No, it's not hard not to feel confident! Not to me! Especially, after watching how the Ravens offense performed yesterday, after nearly 2 weeks of rest and at home against the 3-6 Panthers. A team below .500. See, to me, that type of piss-poor production will come back to bite the Ravens in the ass come playoff time.
So I agree with the premise of we didn't play well yesterday on offense, BUT, we did still win.
I guess my question is...why do people not feel confident about our ability to be inferior teams? Has that been an issue with Lamar-led teams?
I mean if I just go back to 2019-2021...
In Lamar starts, we're 21-4 against teams who don't make the playoffs that year. We're 10-6 against teams that do.
When we play inferior teams (in terms of teams who don't finish with a winning record or don't make the playoffs), when Lamar starts, we win those games at a very high rate. If the argument is "well we don't play very well in those games", thats fine, but that's more about optics than outcome.
I don't have any real concerns about this team beating bad teams. I think we'll handle the Jags somewhat easily, I think we'll beat Denver (though probably in a game that looks a lot more like yesterdays game) and I think we'll handle Atlanta relatively easily too. The rest are division games where pretty much anything can happen, but I don't anticipate getting swept by Pittsburgh and there's no reason I see why we can't beat the Browns either.
My concern is the concern everybody should have... what happens when we actually play good teams? We were dominant against basically everybody in 2019, but in 2020 we were 4-3 against playoff teams, and 1-2 in 2021, with Lamar under center. Currently, against teams with a winning record this year, we're now 3-3. And two of those wins are against the Jets and the Patriots, who, while they might have winning records, I seriously doubt anybody is treating as "contenders" in the AFC. And one or both of those teams won't make the playoffs most likely.