The streak is dead. Long live the streak.
Never before in NFL history had a team won 20 or more preseason games in a row before the Baltimore Ravens achieved that feat in recent years. They ran that streak up to 24 games earlier this year, but the Washington Commanders’ win on Monday night saw their years-long efforts to preserve the run go to waste.
Baltimore lost by one point, 29-28, the winning points coming in the waning moments on a 49-yard field goal for Washington with just 14 seconds remaining. The Ravens took an eight-point lead early in the fourth quarter, but the Commanders responded with nine unanswered points (failing a two-point conversion attempt on a touchdown pass).
And so the streak that began in 2016 with a 22-19 win over the Carolina Panthers and ran through last week’s 20-19 margin against the Philadelphia Eagles is no more. And we finally get to stop hearing it being talked about as though it were ever something that mattered in the first place. One of the truly meaningless ‘records’ is no more.
“You’re proud of it of course, you appreciate it, but the thing that you’re proud of is all those games were mostly just like that”, Ravens head coach John Harbaugh said after the loss. “Preseason games, people want to write about it and say they don’t mean anything because you never played the game. You were never out there in a preseason game. You never were fighting for a spot on the team. And yet you have the audacity to say that the effort that somebody puts into that to win and fight and win a game like that is meaningless. Tell it was meaningless, what you just saw…I can’t respect anybody that says that”.
Yes, it is always better to win in the preseason than to lose. It can generally indicate a deep roster, and to be fair, Baltimore has typically had good teams. But given the limited playing time of starters (and increasingly limited, I might add; QB Lamar Jackson and most of the Ravens’ starters did not play), it’s hard to draw any conclusions about what a team will look like in the regular season based on preseason scoreboard watching.
And to be fair, talk of the streak has been laughed at. For years. Former Steelers S Ryan Clark chimed in after the Commanders ended it via X. “Bro!! People are really hype that Washington is about to break Baltimore’s preseason streak!”, he wrote. “I’m weak”.
Washington OL Sam Cosmi shared his thoughts on the prospects of possibly ending Baltimore’s streak before the game, and I believe he spoke for many. “I think it’s a stupid record”, he said. “I mean, who gives a shit about preseason games? If we beat it, great. We’re gonna beat it, so, there you go”.
And they did, though it must be noted that the Commanders played their starters and the Ravens did not—yet, again, Baltimore was winning by 8 in the fourth quarter, so it was the reserves versus the reserves deciding this one. As was the case with the 24 wins that preceded this loss, and all the other preseason games in history.
