Mark Andrews’s drop effectively ended the Ravens’ season.Photograph: Gregory Fisher/USA Today Sports
Josh Allen v Lamar Jackson was set to be an epic. The idea of this season’s MVP favorites sharing a field was chill inducing. Because whichever quarterback punctuated a brilliant individual season with a conference championship berth would do so because he outplayed his counterpart.
Then the actual game was played in snowy Buffalo. It turns out there’s so much more to a football game than the two men under center, even men as supremely talented as Allen and Jackson. Many will blame Jackson for Buffalo’s 27-25 win over the Ravens, especially as the weeks and months go on. They’ll credit Allen too. But neither player was the key factor in the outcome. It’s often the easy chances players don’t take rather than flashes of brilliance that decide games.
Jackson wasn’t perfect on Sunday but he stepped up when it counted. Driving 88 yards in eight plays to set up a game-tying two-point conversion in the final moments of a playoff contest is what MVPs do. But Jackson didn’t dial up the play call for the two-point conversion, and his pass was fine – it was tight end Mark Andrews who dropped the simplest of catches to effectively hand the game to the Bills.
Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken decided to put the season in the hands of Andrews, who had fumbled and squashed a promising Ravens drive earlier in the half.
“We wouldn’t be here without Mark Andrews. … It’s like anything else. Destiny is a decision that you make, and how you handle what comes in life. And Mark will handle it fantastic,” Jim Harbaugh said in his postgame press conference.
“Destiny is a decision that you make” sounds fancy and metaphysical. In this game, it was the little decisions that led to Buffalo advancing to the AFC championship.
Playing Sliding Doors is easy but, in the moment, the decision not to put the ball in the hands of Jackson or Derrick Henry with the…
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