Week 8 Bills-Ravens Preview: Josh Allen vs. Lamar Jackson

The Bills host the Ravens on Sunday, with a banged-up Lamar Jackson trying to return and a Buffalo defense that still can’t get off the field. Neither of these teams can finish a pass rush or cover downfield, so this has the makings of a shootout that comes down to whoever’s offense blinks first. A win drops Baltimore to 4-4 and keeps Buffalo in the hunt for the #1 seed in the AFC.

Dave and Greg previewed it on 1st and 5, joined by Baltimore Sun Ravens reporter Brian Wacker and Banged Up Bills injury analyst Kyle Trimble. What’s worth watching:

• Just how limited Lamar Jackson will be on that ankle
• What a Ravens beat writer thinks Baltimore has to do to win
• Whether the Bills can finally slow anybody down
• The injuries that decide how Buffalo lines up
• Where Dave and Greg came down on the score

Will Lamar Jackson Be Healthy Enough to Beat the Bills?

Lamar Jackson’s status is the biggest variable in this game. He’s roughly 24 days removed from a high ankle sprain, the kind of injury that usually costs a player four to six weeks and tends to linger in some form the rest of the season. Getting a full practice in on Wednesday, well inside that window, puts him ahead of the normal curve.

Kyle Trimble, who runs the injury-analytics site Banged Up Bills and breaks down the medical side on the show every week, doesn’t see a quarterback forcing his way back early. He reads it as Jackson using every available day to get as close to full strength as possible, with a clear sense of what the ankle will and won’t let him do once he’s out there.

The injury takes away the part of Jackson’s game that scares defenses most. His arm and his pocket mechanics should be close to normal, but the explosive cutting and the off-script improvising, the stuff that turns a broken play into a 30-yard gain, is exactly where a healing high ankle shows up.

If the Bills can collapse the pocket and force him to move on an ankle he’s still favoring, they turn his most dangerous trait into a liability. A quarterback thinking about his footing is the kind that hands a struggling defense the mistakes it has to manufacture.

Re-aggravating the injury, encouragingly for Buffalo, would take a specific mechanism, a twist or a hard plant like the one that caused it, not a routine tackle. There’s no reason to play him soft and let him settle into a rhythm.

Nobody outside the building seems entirely sure how serious this actually is. Brian Wacker, who covers the Ravens day to day for the Baltimore Sun, pointed to the fog that has always surrounded Jackson’s injuries in Baltimore, going back to the John Harbaugh years, and suggested what was reported as a high ankle sprain could sit somewhere on the milder end of that scale. Jackson will play if he feels he can move and be explosive, and he’ll sit if he can’t, which means a real answer may not come until close to kickoff.

For Greg, the red flag is the communication around all of it, not anything about whether Jackson wants to play. Jackson himself was the one who told reporters it was a high ankle sprain, not the team, and a month of mixed signals is unusual for a franchise that normally keeps a tight lid on its medical information. Wacker stopped short of calling it a genuine rift between Jackson and the staff, but he didn’t have a clear explanation for it either, and that uncertainty is part of what makes the Ravens tricky to prepare for this week.

How Do the Bills Slow Down Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry?

The Ravens will need to take their shots down the field with Jackson and Zay Flowers, who Wacker says has grown into a genuine No. 1 receiver, and they’ll lean on Derrick Henry to grind the clock and keep Josh Allen watching from the sideline.

Henry is in the middle of a down year by his standards, and Wacker put most of that on the offensive line in front of him. Baltimore has churned through something like 17 line combinations, had to trade for a center midseason, and lost a key blocking tight end, all of which have shrunk the room Henry usually runs in. Wacker still expects him to be featured, using the threat of the pass to set up the run rather than the other way around.

Buffalo’s plan starts with Henry, and not with the idea of shutting him down. The goal is to keep him from the back-breaking runs where he drags half a defense for 20 yards, the plays that have beaten the Bills before, even if he piles up yards in between.

The Bills’ front looks different than it did a year ago. Greg Gaines, Deone Walker, DeWayne Carter, and Landon Jackson give Buffalo real size in the middle, and the idea is to make the Ravens one-dimensional so a limited Jackson has to win from the pocket while the rush tees off.

Dave isn’t sold that one-dimensional even helps. Buffalo held the Rams to around 60 rushing yards and still gave up more than 30 points, because Matthew Stafford simply threw it 50-odd times, and the Raiders barely bothered to run at all. When a defense can’t cover, making a team pass isn’t much of a punishment.

Grudgingly, the two agree on the approach Jim Leonhard keeps defaulting to anyway. Keep everything in front and make the Ravens earn it in short chunks, the bend-don’t-break style Greg can’t stand and can’t argue with right now.

Can Anyone Stop the Bills Offense?

There’s no stopping this Bills offense right now, only slowing it, and Wacker didn’t pretend otherwise. Buffalo leads the league in scoring and ranks at or near the top of nearly every efficiency metric that matters, which leaves Baltimore hoping to control the clock and keep Josh Allen on the sideline rather than actually get stops.

The middle of the field is where Baltimore has been soft all year, and Wacker expects Buffalo to live there. He’d also take deep shots at Marlon Humphrey or Nate Wiggins to test them, and he keeps coming back to James Cook in the screen game, where Cook has grown into one of the most dangerous backs in the league.

Dave sees the same James Cook game, and expects Buffalo to keep building on what it started before the bye. The offense leaned harder on getting Cook and the other backs involved as receivers, using the pass to loosen the box so the run has somewhere to go.

He doesn’t expect many deep shots this week, mostly because of health. Joshua Palmer is working back from an injury, and Dalton Kincaid is playing through banged-up ribs, while DJ Moore is only just returning from a month out, so Allen is short on downfield targets he fully trusts.

Buffalo’s only genuinely bad offensive game all season was the Chargers loss, five turnovers with three of them on Allen, and the two treat that as an outlier rather than a trend. That’s why ball security is the one number they keep circling going into Sunday.

DJ Moore and his sore shoulder are the one thing the two actually disagree on. Greg argues you protect the shoulder by throwing deep, where Moore can run under the ball in space, rather than on short slants that put him in traffic with a defender arriving on every catch. Dave calls it closer to a wash, and points out that a less-than-perfect deep ball is exactly how Moore hurt the shoulder in the first place.

Which Bills Injuries Matter Most?

Most of Buffalo’s injury news breaks the Bills’ way, at least the way Trimble reads it. DJ Moore’s shoulder is about four weeks along by Sunday, and the red non-contact jersey that set off alarms at practice is purely preventive, there to keep him from a hit that would restart the whole clock. Trimble expects him to play and to factor into the plan, though the designation could linger another week or two.

Dalton Kincaid’s problem is his ribs, after he came down flush on the ball against the Raiders. Trimble expects a flak jacket and a pain-management injection, and he isn’t worried about it long term, though rib injuries nag and Kincaid will have to play through the discomfort.

Ed Oliver looks like a straightforward MCL sprain, and the bye gave him a full month to heal. He practiced without any bracing on the knee, which has Trimble expecting him back on Sunday, possibly with a brace as a precaution.

Spencer Brown’s back is more of a maintenance issue than a structural one, with a clean MRI behind it, so the hope is that his missed practice was load management rather than a sign he sits. If he can’t go, Tylan Grable slides in at right tackle.

The bigger shake-up is in the secondary, where C.J. Gardner-Johnson is suspended for this one. That forces a new starter alongside Cole Bishop, most likely Damar Hamlin or Jalon Kilgore, on a back end that has been the team’s biggest problem all season.

Dee Alford’s ankle has him trending toward out, which opens a real question at slot corner, and the Bills just brought in veteran Tre’Davious White as insurance that nobody on the show expects to fix the group overnight. You can track all of it on the Built in Buffalo injury report.

Who Are the Key Matchups to Watch?

The matchup Greg keeps circling is Davison Igbinosun against Zay Flowers. His guess is that IGB draws Flowers with Cole Bishop sliding over to help, and he wants to see how a rookie corner handles a receiver playing like a true No. 1.

Dave isn’t sure the Bills put IGB on Flowers at all. If Buffalo stays in the zone it has leaned on all year, he figures Christian Benford, the team’s steadiest cover corner, ends up matched on Flowers more often than not.

Dave’s players to watch come with conditions attached. The first is whoever lines up at safety next to Bishop with Gardner-Johnson suspended, because the Ravens will go looking for that spot early.

The second is right tackle, if Spencer Brown can’t go. Tylan Grable was a mixed bag the last time he saw real snaps, and Baltimore’s pass rush will find out quickly whether he’s ready.

The third is DJ Moore, and specifically how early and how often Buffalo gets him the ball. That usage is the clearest tell for how much the staff actually trusts the shoulder.

On the chalkboard, the two basically traded game plans. Greg, running the Bills, would throw to set up the run and attack the middle of the field, where he’d take his chances getting Moore and the backs loose. Dave, playing Baltimore’s defensive coordinator, would do to Buffalo what Buffalo’s own opponents keep doing to them. He’d take away the middle and the tight ends and dare the Bills’ receivers to win on the outside, adjusting only if they started to.

Bills or Ravens. Who’s Going to Win?

Everyone on both shows picked the Bills, but the scores and the reasoning split.

• Greg: Bills 37-31. He expects a shootout where Buffalo builds a lead through the air and holds on after a late Baltimore push.
• Dave: Bills 34-23. His hot take is that the secondary finally turns a corner this week, the way Jacksonville’s defense flipped down the stretch last year, with a couple of Ravens turnovers along the way.
• Brian Wacker (Baltimore Sun): Bills 27-23. He sees a game that comes down to the final possession, with Buffalo’s home record and the Ravens’ rust tipping it.
• Kyle Trimble (Banged Up Bills): Bills 29-21. Close, but he likes where Buffalo sits.

Bills-Ravens: It’s Time to Play the Game

Buffalo is the better team with the better quarterback, and getting a motivated DJ Moore back only helps the league’s top offense. The defense is still the open question, the same one that’s shadowed the Bills all season.

If Jim Leonhard’s group really is ready to turn a corner, a hobbled Lamar Jackson and a reeling Ravens team is the week to show it.

Do you trust this Bills defense to get a stop when the game is on the line, or does Josh Allen have to win another shootout?

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