How good does Joe Flacco really need to be to lead this team to the hoisting of a silver football? There's a lot of Flacco hate everywhere and some of it is justified. Most of this due to his inconsistency but is it as bad as it looks?  I attended the Ravens/Jets matchup two Sundays ago, and watched the game at home also as I had recorded it. The experience made me do a lot of thinking. Here are a few points;

1) Did anyone expect anything more than a defensive battle when you basically had two Rex Ryan creations out on the field? Unfortunately for Rex his monster that he helped to create, came back to eat him. In some regard he should have been proud while he was cringing. Was this a case of life imitating art?

2) I know that if you look at statistics, Joe looks pretty bad. There is no arguing that there is a level of inconsistancy in his plays. But why is this the case? One could make the argument using the Ravens Jets game as an example, that Joe actually had a pretty good drive against a darn good defense in the first quater scoring the only offensive touchdown in the game. In other parts of the game, while Joe badly overthrew Torrey Smith a few times, he "almost" connected with him on some pretty deep balls not to mention Torrey's ability a couple of times to manage to shove off of Revis Island. That in and of itself impressed me. That fact alone tells me that with a little more time, these two are going to develop a nice rhythm. Who really expects an offense with a rookie playing in only his second NFL game to catch and complete one or two touchdowns against a team built on defense? Or what about the third down conversion pass to Ray Rice while Joe was scrambling? I thought I saw our quarterback make something out of nothing on that play. I think Joe will get there. Which leads me to my third point.

3) The Ravens have already shown that with a quarterback that can do enough, that a Lombardi can be hoisted. Without getting ahead of myself or drinking too much purple koolaid, this Ravens D islooking pretty 2000esq. The offense is definately better than the 2000 offense and that one was enough.  I think an argument could be made, that as long as our D stays the same or improves, and our O stays the same or improves, that we do have the best chance that we've had in a very long time.