On Sunday, the Baltimore Ravens lost the AFC Championship game to the Kansas City Chiefs, 17-10. After going 13-4 in the regular season and securing the top seed in the playoffs, the team with the league’s best defense and MVP quarterback lost to a team that limped its way into the playoffs and had never looked more beatable.
What happened?
For one thing, the Chiefs played well and made practically zero mistakes, while the Ravens played poorly and made many – stupid penalties, bad throws and costly turnovers. Despite the sloppy play, the Ravens may still have won the game, if not for a goal line fumble to start the fourth quarter.
But there was another factor that played an even bigger role in the outcome of the game:
The Ravens abandoned what worked well for them all season and stopped running the ball.
After leading the league in rushing, the team with one of the most electric running quarterbacks in the history of the game ran the ball just sixteen times. The week before, in a rout of the Houston Texans, the Ravens ran the ball 42 times. Throughout the season they averaged 32 rushes per game.
In the biggest moment of the year, against the best NFL franchise of the past decade, the Ravens decided to throw their game plan out the window.
There are many reasons why a run-heavy team might do this. Their opponent might be strong against the run, or key pieces of their offense might be injured. They might be playing from behind and not have time to move methodically downfield. Maybe they just want to surprise the opposing team with new looks.
But none of those factors seemed to play a role on Sunday. Instead, it was pretty clear watching the game that the Ravens coaches did the one thing you can’t do against the Chiefs:
They panicked.
After the Chiefs strung together a perfect touchdown drive to go up 7-0, the Ravens forgot everything that had gotten them to the big game and pivoted away from their strengths. As Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
With hindsight, it’s easy to criticize the coaching staff for what looks to fans like a stupid last-minute decision, but we’re all guilty of these mistakes in our own lives. It’s easy to stick to a plan when everything’s going well, but what do we do when the first punch is thrown?
For example, I have often gone out way too fast at the start of a marathon, despite the four months of training telling me to slow down. The minute the gun goes off and everyone else starts running fast, my plan goes out the window.
Similarly, during the crypto boom in 2021 I bought Bitcoin and Ethereum, abandoning my strategy to only invest passively in things I understood. The fear of missing out on a homerun distracted me from my investing principles, and I ended up losing thousands of dollars.
Worst of all, during a company hiring freeze last year that made promotions difficult, I considered looking for roles externally, ignoring all of the career capital I had accumulated where I was. Short-term frustration made me lose sight of the long-term goal I was working towards.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to minimize the potential damage from these pivots, even if I haven’t eliminated the urge entirely, with a simple practice:
- Remind myself why I made the decision in the first place
- Reassess whether the decision was the right one
For example, when career frustration began to set in early last year, I tried to remember that my slow progress was intentional – I had chosen to take a lateral from finance into product management years before because I felt it would improve my long-term prospects and better align with my skills.
Even so, I reevaluated whether that original decision to be patient was still my best option. Did I still prefer product management to finance? Yes. Did I still see myself at the company long-term? Yes. It became pretty obvious that waiting things out was not only acceptable, but the right decision to make two years later.
If the Ravens had done this, I expect they would have realized that a run-heavy offense was still their best bet to beat the Chiefs on Sunday. At the very least, they could have waited until the second half to make adjustments.
More often than not, in my experience, the original path will continue to be the right one. Most of the times I have been tempted to change course have been driven by external factors, rather than internal ones. What other people are doing is a powerful motivator, but often leads us to make poor decisions for ourselves.
Fighting that urge is never easy, but it’s highly worthwhile. The alternative leads to costly mistakes, as the Ravens showed last weekend.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
How to Have Better Habits in 2024 – Ryan Holiday
“LESS. Less stuff. Less distractions. Less screen time. Less commitments. Less so we can have more—more presence, more peace.”
How Anxiety Became Content – Derek Thompson
“Watching and listening to so much anxiety content, which transforms a medical diagnosis into a kind of popular media category, might be contributing to our national anxiety crisis.”