Lamar is good late because he is good always.

What a Sunday. Week 3 felt like one long fourth quarter.

The Ravens and Cowboys traded punches in Rio until the last seven seconds. Lamar hit Zay Flowers for 27 yards, called timeout with one second left, and Tyler Loop drilled a 56-yarder to win it 34-31. In Pittsburgh, Joe Burrow fumbled on the Bengals’ final drive and the comeback died right there. The Jets erased a 14-point hole to tie the Lions with four minutes left before Jahmyr Gibbs closed it out. The Bills turned it over five times and still needed two fourth-quarter touchdowns to put away the Chargers.

Three of those finishes turned on late defensive flags that erased a stop or set up a score. Denver won by four. Cleveland won by three.

That is how the NFL actually works. Most games are decided by a handful of plays and calls in the last few minutes. It is where reputations get made and narratives get written, and it is also where we most reliably forget that football is the ultimate team sport.

All these close games got me asking which quarterbacks actually show up when it matters, and whether “not clutch” is just one more label people use to minimize Lamar Jackson while ignoring what the numbers say about everyone else.

The stat that started it came from Scott Kacsmar after the Bengals loss: Burrow is 1-34 in games where he trailed in the last eight minutes.

My thesis, stated plainly so you can hold me to it:

1. Lamar is better than average in these moments, and probably great.
2. He gets measured differently than the other superstars.
3. He gets less help from the officials late in games.
4. He has lost games where he did his job and the kick or the defense did not hold.

Some of it held up. One part of it did not, and that is the part I have been chewing on.

Start where everyone starts: the scoreboard. When you are behind with eight minutes to go, do you find a way to win?

Lamar wins 23.9% of the time against a 16.5% league average, sixth among forty active quarterbacks with at least fifteen of these games. Not bad for a guy who supposedly cannot close.

Mahomes is the only true outlier. Allen and Lamar are nearly identical, and only one of them gets called not clutch.

Burrow is not just below average, he is the worst of anyone with a real sample, by a distance. His team puts him in these spots as often as Lamar’s does, so this is not about opportunity.

One caution that governs everything below: a win-loss record is a team statistic. It contains the defense, the kicker and the play caller.

Records are fun to argue about. They do not tell you who made the plays. So I went snap by snap, and this is where I was wrong.

Lamar wins these games, but his individual plays in them are only average for this group. That is my second thesis point, the one where I said he was probably great, coming apart in my hands.

Nobody here is padding. Garbage time is 14% to 20% of everyone’s plays, and those snaps are excluded from the first two columns entirely. Lamar’s garbage-time snaps mostly came while the Ravens were already winning big, not while chasing a lost game.

I counted the four defensive penalties that bail out an offense, per 100 dropbacks, in the last eight minutes when the offense is tied or trailing.

Lamar draws about a third fewer late bailout flags than the league average, and roughly half what Mahomes gets. A third of Mahomes’ late comeback wins included one of these flags on the drive.

Give Lamar credit for an average catch on every high-stress drop, and erase the fumbles his receivers lost, and his high-stress EPA nearly doubles, from 0.075 to 0.144 per play. Only Mahomes and Hurts gain more. He still ranks seventh of nine, so it does not flip the verdict, but it closes almost half the gap.

Here is why a drop hurts so much: EPA charges every incomplete pass to the quarterback, even when the ball hits the receiver in the hands. A lost fumble after the catch is worse, because the turnover lands on his play too. Running back fumbles on handoffs, like Derrick Henry’s in Buffalo, do not count against him at all.

Lamar’s pass catchers drop the ball twice as often as Burrow’s when it matters, and his teammates lose fumbles at the second-highest rate here. Ravens fans do not need the table:

• Buffalo, 2025 opener. Up 40-32 with three minutes left, Derrick Henry lost a fumble. The Bills scored twice and won 41-40.
• Buffalo, 2024 playoffs. Mark Andrews lost a fourth-quarter fumble, then dropped the tying two-point conversion with 1:33 left. FTN charted a second drop on him in that game too, in the second quarter with the score tied and the Ravens at the Buffalo 28. Two in one game is tied for his most since charting began in 2022. Ravens lose 27-25.
• Indianapolis, 2023. Isaiah Likely dropped a pass in a tied game with 3:28 left. Ravens lose in overtime.
• Jacksonville, 2022. Gus Edwards lost a fumble, Kenyan Drake dropped a pass on the next drive. Ravens lose 28-27.

Two more that every Ravens fan reaches for, and a caveat about both that I would rather state than have you catch.

• Kansas City, the 2023 AFC Championship. Fourth quarter, Ravens down 17-7, Lamar hits Zay Flowers for eight yards to the Kansas City 1. Flowers reaches for the goal line, the ball comes out, and Kansas City recovers in the end zone. Touchback. The play cost 5.23 expected points, a hair behind Henry’s fumble in Buffalo for the most damaging single play in this section.
• Cincinnati, Week 13 of 2025. Lamar finds Isaiah Likely for what the officials signal as a 44-yard touchdown. Replay reverses it: Likely had fumbled at the 1 and the ball rolled through the end zone. Touchback, no points, and 3.20 expected points off Lamar’s ledger.

Here is the caveat. Neither of those two is in any number above this line. The Flowers fumble came with the Ravens down ten, outside the one-score window that high_stress@v1 measures, and the Likely reversal was the second quarter of a one-point game rather than the fourth. They are the two plays people remember, and the filter this piece runs on excludes both.

That cuts in my favor, which is exactly why it is worth saying. Widen the window to catch them and the teammate-cost case in this section looks stronger than the numbers I showed you, not weaker. I am leaving the window where it is, because moving it after seeing which plays it catches is how you talk yourself into anything.

The playoffs show it hardest. Lamar has only 16 high-stress playoff plays. Two of them are Andrews’ fumble and dropped conversion in Buffalo. Those two drag his high-stress playoff EPA from 0.52 per play, which would lead this group, down to 0.13. A sample that small proves nothing, and it is still the clearest picture of a drive he finished and his teammates did not.

Miami 2022, up 21 in the fourth, lost 42-38. Cleveland 2023, a 14-point fourth-quarter lead into a 33-31 loss. Buffalo 2025, up 15, lost 41-40. Pittsburgh 2025, a missed 44-yarder in a 26-24 loss.

To be fair, two of Lamar’s three missed-kick losses were from 61 and 67 yards, and Burrow has it worse with five. The broader point stands: every one of those twelve is a loss on his record, and several came after he had already put his team ahead.

Mahomes starts his final drive with about two timeouts, double almost everyone. That is repeatable, and it belongs to the coach.

The Ravens leave value on the table. They go for it on late short fourth downs less than league average and convert 78% when they do.

Zac Taylor punts the most when trailing late. Put that next to the Bengals’ 6-52 record when trailing after three quarters and the Burrow problem looks less like a quarterback problem every minute.

Here is where I landed. Lamar wins late more than most, with less help from the officials and less support at the finish. The not-clutch label does not survive contact with the numbers. But if you want to call him great in those moments, the play-by-play says there is still room.

Burrow is the flip side. He plays well late and almost never wins. That is not a quarterback problem, it is an organization problem.

And the officiating matters beyond Lamar. Mahomes, Stafford and Herbert each draw about twice his rate of drive-extending flags late. When games are this close this often, those calls decide outcomes. The league should allow replay review of pass interference and roughing the passer in the fourth quarter and overtime, not to re-referee every play, but to fix the obvious misses.

The biggest thing this data reminded me of is simple. Football is the ultimate team sport. We love to boil it down to the quarterback, and I did plenty of that here. The numbers keep pulling it back to everyone else. A receiver has to catch it. A back has to hold it. A defense has to get one more stop. A kicker has to make the kick. Lamar can put his team ahead with two minutes left and it still does not count if the other fifty-two do not finish.

Which Ravens late-game collapse still keeps you up at night, and was it the quarterback, the hands, the defense, or the whistle? Tell me and I will pull the numbers on the best answer.

Definitions used: high_stress@v1 · trailing_late@v1 · bailout_flag@v1 · garbage_time@v1 · Each links to the exact filter, the thresholds, and the argument against them.

Sources: nflverse play-by-play, 2018 through Week 3 of 2026, regular season and playoffs; FTN charting via nflverse (CC BY-SA 4.0) for drop and pressure data. Reporting credited inline. The Bottom Row No. 002 · bottomrowsports.substack.com · Written by a fan, for an argument. Bring your own numbers.