Jackson Out, Huntley In, and the Injury List Keeps Growing

The Ravens made it official Friday: Lamar Jackson will not play Sunday against Cincinnati. The high ankle sprain he's been managing since Week 4 didn't clear in time, and Tyler Huntley gets his third start of the season in an AFC North game Baltimore can't afford to lose ground in.

Huntley has held up reasonably well in the two starts he's logged. He hasn't turned the ball over — zero interceptions on the season — and the ground game behind Derrick Henry gives him a margin for error that most backup quarterbacks don't get. The Ravens can still function without Jackson throwing the ball 40 times. They've shown that. The question Sunday is whether Cincinnati's defense respects the run enough to make Huntley's job manageable, or whether they dare Baltimore to beat them through the air.

What makes this week different from the Cleveland start is the Robinson news landing on top of it. I wrote Thursday that the edge depth was already thin before his pectoral injury ended his season, and that hasn't changed — it's just more acute now. The Ravens are walking into a divisional road game without their starting quarterback and with a defense that was already leaning hard on Calais Campbell at 40 years old. That's a lot of weight on a short list of people.

Baltimore is still 4–2 and still leading the AFC North. Huntley starts, Henry runs, and the Ravens find out what this roster is made of without its best player for the third time in seven weeks.