By Tiffany Williams –
The Ravens walked into Cleveland and dragged the Browns into a street fight, walked out with a 23-16 win, and suddenly a 5-5 record that looks a whole lot more dangerous than it did a month ago. Baltimore has now won four straight and pushed its domination of Cleveland to a suffocating 28-8 since 2008, a run of misery tied with the Packers over the Bears and the Patriots over the Jets. John Harbaugh keeps stacking history, now sitting at 190 total wins, the 13th coach to ever crack that mark.
Derrick Henry looked like the old freight train again, piling up 103 yards on 18 carries with another touchdown and a 59-yard explosion that flipped the field and set up a field goal. He’s stacking 100-yard games, 50-yard runs and touchdown streaks like he’s collecting debts, and he’s now tied with John Riggins for the fifth-most games with a rushing touchdown across NFL history. Every week he looks like he’s not just fighting defenders but fighting time, and so far Henry is winning.
Mark Andrews delivered one of the wildest plays of the NFL season—a 35-yard fourth-and-1 rushing touchdown, the first rushing score of his career and the first rushing TD by a tight end in team history. Before that, he broke Derrick Mason’s franchise receiving yardage record, joining a tiny, elite club of tight ends who’ve carried an entire franchise’s passing game. Baltimore asked him to drag the team back into the lead, and Andrews didn’t just do it; he did it with a sledgehammer.
Zay Flowers kept tearing up defenses in huge chunks with a 45-yard catch-and-run and another big grab to move into the Top 10 on the Ravens’ all-time receiving list. His acceleration turns ordinary plays into field-position swings, and Cleveland watched it happen in real time.
But this game was won by a Ravens defense that treated Cleveland’s offense like a chew toy. The Browns finished with 187 yards, couldn’t convert a single third down in the first half, and ended up 2-for-14 for the night. The Ravens have now held their last three opponents to 7-of-40 on third down and have shoved five straight opponents under 20 points. Dillon Gabriel and Shedeur Sanders were held to a 39.7 passer rating—one of the worst beatdowns the Ravens have laid on a quarterback duo since 2015—and their 42.3 percent completion rate was among the lowest across the entire league this season.
Kyle Hamilton played like a one-man disaster siren: nine tackles, a sack, three tackles for loss, two passes defensed and a forced fumble. Nobody in Baltimore’s history has started a career with this kind of annual pass-rush consistency from the secondary, and he’s the first defensive back—and only the second player since 1999—to put up that exact stat line in a single game. Every snap he looks like a defensive back built in a lab.
Chidobe Awuzie broke up three passes, including two on Cleveland’s desperate final drive, swatting away the Browns’ last flickers of hope. Kyle Van Noy added a sack. Nate Wiggins jumped a ball for his fourth career interception—his third against Cleveland, like he has the Browns programmed into his internal GPS. Keyon Martin delivered his first career sack, becoming just the third undrafted rookie DB in team history to do it.
Harbaugh’s got his weekly press conference lined up, but the tape already says everything: Baltimore’s defense is suffocating teams, stealing the ball, closing out drives, and blowing up quarterbacks with a swagger they haven’t had since their last title run.
But the Browns didn’t just roll over. Myles Garrett turned in one of the most terrifying individual defensive performances the league has seen this year: five tackles, five tackles for loss, four sacks, tying an NFL record with 10 sacks in a three-game stretch, and becoming the first player ever with at least 12 sacks in six straight seasons. Every time Baltimore dropped back, Garrett was waiting like a closing elevator door.
Devin Bush jumped a pass for a 23-yard touchdown return, Carson Schwesinger led the team with 10 tackles and snatched an interception, and Mike Hall Jr. grabbed his first sack of the season while Grant Delpit recovered another fumble. The Browns still haven’t allowed a 300-yard passer in 38 straight games, the longest active streak in the league.
Cleveland’s defense came ready for a war. Baltimore’s defense came to end it. And that was the difference.
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