Be honest: Baltimore fans weren’t exactly optimistic when the drive stalled at the 2. Be equally honest: Pittsburgh fans weren’t exactly fearful of giving the ball back to the Ravens offense with mere seconds on the clock. We all know how it turned out. A question has been answered in the National Football League. Who is the best hurry-up quarterback in the NFL?

It’s Peyton Manning. But Joe Flacco is number two.

It’s a transformation that can really only be understood by watching every snap of a game. Flacco is an incredibly streaky quarterback who gets in a rhythm (good or bad) by completing or missing consecutive passes (more on that in a moment). But in the hurry-up, if that first pass is completed, so will the next five.

With that in mind, the Ravens should consider taking a hint from the Jim Kelly Bills and initiate their own version of the K-Gun.

Don’t get me wrong, Cam Cameron did a lot of smart things at the beginning of the game to heat Flacco up, namely calling a bunch of passes to Old Reliable Derrick Mason. Joe needs those to get going, or you end up with a Cincinnati game. I also don’t fault Cameron for the playcalling inside the Steeler 5, considering the healthiest back on the team had a bum knee. But Flacco had no problem jumping right into the groove on that last drive. He demonstrates a ridiculous ability to get the team lined up and a play off in almost no time (who else thought they were spiking the ball after that first gain to Boldin?), showing himself to be one step ahead of the defense.

The Ravens are also sort of accidentally loaded for the K-Gun. Ray Rice is a perfect back, a triple-threat who can run it, catch it, or hold up in pass protection. Also, the benefit of having older receivers is that they’re composed and smart, knowing how to get open against reeling defenses.

Fine. Here are a few examples:

1. 2008. Week 9, Ravens at Browns. Down 27-13 in the second half, Cam tunes up the J-Gun. Starting at their own 21, Flacco hits Mason for 20, Rice for 8, Rice runs for 11, McClain runs for 9, Flacco to Mason for 7, Cleveland jumps offside trying to stop the bleeding. No huddle starts again: Rice runs for 5, then 18, McClain runs for 1, Cleveland encroaches to stop the bleeding. McClain runs it in for a touchdown.

   After a 3 and out by Cleveland, Flacco gets the ball at the Cleveland 42. Hits CLayton for 14, Rice runs for nothing, Flacco hits Mason for a 28 yard TD.

   Two Drives
   Flacco: 5/6, 77 yards, TD.
   Running Game: 6 carries, 45 yards, TD

2. 2009. Week 6, Ravens at Vikings. Down 17-3 in the third. Ball at the 28. Flacco misses one to Kelley Washington, Rice runs for 3, Flacco to Mason for 10, Flacco misses Mason, Rice runs for 5, Flacco to Mason for 9, Flacco to Mason for 23, Rice for 22, TD.

   Minnesota gets a field goal, then a touchdown. 27-10 Vikings.
   J-Gun 2: Starting at the 17, Flacco to Washington for 28, misses the next two, then hits Demetrius Williams for 17, Rice for 6, and Clayton for 32, TD.

   A field goal from Minnesota, 30-17 Vikings. J-Gun 3: Pass to Rice for 63 and one to Mason for 12, TD.

   Three and out Minnesota, Rice takes the first handoff to the house (a side effect of the hurry up). Frank Walker does what he always does, and Flacco has the ball with 1:49 to get into field goal range. Misses Clayton, then completes to Rice for 13, Washington for 13, Rice for 3, misses Mason, hits Mason for 9, misses Clayton, Rice runs the ball to wind the clock, Hauschka shanks the field goal.

   Four Drives
   Flacco: 11/17, 163 yards, 2 TD
   Running Game: 5 carries, 96 yards, 2 TD

3. 2010, Week 4, Baltimore at Pittsburgh. Easy one. 1:08 left in the game, ball on the Pittsburgh 40. Complete to Boldin twice and Houshmandzadeh twice. Ballgame.

   Flacco: 4/4, 40 yards, TD.

The risk with running the gun is miscommunication on the road. All three of these games were in loud, hostile environments. Let’s add one last stat for shock value:

Seven Drives in The J-Gun

Flacco: 20/27, 280, 4 TD

Running Game: 11 carries, 141 yards 3 TD.

The hurry up doesn’t totally fit into the Ravens’ model of a defense first team, because going fast means the D is getting back on the field again soon. Dilfer-ball won this city a championship. But Flacco isn’t Dilfer.

He might be Kelly.

An awful lot to dislike in this game, with the sort of reaction a lot of PTSD people get when triggered by a familiar stimulus. That’s not to say, however, that it was a total disaster. Always the optimist, here’s a quick assessment of what exactly happened in the Queen City.

OFFENSE

It’s easy to throw darts at Joe Flacco, who had his worst game as a pro. Three reasons why he’s going to avoid them from this post:

1. Something was physically wrong with him in the first half. A lot of the throws looked like they were being tipped by invisible defenders.
2. The Mason TD neutralizes two of the four picks. It was that good a throw.
3. Playcalling.

The third is the real mystery, bringing up frightening reminders of the “Let’s Get Cute” Billick era. When Flacco is struggling, you just run Ray Rice alliteratively. At times, it seemed Cam Cameron thought he was still playing the Jets, who did do a masterful job at shutting down the pint-sized Scarlet Knight. While Flacco was terrible, he wasn’t given any help by his coordinator.

For a bit of Monday Morning Quarterbacking, it’s time to come to terms with what Flacco is: the streakiest quarterback in the league. When he heats up, he’s almost undefendable, the kind of franchise passer of which Baltimore fans dream about erecting a statue. When he’s off, he’ll throw picks in bunches. While stats are painfully misleading, these show at least a bit of a pattern. Flacco has 39 career starts (including postseason) and 35 career picks. 27 of them came in 11 games. Three of those brutal games were in Flacco’s first five games as a pro and seven of them were on the road. The moral of the story? When Flacco is comfortable, he’s what we hope he is. When he’s not, three R’s come to mind.

DEFENSE

Tom Zbikowski, Dawan Landry, and Cory Redding have all dropped interceptions this season. This incarnation of the D doesn’t create as many splash plays as they have in the past. But, in a manner that invokes images of the 2000 team, you can’t do anything against them. Opposing talent is not a reason, either: the Bengals have plenty of weapons and the Jets evidently aren’t as bad as the Ravens made them look. The Bengals and Jets have combined for 24 points and 429 yards against them, compared to 52 points and 764 yards against the Patriots who are mediocre, but certainly not bad. The only thing this unit is missing right now are the turnovers in bunches that great defenses are used to. The secondary was the so-called weak point of the team in preseason and frankly hasn’t been one. Chris Carr, Fabian Washington, and Tom Zbikowski have all played great, despite all being presumed depth chart backups. They’ll keep the Ravens in every single game this season.

SPECIAL TEAMS

Why is it that when you bring in an offensive guru like Billick, the offense doesn’t work and the same is true of bringing in a special teams guru? The coverage units have been really, really bad this season, giving up big plays that could have been huge plays if Sam Koch wasn’t the best tackler on the field at the time. It has to get remedied or it will be what lets the great defense down.

How I’m Feeling

Good. You should too. The Ravens lost a close game on the road on a short week to a team that’s had their number for the last couple seasons. Next weekend has hugely Pyrrhic potential, as anything less than a total demolition of the lowly Browns will go into the ‘We Won, But…’ category talk radio meatballs like to wallow in. Flacco and the offense should do some stat padding at home.

Every defense can be beaten. Ravens fans know this best of all, watching in 2001 as Brett Favre lit up Baltimore a year after the unit was the greatest of all time. Granted, ‘beating’ that defense was relative because there was little to fear from Jason Brookins at running back and Cowardly Elvis under center. The ’85 Bears were unbeatable in ’86 too, but were taken out by Jay Schroeder and the Redskins. Coordinator Buddy Ryan assembled a killer defense in Philadelphia, but won zero playoff games.

Now his son has himself a killer D.

Let’s get this out of the way: paper aside, we all know first-hand how good Rex Ryan’s defense can be. It’s The OC (Organized Chaos) and it features the true Defensive Player of 2009 in Darrelle Revis (how that award goes to Charles Woodson just baffles me). Sure, he may have missed camp, but even at 50%, he’s a better cover corner than anyone the Ravens have. The Ravens defense vs the Jets offense is a sideshow: Jets fans have convinced themselves somehow that Mark Sanchez is ready to take on real-deal defenses and Ravens fans have convinced themselves that their secondary is banged up enough to be potentially exploited. Let’s call that a wash. The real game is the Ravens offense vs last year’s Number 1 defense.

Luckily, Baltimore knows what to do about it because they’ve lost games (not many, but more than one) using the exact same scheme.

Thinking back through last season and the preseason, when is Joe Flacco his most comfortable? When does he complete the most passes, read defenses the clearest, and  call the most precise audibles? Stay tuned for the answer.

Now to the OC. What Ryan does so well is create complex and occasionally bizarre personnel groupings that could all be coming after the quarterback on any given play. We’ve all seen games with Kelly Gregg as the lone down lineman, Haloti Ngata at middle linebacker, and the infamous instance of 270 pound Adalius Thomas covering Chad Johnson on the outside. They’re so unpredictably good because there’s no base. Revis is covering a guy one on one and the rest could be anything. What’s the best way to counter that?

Don’t let them do it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the teams and quarterbacks that gave the Ravens the most fits while under The Rex were the ones in a no-huddle. Personnel groups would get trapped out there and gassed, fast. For a defense based on speed and confusion, that’s certain death.

It’s a gigantic game for both teams on Monday, as Baltimore beat only a handful of playoff teams last year and the Jets have a lot of words to back up. But the whole game could come down to this one simple strategy. The question is whether Flacco is up to the task.

I mean, it worked for Jay Schroeder.

The Pittsburgh fan is a unique breed. The kind of cyclic delusion that causes one to believe rolling a two on a roulette wheel increases the chances of rolling another one. So when they are forced to play the first four weeks of the season without bathroom tourist Ben Roethlisberger, they’re not only calm, but confident. Message boards are teeming with various incarnations of ‘Don’t sleep on the Steelers! We’ve won six rings, which cosmically means we always have a better chance to win another!’ The die-hards in Pittsburgh and band-wagoners across the globe foresee positive results in the four games without Ben.

But what if they’re right?

Just ask the Ravens, Jaguars, Giants, Chargers and most of the teams in the league: you can’t win without a quarterback. Only once has a team won in spite of their field general, but he was mediocre, not wretched. The construct of the Pittsburgh roster is not to play hard-nosed, pound-the-rock football, but to chuck it around. It’s like a golfer suddenly deciding he’s going to make all of his putts.

If the Steelers break even, win three or, god forbid, sweep their Ben-less games, it’ll create a true worst case scenario in the Steel City. How is winning bad?

If they win, it’ll be because of Dennis Dixon. He’s fast, he’s surprisingly accurate, and throws a better deep ball than other players in his category of ‘mobile backup.’ He nearly led the Steelers to victory in Baltimore last season. Three of their four opponents finished in the top ten against the run last year, and ALL made upgrades to their defensive fronts: Baltimore (5 vs run) added Terrence Cody, Atlanta (10t) got Sean Witherspoon and Peria Jerry back from injury, Tennessee (10t) now have Derrick Morgan, and the Bucs bolstered their dead-last rating by nabbing two massive defensive tackles in Gerald McCoy and Brian Price. Pittsburgh has to throw to beat these teams.

Scratch that: Dixon has to throw.

If you have two starting quarterbacks, you have zero. If Dixon plays out of his mind, do you really go back to Ben? He’ll be rusty, he always has a bit of a turnover problem, and he also has a $100 million contract that is in jeopardy every time he has a couple Incredible Hulks with college girls.

Every quarterback gets benched eventually. That’s how Ben got the job in the first place.

Also, for the small market, family style division, a little trip down Harrison Ford’s family tree:

Thing I’ll Regret Saying By January: Mangini and Holmgren will keep this team from being a total disaster.

The remnants of the old AFC Central are a very interesting division indeed. Two of the league’s most stable and well-run franchises plus a quietly improving Bengals organization make it one of the toughest draws top to bottom. The only reason why the AFC East and NFC East can lay claim to divisional supremacy is that Cleveland has been a perennial doormat. There is reason for some optimism in The Mistake, though, which is saying a lot considering the summer they’ve had.

So who better to star in the AFC North film analogies than the king of the blockbuster and everyone’s favorite old guy with an earring, Mr. Harrison J. Ford (the J. is a guess).

Just for a primer, spend a little time watching Ford’s star turn in the little CBS made-for-TV movie that could.