OWINGS  MILLS — There are times when Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson wants to play in a preseason game.

However, he understands why coach John Harbaugh is being cautious. Jackson and the rest of the team’s key playmakers need to be healthy when the Ravens open the regular season against the Kansas City Chiefs on September 5th.

“I’m very competitive, so sometimes I do [say], ‘I want to go play,’ but at the same time I know why our coaches [are] keeping us off the field; and I’d rather just play [the] regular season than going out there and things happen,” Jackson said.

Jackson has not played in the preseason games in the past three seasons. He dealt with injuries in the 2022 season. Last year, he won his second NFL MVP award after not seeing any action in the preseason.

Harbaugh learned a hard lesson in 2021 when starting running back J.K. Dobbins suffered a knee injury on the Ravens’ first drive of the third preseason game in Washington and was lost for the season. Dobbins was never able to find his footing with the Ravens and now will try to resurrect his career with the Los Angeles Chargers.

Harbaugh doesn’t want a repeat of that incident with any of his players.

“We want to start the season off well,” Harbaugh said. “We want to put our best foot forward right out of the gates as much as we can. It’s hard to do; there’s no guarantee you’re going to do that, and there’s a lot of question marks to that every year. We have done well over the years doing that, because we practice well. It comes down to practice. Practice is what makes it; preseason games don’t make or break you that way, it’s the practices that make you, because that’s what you stack. There are advantages to practicing; you see teams do it, like the Chiefs for instance, they’ve always done it.

“All the way the back to Andy [Reid with the Eagles] in 1999, they’ve always done it. We had done it for a while, and we haven’t done it in the last few years. I think you can do it either way, and that’s the way we’re doing it this year.”