Lamar Jackson called it “terrible.” He called it “B.S.” Standing at the intersection of physical breakdown, wavering precision, and an organization suddenly stripped of its most steadying presence, the two-time NFL MVP watched a season slip away that looked, from the outside, like it was quietly eating him alive from the inside out.

The Baltimore Ravens finished 2025 at 8-9 — a losing record, and a mirror image of the year prior. But this time, they didn’t just miss the playoffs. They did so without John Harbaugh patrolling the sideline, without a healthy quarterback for stretches of the most critical games, and without the relentless consistency that had defined Jackson’s ascent to the pinnacle of the NFL.

And when Jackson finally spoke publicly, he didn’t mince words. Injuries had prevented him from being the player he knows he can be. Turnovers — interceptions and fumbles arriving at the worst possible moments — had cost the team in close games he felt Baltimore should have won. And hovering over everything was a sense that, from Week 1 to Week 17, the Ravens never found their footing as a unit.

“We never found that consistency,” Jackson reflected. The word — consistency — would become the defining indictment of the Ravens’ 2025 campaign.

It began in earnest in the early weeks of the season, when Jackson sustained a back injury significant enough to require a Toradol injection in an attempt to return. The image alone tells the story: a 28-year-old quarterback, the league’s career leader in passer rating and rushing yards at the position, needing a painkiller just to take the field. He would not finish that game. The sense of helplessness — of being physically unable to deliver for a team fighting for its playoff life — visibly gnawed at him.

It was a disturbingly familiar pattern. The previous season, a hamstring injury suffered in Week 4 in Kansas City proved to be the season’s turning point. In his first three games before that injury, Baltimore was the highest-scoring offense in the league, averaging 37 points per game. After his return, the Ravens failed to crack 30 in each of Jackson’s final ten starts — the longest such drought of his career. The damage inflicted by those missed reps, the lost weeks of practice rhythm, proved irreparable.

This year’s back injury threatened to write the same story. Jackson described it as unfair — to himself and to his teammates — that his body kept forcing him out of games at moments that mattered most.

Former MVP and NFL analyst Rich Gannon articulated the compounding nature of Jackson’s injury absence better than perhaps anyone. When a quarterback misses practice, it isn’t simply one man falling behind — it’s the entire offense losing synchronized reps. The red zone timing routes that don’t get run. The two-minute drill that exists only in theory that week. The third-down packages that never get sharpened. Every missed session rippled outward into the performances of eleven men.

The precision passing numbers were stark. Jackson’s precision pass rate — the percentage of attempts delivered to receivers in stride — fell to 43.7%, his lowest mark since his rookie season. During his back-to-back MVP campaigns in 2019 and 2023, those figures stood at 54.9% and 56.1% respectively. The drop wasn’t marginal. It was precipitous.

Kurt Warner, the Hall of Fame quarterback who won NFL MVP awards in 1999 and 2001, watched the tape carefully and found himself unable to attribute the drop to any single mechanical breakdown or mental error. “It wasn’t that,” Warner said. “It was more just missing plays that he’s made a million times before.” That verdict, in its own way, is more troubling than a correctable flaw — it suggests a player operating below his own baseline, dragged down by everything surrounding him rather than something within his control.

Perhaps the most alarming statistical trend, though, was the one that didn’t show up in the passing numbers at all. Jackson’s rushing attempts dropped to just 5.2 per game — a dramatic decline for a player who has built his singular identity as much on his legs as his arm. His career was constructed on the premise that defenses cannot prepare for both threats simultaneously. Remove the run, and the pass becomes more manageable. Remove the run, and Lamar Jackson becomes a different quarterback entirely.

The suspicion among analysts is that fear of re-injury — the body’s natural, self-protective instinct — caused Jackson to pull back from the scrambles and designed runs that had made him genuinely unguardable. Matt Ryan, now the president of football for the Atlanta Falcons and the 2016 NFL MVP, identified the broader issue clearly: it isn’t just about being available to play. “You’re available to play, but it’s just hard to be sharp when you’re not practicing and you’re missing time during the week,” Ryan said. “Even when you are, you’re laboring to get through it.”

The cost was visible in the most critical stretches. Over a brutal six-week run in November and December — the period when playoff implications are decided — Jackson averaged just 177 passing yards per game, threw three touchdowns against five interceptions, and went three consecutive games without a touchdown for the first time in his NFL career. He was, as he put it himself, “tired of being right there” without being able to close.

Looming over all of it is the factor that no statistic can fully capture: the loss of John Harbaugh.

Harbaugh’s shocking firing after 18 seasons — following the Ravens’ 8-9 finish the year prior — removed from Baltimore the one constant of Jackson’s entire professional life. Every snap Jackson had ever taken in the NFL, every MVP award, every comeback, every playoff push, had occurred under Harbaugh’s watch. The coach was more than a tactician. He was a true believer — in Jackson’s uniqueness, in the Ravens’ unconventional identity, in the idea that this franchise had found something the rest of the league was still chasing.

New head coach Jesse Minter has spoken thoughtfully about his vision for Jackson’s role, telling the Ravens’ website that he wants a system in which Jackson doesn’t have to feel like he’s “Superman” every time the ball is snapped. It is, in its way, a compassionate and sensible philosophy. But it also underscores how much re-calibration lies ahead — for a quarterback who has always played at a supernatural register, who has always been asked to carry impossible weight, and who is now doing so with a brand-new coaching staff, a shaken identity, and a body that spent much of 2025 reminding him of its limits.

The raw talent remains beyond question. Jackson is still the NFL’s career leader in passer rating at 102.2. He is still the most prolific rushing quarterback in league history. At 28, there is no reason to believe his best football is behind him. But 2025 was a year that demanded answers he couldn’t always provide — answers to injury, to inconsistency, to turnovers at the worst moments, and ultimately, to the absence of the man who had always believed most loudly in him.

Whether Minter and a rebuilt Ravens staff can restore what was lost — or build something new enough to transcend it — is the defining question hanging over Baltimore heading into 2026. For now, Lamar Jackson sits with a season he described, without hedging, as terrible. He is too honest, and too proud, to pretend otherwise.