In the course of Monday night's 24-23 preseason victory over the New York Jets, the Ravens alternately looked like a team headed for the Super Bowl and a team that might be headed for trouble.
When Haloti Ngata picked off the first pass of the night by Jets No. 1 draft choice Mark Sanchez and lumbered into the end zone for a quick touchdown - on the heels of the Ravens' 23-0 victory over the Redskins in their preseason opener - the thought passed through my head that it wouldn't be a bad idea to book one of those cool art deco South Beach hotels in Miami for the first week of February.
When Ray Lewis nearly picked off the kid's second pass of the night with nothing between Ray-Ray and the end zone except Rex Ryan's worst nightmare, I could almost taste that $12 mojito at Larios, Gloria Estefan's beachfront bistro.
If you read me regularly, you know I'm occasionally prone to a burst of irrational optimism, like that time in March when I predicted the Orioles would win 68 games this year. So, when Joe Flacco slipped that flashy behind-the-back handoff to Ray Rice for the Ravens' second touchdown, making the cumulative score of the Ravens' preseason 37-0, I was savoring in my mind that tiny sack of peanuts on the Southwest flight to South Florida.
There were, however, 51 minutes more of preseason football to play, and they would provide plenty of opportunities for a more reasoned analysis of the Ravens with three weeks left before the start of the NFL regular season.
The first-team defense looked pretty good, though the Jets did regroup and establish a running game after Sanchez recovered from his first-minute meltdown. The Ravens' first-team offense also performed adequately, but I doubt Flacco is strutting around after his 8-for-18 passing performance. Faced with an opponent that was playing with some intensity, the Ravens performed unevenly in the first half and sloppily at times in the second.
There is no cause for great alarm, of course. The top priority in any NFL preseason game is to stay healthy, and the Ravens came out of Monday night pretty much unscathed. But coach John Harbaugh is a stickler when it comes to turnovers, penalties and blown assignments, and there were too many of all of those for him to walk off the field with a big smile.
