BALTIMORE — Set aside the Ravens’ mystique, and this should’ve been a challenge the Bears could handle, even on the road: beat an opponent that has allowed more points than anyone in the NFL and is down to its third quarterback.
Yet they looked inept and clumsy Sunday, and coach Ben Johnson didn’t have solutions as they sputtered to a 30-16 loss at M&T Bank Stadium. The Ravens had been reeling and, because of quarterback Lamar Jackson’s injury, turned to Tyler Huntley to save their season.
But really, the Bears did that for them. Between quarterback Caleb Williams’ unsteadiness and the defenses’ lapses, they wasted a prime opportunity. These are defeats that signal you shouldn’t be taken seriously.
“They were hungry, they were determined,” Johnson said of the Ravens. “I expected a little bit more out of our squad to counter that.”
The problems that sunk the Bears are precisely the ones he was hired to fix.
Various injuries in the secondary aren’t an excuse, especially when the opponent is missing its two-time MVP quarterback, and neither is Williams’ inexperience.
There is an acclimation period for a new coach-quarterback pairing, and the Bears should be just about through it by now. But it’s not clicking, and Williams compounded his pedestrian game — 25-for-38 passing, 285 yards, an interception, no touchdowns, 77.2 passer rating — with mental mistakes.
His most egregious errors were squandering the Bears’ last realistic chance, down 16-13 with nine minutes left, by throwing an interception deep in his own territory and committing an intentional-grounding penalty shortly before halftime.
Those two slips resulted in a 10-point hit for the Bears. The Ravens quickly turned the interception into a touchdown to bury them, and the intentional grounding wrecked their shot at a field goal.
But alarms rang before that, when the Bears ran 22 plays in the first quarter to the Ravens’ three and got inside the Baltimore 25-yard line twice, but led just 6-0. They went 1-for-3 scoring touchdowns in the red zone, dropping them to 48% for the season.
It’s imperative that Johnson intervene on both sides of the ball.
At this stage, he has no choice but to tailor his game plan to what Williams and this offense can manage. If he wants to expand that, it’ll have to wait until the offseason.
And he’s not a defensive-minded coach, but that responsibility comes with the head job and needed his attention as Huntley put up one of the best games of his career. The Ravens scored just 13 points over the last two weeks without Jackson.
The Bears had allowed the seventh-most yards in the NFL coming in, but offset that with a league-leading 16 takeaways. They haven’t been a solid, steady defense, and the Ravens exploited it.
Penalties are boring, but they’re pivotal, and the Bears were flagged 11 times for 79 yards. That included five pre-snap penalties, Williams committing intentional grounding twice, Josh Blackwell holding on the opening kickoff and D’Marco Jackson wiping out a punt to the 1-yard line getting flagged for illegal formation.
Johnson pointed at the players for the offense’s pre-snap penalties.
“We get away with it occasionally, but it’s just not the way you win,” Johnson said. “I really put it on the leaders to get this ship going in the right direction in that regard. We have been pounding that drum now for a while and we haven’t gotten the results.”
All of these issues have been ongoing. The Bears have masked them at times, usually against weak opponents, but that’s not sustainable.
Johnson has reiterated all season that the team is in win-now mode, and at 4-3, there’s still a lot at stake. This is not intended to be a throwaway season under a new coach. “Win now” means, at minimum, taking aim at the playoffs, but the Bears will plunge in the standings if Johnson can’t straighten out their sloppiness.
Pretend time is over, people.
There was no excuse for Williams being more uncomfortable running the Bears’ offense than Tyler Huntley running that of the Ravens. Huntley was the Ravens’ third-stringer before being promoted when Lamar Jackson was ruled out Saturday with a hamstring injury.
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