Jacoby Jones and the Baltimore Ravens: The Plays, the Records, and the Man Behind No. 12
From New Orleans to Baltimore: How Jones Became a Raven
There’s a small irony baked into how Jacoby Jones ended up in Baltimore. In the 2011 AFC Divisional Playoff, playing for the Houston Texans, Jones muffed a punt – the ball was recovered deep in Texans territory by Jimmy Smith, a play that contributed directly to Houston’s elimination by the Ravens. Four months later, on May 8, 2012, Baltimore signed him to a two-year, $7 million deal. The same player who helped end their opponent’s season was now wearing purple.
Jones grew up in New Orleans East, attended St. Augustine High School and later Marion Abramson High School, and was considered too small to play for his high school team as a sophomore. He proved them wrong, eventually earning a scholarship to Lane College in Tennessee, where he played for the Dragons before the Texans selected him in the third round of the 2007 NFL Draft. Five seasons in Houston, 127 catches, 2,733 receiving yards, 14 touchdowns, and four return touchdowns later – the Texans cut him. Baltimore was watching.
What the Ravens were getting wasn’t a polished No. 1 receiver. Jones was a return specialist first, a situational receiver second, the kind of player whose impact doesn’t always show in the weekly box score. His first five NFL seasons were solid, occasionally electric, never quite transcendent. That changed the moment he put on a Ravens uniform.
The 2012 Season: A One-Man Special Teams Record Book
On October 14, 2012, against the Dallas Cowboys, Jones returned a kickoff 108 yards for a touchdown, tying the NFL record for the longest kick return in league history. Less than four weeks later, on November 11, he went 105 yards against the Oakland Raiders in a 55-20 Ravens win. That made him the first player in NFL history to return two kicks of 105 yards or more in a single season. Both records in the same year, in back-to-back months.
He wasn’t done. On November 18, in a divisional game against Pittsburgh, Jones returned a punt 63 yards for a touchdown – the first time Baltimore had ever returned a punt for a score against the Steelers. The Ravens won 13-10. Moments like that one don’t show up in yards-per-game averages, but Ravens coaches and fans felt every one of them.
By the end of the regular season, the Pro Bowl selectors had seen enough. Jones was named to the AFC roster as a kick returner and selected to the 2012 All-Pro team. For a player who had been cut by his previous team seven months earlier, the turnaround was about as complete as it gets in professional football.
The Mile High Miracle – January 12, 2013
Set the scene: 13 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver, wind chill at 2 degrees, the coldest playoff game ever played at Mile High. Peyton Manning was wearing gloves. The Ravens were down 35-28 with under a minute left in regulation, facing 3rd-and-3 from their own 30-yard line. Every statistic and situational factor pointed toward Denver finishing them off and advancing to the AFC Championship.
Joe Flacco took the snap, held the ball longer than he should have by conventional logic, and launched it 70 yards downfield. Jones, running a post route with cornerback Tony Carter in coverage, caught it in stride and walked into the end zone with 31 seconds left. Tie game. The play immediately earned a name: the Mile High Miracle.
What’s easy to forget now is how close Denver came to never allowing it. Broncos head coach John Fox, leading by seven with 2:30 remaining, called three consecutive runs up the middle. He had Manning take a knee after Jones scored, with 31 seconds left and two timeouts in his pocket. Fox was later criticized extensively for both decisions – Pro Football Reference’s Jason Lisk described the conservative playcalling as “leaving the win on the field.” The Ravens went on to win 38-35 in double overtime on Justin Tucker’s 47-yard field goal, the sixth double-overtime game in NFL playoff history. The game ran 76 minutes and 42 seconds, making it the fourth-longest in league history.
Jones finished that game with two catches for 77 yards and a touchdown, plus 74 yards in return yardage. Numbers that don’t capture what those final 31 seconds felt like to anyone watching in Baltimore.
Super Bowl XLVII: Records Set in His Hometown
Super Bowl XLVII was played at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans on February 3, 2013. Jacoby Jones grew up four miles away.
With under two minutes left in the first half, Flacco found Jones on a 56-yard touchdown pass – Jones eluded two San Francisco 49ers defenders to score, giving Baltimore a 21-6 lead. Good play. Big moment. Not the one anyone remembers.
To open the second half, Jones took the kickoff at his own end zone and ran 108 yards untouched for a touchdown. It is still the longest play in Super Bowl history. At the time, it tied the NFL record for the longest kickoff return. The score pushed Baltimore to 28-6. San Francisco would cut it to 34-31, aided in part by a 34-minute power outage in the Superdome that stopped the game cold and let the 49ers recalibrate – but the Ravens held on. Jones became the first player in Super Bowl history to score both a receiving touchdown and a return touchdown in the same game. Sports Illustrated put him on the cover of its Super Bowl XLVII issue. He was 28 years old, playing in a championship in his hometown, and he had just set records that still stand a dozen years later.
If Joe Flacco hadn’t caught fire across all four playoff games that January, Jones very likely wins Super Bowl MVP. Flacco finished 22-of-33 for 287 yards and three touchdowns – his performance was undeniable. But Jones scored half the team’s touchdowns in that game and produced one of the two or three most electric individual plays in Super Bowl history. It’s hard to argue he got the worse end of that outcome.
The Rest of His Time in Baltimore – and How It Ended
The 2013 season was rougher. Week 1, during a punt return, teammate Brynden Trawick accidentally ran into Jones and injured him. He missed five games. When he came back in Week 6 against Green Bay, he was working his way back into rhythm on a Ravens team that never quite recaptured 2012’s magic.
There was still Thanksgiving against the Steelers, when Jones broke into open field on a kickoff return and appeared to be heading for a touchdown – until Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin, watching the scoreboard replay, inadvertently drifted onto the field and slowed Jones’s route. Tomlin was fined $100,000. The Ravens won 22-20 anyway. Two weeks later, in a snowstorm against the Vikings, Jones returned a kick 77 yards for a touchdown with under two minutes remaining. John Harbaugh later said that play – Jones talking to his mother on the sideline just before the return, then racing the ball back through the snow – was his favorite Jones football memory.
Jones played one more season in Baltimore in 2014, then split time between the San Diego Chargers and Pittsburgh Steelers in 2015 before the NFL career wound down. On September 29, 2017, he signed a one-day contract with the Ravens specifically to retire as a member of the team. The organization didn’t have to offer that. They wanted to.
After Football: Dancing, Coaching, and New Orleans Roots
Season 16 of Dancing with the Stars in 2013 featured Jones as a contestant. He finished third. If you’ve seen footage of his post-touchdown celebrations during the 2012 season – the full-body, arms-and-legs, entirely unselfconscious joy of them – his Dancing with the Stars run makes perfect sense. He was never performing. That was just who he was.
The Jacoby Jones Foundation ran free football camps in New Orleans from 2009 through 2015, giving back to the neighborhood where he was born. At the time of his death, he was working as the wide receivers coach at Alabama State University, passing along what he knew to a younger generation. His friends called him someone who took the shoes off his own feet to give to strangers who needed them more. That detail came up repeatedly after he died, from multiple people who witnessed it firsthand – not one person’s recollection, but a pattern of behavior over years.
His Death and the Outpouring That Followed
Jacoby Rashid Jones died on July 14, 2024, three days after turning 40. He was found in his sleep at his home in New Orleans East. A Louisiana medical examiner later confirmed the cause: hypertensive cardiovascular disease, a condition caused by long-term high blood pressure and the leading cause of death related to hypertension.
The NFL community’s response was immediate and wide. Lamar Jackson posted “na bra no way RIP LEGEND.” J.J. Watt, who played against Jones with the Texans and later played with him in Houston, wrote that Jones was “one of the most fun-loving teammates and people I’ve ever been around.” Ray Lewis called him “a pillar in the community.” Robert Griffin III noted he was “funny, fast, and could dance.” The NFL itself issued a statement within hours.
Ravens GM Eric DeCosta said he remembered standing next to Jones at the Super Bowl, hugging him after the final whistle with Jones’s mother nearby. Harbaugh said simply: “I loved Jacoby Jones. We all did.” What’s striking about the tributes is that almost none of them led with the records. They led with the man.
What He Left Behind in Baltimore
Jones was a journeyman by any statistical measure – nine NFL seasons, four teams, career totals that don’t put him in Hall of Fame conversations. But the Ravens’ Super Bowl XLVII title doesn’t happen the way it happened without him. The Mile High Miracle doesn’t exist. The 108-yard return doesn’t exist. Baltimore doesn’t get that second Lombardi Trophy, the one the franchise had been chasing since Ray Lewis and Ed Reed and the entire 2000 team grew older together.
In the summer of 2025, former teammate Torrey Smith organized a free football camp in New Orleans at the request of Jones’s mother, Emily London-Jones, who wanted to restart the Jacoby Jones Foundation camps after a decade away. Three hundred and seventeen kids showed up, ranging from 8 to 14 years old. Former Ravens Ray Rice and Bryan Hall helped coach. Everyone got No. 12 bandanas – a nod to how Jones wore his during his playing days. Emily London-Jones spent the day fussing over the children, overseeing breakfast and lunch, handing out free shoes. “Whatever it takes not to let his name fade away,” she said. “Because he was good to people. And he loved people.”
The longest play in Super Bowl history still belongs to him. The Mile High Miracle still carries his name. And in New Orleans, 317 kids spent a Saturday learning to play football because of who he was off the field – which, in the end, may be the record that lasts longest.
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