night Football” was a new low point in the Ravens’ season. With Jacoby Brissett coming aboard, can they turn the ship around?
Here’s what you need to know about the Ravens’ path forward.
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How Ravens can still make the playoffs
At 4-5, the Ravens are firmly on the outside-looking-in in the AFC playoff picture, sitting 1.5 games behind the Patriots for the No. 7 seed and 2.5 games behind the Steelers in the AFC North.
Even if you don’t believe in the Browns, the presence of both the Steelers and Bengals in the AFC North makes the path to a division title extraordinarily unlikely for the Ravens. Is the wild-card race still in play? Yes.
Six AFC teams have two or fewer wins, so there are effectively 10 teams competing for seven spots, with the caveat that there is still time for a team like the Texans to make a surge. The two teams above the Ravens in the wild-card race but outside the playoff picture are the Browns and Raiders, who are certainly vulnerable in their own ways.
The wild-card teams look less shakable: the Chiefs and Bengals aren’t likely to collapse unless they are hit by serious injuries. The seventh-seeded Patriots might be more vulnerable, as they continue to deal with injuries to A.J. Brown and other key pieces, but they just went to the Super Bowl last season.
The Ravens would have to finish 6-2 to get to 10 wins, or 5-3 to get to nine wins. Nine is far from a guarantee to be enough to get into the playoffs, but it’s a realistic target: Baltimore has a quarterback upgrade coming in and doesn’t face a team with a winning record again until Dec. 20.
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Jesse Minter’s squad closes with four consecutive AFC North matchups, but they are hoping to be healthier by that point, and the Steelers — featured in two of those matchups — have battled offensive inconsistency all season despite being 6-2.
The Ravens already faced the Bills and Jaguars, and they don’t have the Broncos, Chiefs or Patriots on their schedule.
The Ravens do have one problem: the AFC hasn’t been hit with quarterback injuries like the NFC has. Baltimore is about to start its fourth quarterback of the season, but no other AFC team has even started more than one quarterback (that’s likely to change on Sunday with Cleveland’s Deshaun Watson in concussion protocol).
To make the playoffs, the Ravens will need some help, even if that help is in the form of the injury curse striking other teams.
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Ravens remaining schedule
Here’s what the Ravens still have ahead this season:
| Date | Matchup | Time (ET) |
| Nov. 16 | vs. Chargers | 8:15 p.m. |
| Nov. 22 | at Panthers | 1 p.m. |
| Nov. 29 | at Texans | 1 p.m. |
| Dec. 13 | vs. Buccaneers | 1 pm. |
| Dec. 20 | at Steelers | 1 p.m. |
| Dec. 27 | vs. Browns | 1 p.m. |
| Dec. 31 | at Bengals | 8:15 p.m. |
| Jan. 10 | vs. Steelers | TBD |
No game is a guarantee for the Ravens at this point, but the schedule before the bye week is favorable. The winless Chargers await in Week 10, followed by the 3-4 Panthers, 2-5 Texans and 3-5 Buccaneers.
There is a case to be made that some of those teams are better than their record indicate, as the talented Texans are trying to recover from a brutal start to the season while the Buccaneers have won back-to-back games since Baker Mayfield returned from injury.
If the Ravens can go 3-1 over that stretch with Brissett at quarterback, they would still have work to do at 7-6 but would be in position to make a charge in those divisional games to close out the season.
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