BALTIMORE — Setting aside the Ravens’ mystique, this should’ve been a challenge the Bears could handle, even on the road. Baltimore had allowed more points than anyone in the NFL and was down to its third quarterback.
But the Bears, looking inept and clumsy, sputtered to a 30-16 loss Sunday at M&T Bank Stadium.
And coach Ben Johnson didn’t have solutions.
The Ravens, who had been reeling 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 their defensive lapses, the Bears wasted a prime opportunity. This is a defeat that signals you’re not to be taken seriously.
“[The Ravens] were hungry; they were determined,” Johnson said. “I expected a little bit more out of our squad to counter that.”
The problems that sunk the Bears were the ones Johnson was hired to fix.
Various injuries in the secondary are no excuse, especially when the opponent is missing its two-time MVP quarterback, and neither is Williams’ inexperience.
There’s an acclimation period for a coach-quarterback pairing. The Bears should be just about through it by now. But it’s not clicking. Williams compounded his pedestrian game — 25-for-38 for 285 yards with no touchdown passes and an interception for a 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 Bears territory and committing an intentional-grounding penalty shortly before halftime.
Those 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’ 3 and got inside the Baltimore 25-yard line twice but led only 6-0. They scored one touchdown in three red-zone opportunities, dropping them to 48% for the season.
At this stage, Johnson 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.
Although he’s not a defensive-minded coach, the defense needs his attention after allowing Huntley to put up one of the best games of his career. The Ravens had scored only 13 points over the last two games without Jackson.
Baltimore, however, exploited the Bears’ unsteady defense, which had allowed the seventh-most yards in the NFL coming in but had offset that deficiency with a league-leading 16 takeaways.
The Bears were flagged 11 times, including five pre-snap penalties, for 79 yards. Williams was called for intentional grounding twice, Josh Blackwell held on the opening kickoff and D’Marco Jackson wiped out a punt to the 1-yard line by getting flagged for illegal formation.
Johnson pointed to 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.”
Johnson has reiterated 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.
