MINNEAPOLIS — The Ravens nearly got Gink'd on their penultimate offensive snap Sunday.

When Baltimore came to the line of scrimmage after the 2-minute warning, another Ravens run on a third-and-4 felt imminent. Vikings outside linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel expected otherwise, though.

"That's a play that I've seen before, so I was kind of anticipating that," Van Ginkel said standing at his locker in the wake of Minnesota's 27-19 loss. "The biggest thing was trying to just chop my feet so he doesn't shake me. And when I saw him throw it, I just tried to get a hand up and knock the ball down."

It was an impressive play but so close to being an epic one.

Shocking the analytics, Lamar Jackson rolled to his right and attempted to find tight end Charlie Kolar for a first down that would have nailed the coffin shut on the Vikings without their offense touching the ball, again, after drawing within eight points on a TD pass from J.J. McCarthy to Jalen Nailor at the 3:28 mark.

Van Ginkel sniffed it out like a working dog, leaving his feet to swat the pass and almost intercept it.

"I didn't even know it was right above me," he shared. "I guess I kind of wish I would've looked around for it quicker. And it wasn't until he kind of was running towards me and I felt him, like, kind of reaching for it. At that point it was [too] late. I wish I would have got my head up and tried to come down with it."

The well-nigh takeaway was emblematic of the club's third home loss and fifth overall this season.

"We knew Lamar was going to be a big task for us and that we had to slow him down," Van Ginkel commented. "We knew it was going to take all 11 of us getting to the ball and just trying to slow their run game down. We got some tipped passes, and we just got to find a way to come down with them."

Linebacker Blake Cashman, who notched a game-high 11 tackles said he needed to digest the film to truly assess the defense's performance, but initially "felt like we did a lot of good things. I thought we kept ourselves in a position to stay in the game and potentially win the game," he offered.

"We knew they were going to make some plays," Cashman added following his third consecutive game with at least 10 tackles. "I feel like there were really only about two series where I thought we could have tightened up. … The narrative of the game was we had a lot of turnovers, and defensively we didn't take the ball away. And this defense is made to take the ball away. So we weren't disruptive enough."

Minnesota's defense has produced two takeaways in its past six games, and only nine on the season, with five of them occurring in the Week 3 annihilation of Cincinnati and backup quarterback Jake Browning. It's the team's second-fewest takeaways in its first nine games of a season in history (eight in 2000).

"That's what we pride ourselves on," Van Ginkel said. "We've just got to continue to focus on it and put an emphasis on it, because we're going for it and the opportunities will come; they'll come in bunches."

It seemed like Minnesota was on the cusp of a breakthrough all afternoon.

In addition to Van Ginkel's timely tip, which caused Baltimore to punt with a little bit less than two minutes (but no timeouts) for McCarthy to do some magic, the 2024 Second-Team All-Pro defender garnered another deflection earlier in the game, and fellow pass-rushers Dallas Turner and Jonathan Greenard disrupted a pass apiece. Turner's resulted in a near INT, as well, except close counts for … welp, nothing.

"Sometimes it's just the flow of the game," Cashman pointed out. "I didn't think Baltimore was really taking much risk. They were running the football. Lamar was, for the most part, where they were having their success was in their quick passes. On the dropback, it wasn't really working for them. So it's hard to take the ball off a team when they're not absorbing risk. But with some [of the] guys they have over there – where they've had fumble issues – we've got to be better at punching at the football."

Minnesota in general needed to play a more reciprocal style, safety Joshua Metellus determined.

The Vikings lost the turnover battle 3-0; McCarthy tossed two interceptions and rookie return specialist Myles Price coughed up the football right after Baltimore took its first lead on Tyler Loop's fourth field goal. Greenard suffered a shoulder injury that sidelined him for the rest of the game two plays later, and the Ravens scored their very first touchdown on that same possession, taking advantage of a short field.

"It's difficult when one of your captains and team leaders goes down," said Van Ginkel.

Still, the defense rallied and did enough in theory to win in Week 10, instead of dropping below .500.

"We made plays, but at the end of the day, if you don't play clean football, you don't give [yourselves] a chance to win in this league, especially against a team like that, the kind of players they have," Metellus commented. "I think as a team, we just [have] to find a way to play more complementary, play cleaner."

Cashman elaborated: "For the most part I felt like [the defense] did a good job at keeping us in the game," he said. "I think if we take care of the ball better, and defensively we are attacking the ball and eliminate those self-inflicted wounds, we're going to [have] a good chance to win that football game."

A win certainly is feasible when Jackson is contained the way he was at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The league's two-time Most Valuable Player entered the game with a 136.7 passer rating and finished with a 87.7 rating in his sixth appearance in 2025. He went 17-for-29 passing (58.6 percent) with 176 yards (6.1 per attempt) and a touchdown, a 2-yarder to Mark Andrews with 10:44 to go in the fourth quarter. Jackson didn't find his usual success in the run game, either, totaling 36 yards on nine attempts.

The Vikings defense also did a solid job gang-tackling Derrick Henry. He led Baltimore on the ground, but only gained 75 yards, with a long of 14, on 20 carries. Change-of-pace running back Keaton Mitchell fared the finest on a per-rush basis, contributing 31 on four opportunities (7.8 avg.), including one for 22 yards.

"They're physical. They're going to run at you. And they've got playmakers all over the field," Van Ginkel stated. "We knew it was going to take four quarters and that we had to play to the best of our ability."

"They played all about the ball and we didn't," Metellus said. "We've all got to trust the process. We've all got to understand that in this league we can't afford to be week-in and week-out, because the week-in and week-out [performance] you end up with a record like we do, or you win one week [and] you lose the next. As a team we've just got to find a way to be more consistent. We don't know what that is yet, obviously. If we did, we would have done it, but I know we got the right guys in the room to figure it out."

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