Huntley Gets His Start. The Ravens Get Their Reckoning.
The offseason was supposed to make this impossible. Baltimore drafted an offensive lineman in the first round for only the second time in franchise history, signed a veteran center, extended Zay Flowers to a $140 million deal — all of it explicitly designed to keep Lamar Jackson upright and healthy enough that Tyler Huntley would remain a footnote. Week 5 just made Huntley the headline anyway.
The production gap between Jackson and his backup is not a subtle analytical distinction. It is 199 points — a chasm so wide that when I wrote about it earlier this week, I called it the single most consequential roster fact Baltimore carries into any game where Jackson can't finish. The depth chart confirms what the numbers say: Huntley accounts for roughly a fifth of what a league-median starting quarterback produces. That is not a backup situation. That is a structural cliff. And now the Ravens have walked off it.
What makes this particularly brutal is the context those numbers land in. Jackson, through 13 games in 2025, threw for 2,549 yards, 21 touchdowns, and rushed for 349 more. The offense is architected around his dual-threat gravity — the read-option, the designed scrambles, the coverage manipulation that opens Derrick Henry through the middle. None of that translates to Huntley. Henry's 1,595 rushing yards last season came behind a quarterback defenses had to genuinely respect as a runner. Remove that threat and the entire ground game becomes easier to key on.
The wider roster context makes the situation harder still. Zay Flowers — the receiver Baltimore paid $140 million to lock up — has been working through a hamstring issue since the opener. Ja'Kobi Lane is already on injured reserve. The wide receiver depth behind Chris Moore is essentially nonexistent, with Moore himself operating well below what a starting NFL wideout typically produces at this stage of his career. My read: Huntley inherits not just a diminished quarterback room but a skill-position corps that was already strained before Jackson went down.
Baltimore's offseason blueprint had a clear internal logic: protect the quarterback, build the line, extend the playmakers, and trust that the infrastructure would hold. The Vega Ioane pick, the Pocic signing, the Flowers extension — they were all load-bearing. But the center position collapsed before the season started, Flowers got hurt in Week 1, and now the quarterback himself is out. The blueprint didn't just crack under pressure. It failed at every structural joint simultaneously. Huntley stepping under center in Week 5 isn't a contingency plan activating. It's the bill coming due on a roster that was never as protected as the offseason suggested.