How much of Baltimore’s offense this season was Lamar Jackson, and how much was everything around him? Sunday’s game against Cincinnati now turns on that. The Ravens ruled Jackson out on Saturday with a high ankle sprain, his third straight missed game, so Tyler “Snoop” Huntley starts again in a division game CBS has billed as having “big playoff implications.”

The betting market got there before the Ravens did. DraftKings had Baltimore as a 2.5-point home favorite on Oct. 20, then flipped to Cincinnati -1.5 on Wednesday after Jackson was seen limping. It went back to Baltimore -1.5 after his limited practices Thursday and Friday. By late Saturday morning, hours before the ruling, CBS’s odds table had the Bengals favored by 1.5 again, and that’s where DraftKings sat after the announcement. So the roughly four-point move on the Ravens vs Bengals line is the market’s running guess about Jackson, built up over the week, not a reaction to Saturday’s news. Tavius Robinson’s season-ending pectoral injury was announced the same afternoon, and it isn’t clear that number has caught up to it.

The production numbers suggest a bigger gap than four points. According to ESPN, the Ravens scored 116 points and 14 offensive touchdowns in 14 quarters with Jackson this season, and 40 points and four touchdowns in 10 quarters with Huntley. That’s a bit over eight points a quarter compared with four. Huntley is 6-8 as a fill-in starter for Baltimore, and since 2019 the Ravens are 0-3 against the Bengals, playoffs included, when Jackson hasn’t started.

The gap is real, but it’s also a little misleading.

Those 10 quarters come from three very different games. The first two were the second half against Tennessee on Oct. 4, after Jackson was hurt on the last offensive snap before halftime. Baltimore led 24-7 at the break, didn’t score again and won 24-18, with Huntley going 8 of 9 for 63 yards. A team sitting on a 17-point lead isn’t trying to pile on points, so that half probably says more about game management than about Huntley.

Atlanta was the best case. Huntley completed 24 of 32 passes for 201 yards and two touchdowns, drove the Ravens to a late tying score and then won it himself with a 1-yard sneak in overtime, 30-23. Derrick Henry ran for 102 yards against a Falcons run defense the AP described as the league’s top-ranked.

Cleveland was the worst case, and only part of the blame lands on the quarterback. All 10 Baltimore points came in the first quarter, starting with an 11-play opening drive that Huntley finished with a fourth-down touchdown pass to rookie Josh Cuevas. After that, Henry lost his first fumble of the season, which set up Cleveland’s tying touchdown, and Tyler Loop missed a 49-yard field goal in the fourth quarter. The Browns won 13-10 on a field goal as time expired. Huntley finished 19 of 31 for 165 yards, with a touchdown and no interceptions. Jesse Minter’s own list of what went wrong was the fumble, the missed kick and a penalty near the goal line, which doesn’t read like an indictment of the quarterback.

Take out the Tennessee half and the fumble that flipped Cleveland, and Huntley’s offense looks less like a collapse and more like a smaller version of the same plan. It’s still smaller, though. In two starts he has thrown for 201 and 165 yards, and Cincinnati hasn’t allowed a single wide receiver more than 63 yards this season, per CBS. A Huntley game plan probably runs through Henry, who leads the league with 130 carries and ranks fourth with 534 rushing yards. That approach works when the score stays in the 20s, as it did in Atlanta. It gets harder if the game turns into a shootout. DraftKings had the total at 51.5 early in the week, down to 48.5 by Friday morning.

That brings in the Bengals’ side of the matchup, which might matter more than anything Huntley does. Cincinnati comes off a bye with no players carrying an injury designation, after Ja’Marr Chase spent time in the concussion protocol earlier this month. In his Week 7 best bets for CBS, Brinson called it “a smash spot for Ja’Marr Chase against the Ravens” and noted that Chase averages 7.5 catches and 120 yards per game against Baltimore. The Ravens will also be without Robinson, who was playing 72% of defensive snaps and led the team with 3.5 sacks, and safety Jaylinn Hawkins, while cornerback T.J. Tampa is doubtful. If Chase gets loose against that secondary, Huntley would be pushed toward the pass-heavy catch-up game his offense is least built for.

The Bengals deserve some skepticism too. Their three wins came against teams with a combined 3-14 record, and both losses came against teams that are now 4-2 (Jacksonville and Pittsburgh). Former Bengals receiver Andrew Hawkins went further on ESPN’s Get Up on Thursday: “I think the winner is going to be the winner of the AFC North.”

In Week 7, with 11 or 12 games left for each team, that’s a stretch. The standings explain why he said it, though. Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore are all 4-2, and Cincinnati is 3-2, last in the division and 0-1 in AFC North play after losing to the Steelers. Baltimore already lost the head-to-head with Cleveland, and a loss Sunday would leave the Ravens 0-2 in the division for the first time in 19 years. One public model, Ben Baldwin’s as cited by A to Z Sports, puts Cincinnati’s playoff chances at 78% with a win and 49% with a loss. So the game doesn’t decide the division, but it could move both teams’ playoff odds a long way.

Jackson’s timeline adds to that. He said this week that he was “not even close” to full capability, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if this isn’t Huntley’s last start, and every division game he plays in the meantime counts the same as one Jackson would have played.

There are two broad ways Sunday could go, and each would tell us something. If Baltimore wins a game in the low 20s on Henry’s carries, with no repeat of the giveaway that sank the Cleveland game, the drop from eight points a quarter to four was mostly circumstance, and the market’s week-long four-point move was too big. If Chase finds space against a short-handed defense and Huntley has to throw 40 times to keep up, the market probably had it about right. In that case Baltimore falls further behind in the division while it waits on Jackson’s ankle.