BALTIMORE — After days of speculation and drama over whether Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson would play this week, the decision matched the past two games.
Jackson, who hasn’t played since suffering a high left ankle sprain in the Ravens’ Oct. 4 win over the Tennessee Titans, was ruled out on Saturday for Sunday’s pivotal AFC North showdown against the Cincinnati Bengals at M&T Bank Stadium.
It will mark the third straight game the two-time NFL Most Valuable Player has missed.
“I’m just trying to move how I move,” Jackson said Friday in his first comments to reporters since suffering the injury. “If I can’t do that, I can’t help my team. I can’t put my team in a situation like that. I feel like I’m doing a disservice then.
“It just hurts. … I can walk. It’s just trying to run, and [I can’t] put too much pressure.”
With Jackson out, Tyler “Snoop” Huntley will get his third straight start.
The Ravens are 1-1 in their past two games with Huntley at quarterback. They beat the Atlanta Falcons, 30-23, in overtime, then fell flat in an ugly 13-10 loss to the Cleveland Browns.
Baltimore is 7-12 in regular-season games Jackson hasn’t played. That includes a 6-7 mark with Huntley starting in his place.
With Jackson, the Ravens have averaged 28.1 points per game. Without him, they have scored only 17.9 per contest. They are also 11-3 against the Bengals in games that Jackson has started.
This will be the seventh game in the past 23 that Jackson, 29, has missed because of injury.
Last season, a hamstring injury knocked him out of a Week 4 game against the Kansas City Chiefs, and he missed each of the next three games. He also missed a must-win Week 17 game against the Green Bay Packers with a deep back contusion.
Jackson also dealt with a spate of other injuries in 2025, had his worst season yet, and Baltimore missed the playoffs, finishing 8-9.
“I feel like that was dumb a little bit,” Jackson said Friday of playing through injuries last year. “I’m hurt, and I’m trying to help my team win, but I’m not to my full capabilities, not even close to it.”
He also said this week that he does not need to be 100% to return to the field.
“If I can just go out there and feel the pain a little bit, I can play,” he said. “But [if] I’m restricted, and I can’t do what I do, [then] I’m not helping [anybody]. If I can just go out there and just be a statue and be hit, that’s not helping my team at all.”
Jackson was initially listed as questionable Friday after three straight days of being limited in practice. However, he didn’t take the field when practice ended Friday and limped to meet with the media with his left ankle still heavily taped.
He also said the Ravens’ training staff told him he has a high-ankle sprain, which typically takes at least a few weeks to heal, and disputed reports that it was less severe.
“It hurt bad, you know,” Jackson said. “It was very, very, very, very, very painful. Just coming back, I’ve been trying to ice it as much as possible, get the swelling down. That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing.”
Sunday’s game is an important one for the Ravens (4-2), who are already coming off a divisional loss to the Browns. Another one would put them at 0-2 in the AFC North.
They also face perhaps the toughest three-game stretch of their season. After the Bengals, they play at the Buffalo Bills before returning home to face the Jacksonville Jaguars on Thursday night.
The hope is that Jackson will return soon, with the quarterback saying the injury is headed in the right direction.
“One thing I’ll say about Lamar is there’s nobody that – he’s super competitive, and he wants to play,” coach Jesse Minter said Friday. “It’s going to be a decision based on how he feels, how effective he feels like he can be and how we feel like it looks. So, that’s really what we’ll base our decision on.”
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