Depends on what your expectations are. If your expectations are for this team to make the playoffs, you should definitely not think the sky is falling. If your expectations were that this team would be in the AFC championship or Super Bowl you can probably say the sky is falling.
What you've already seen is that the defense is tremendously underperorming based on the amount of talent it has. And the reason for that is due to the distribution of talent. The IDL and the secondary are LOADED with talent and the ENTIRE line backing corps, both inside and out are really bad and thin! You also just got an injury Bynes this game so even thinner. All of the goodness of the line and secondary rendered useless by the lack of pass rush, poor tackling, and zero LB coverage ability.
The offense was set up with the bare minimum at the WR position. Which when all healthy was enough to get by for sure. But there goes Bateman. In his absence, I think this offense really sputters.
The greater point I'm making is that this team while extremely talented still has huge units of weaknesses and is somehow yet again the MOST injured team in the league. So if those units aren't going to get better and we're only going to get more injured, this team won't be able to compete for a superbowl. And that's fine I guess, but the entire future of the Ravens for the next 5 years is the hands of Decosta at the draft. We'll see what happens.
Well couple of things I'd like to point out...
1. I kind of eye roll at the whole "linebacker" situation, because for me, its DUH. Everybody knew it was a problem 4-5 months ago. Why are we just pretending like we didn't realize it was an issue now? Nobody looked at our inside or outside linebacker group and were like "o yeah, we're good". It's one of the worst groups in the league in my opinion. We've known this. We made no investment at ILB, and the investments we did make at OLB aren't going to pay off until later in the year or, realistically, in 2023. That's the devil we agreed to.
End of day, what did fans expect? We wanted massive upgrades at Oline. We basically got it. We brought in Moses, we drafted Linderbaum, and we drafted Faalele, among just bringing back the guys we already had.
We wanted the secondary group to be largely overhauled, especially at Safety. You sign Williams, draft Hamilton, bring in a bunch of new corners, and alas, here it is. It's not performing as well as it should, but I thought our Secondary was actually really, really, really good yesterday. Blew away all of my expectations. Especially after people thought the Bills would hang 50 on us because the Dolphins scored so much. They whiffed and whiffed badly.
If the expectation is for the Ravens to upgrade every single position in one offseason, that's not a Ravens problem. That's a fan expectation problem.
The linebacking group is struggling as we expected it to.
2. I don't think we're the most injured team in the league. Not close. Check out the Chargers. Pretty much a bunch of the very best players on their roster are out with long term injuries, and their QB has broken ribs. We've got injuries, but it can be FAR worse.
3. A lot of the "talent" infusion are still young players and rookies, especially on defense. They're not going to be All-Pros in year 1. They'll struggle.
I'm not concerned because Buffalo looks like maybe the best team in the NFL to me, or at the very least, a top 3-4 team. And we were beating them by 17 and lost on a less second FG. That tells me we're basically just as good as them, we just didn't execute certain aspects well enough (nor did they in some spots). If we weren't close, we'd be getting blown out by these teams.
