Jason Bielski ends a week of quiet with his verdict on the Annihilators: "A turn? No."

Jason Bielski opened with an apology. "Sorry it took me a week, Rachel," the Annihilators owner wrote Sunday night, and then he answered nearly everything I had asked him since last Monday, in a handful of short notes that came in together after a Sunday that left his team chasing the Dragons.

I have waited longer for less. What came back was not spin. It was an owner saying, more plainly than I have managed, the thing I have been trying to say for a week.

I asked him whether this was a turn or just one more week. "A turn? No," he wrote. "Unless Jihaad finds a lot of points Monday night, it's a loss and it's one more week. We'll get it sorted."

Not many owners write that about their own club while the game is still technically open. I respect it. I also think he's right.

Last week the Annihilators put up 118.82 against the Inexperienced Blitz, the best score in the league that week, and there was a pull to call it the start of something. I wouldn't. One Sunday is a Sunday. Jon Paden, who owns the Dragons and knows a thing or two about big Sundays, said it better than I did: "One big Sunday is one big Sunday; 118 doesn't travel by itself, and neither does ours."

It didn't travel. When the last Sunday game went final, Paden's Dragons were well clear, and what the Annihilators have left is linebacker Jihaad Campbell on Monday night. Bielski did not sound like a man counting on a miracle. Paden did not sound like a man counting on anything. "I'll let the scoreboard talk until Monday night is done," he wrote, and in a second note, "I'm not calling anything final yet." Neither am I. I'm also not planning a parade.

So where did it go? Bielski gave me one line, and it's the one I keep rereading: "What I didn't expect was a zero out of the flex." He didn't say who, and I'm not going to guess in print. A zero in a flex spot is the kind of hole a team can sometimes climb out of. A team playing its second straight Sunday without Lamar Jackson, who was inactive again for the Ravens, has no rope for climbing.

There was good news, and Bielski led with it among the things he liked. Josh Jacobs had his suspension lifted late in the week and was back for Sunday. "Josh coming back and scoring was good to see," Bielski wrote.

From the other sideline, Paden gave the credit to his running backs and his linebackers. With Buffalo on its bye, the Dragons had to find a way without James Cook III, and "Judkins and Stevenson answered," he said. As for the quarterback question I'd been chewing on all week, he closed it in a sentence: "Tyler Shough was our quarterback and Tanner McKee was behind him; that's all there was to it."

The rest of what Bielski sent was him explaining, in his own clipped way, how he thinks. "We don't change the plan because guys are hurt; the next man plays," he wrote. Kirk Cousins "has been a pro every time we've asked," and D'Andre Swift "runs hard and doesn't complain about the load." On Jackson, Saquon Barkley and T.J. Edwards, he said, "the injury report says what there is to say." That is a polite door, closing. I'll leave it closed.

When I first wrote about Campbell's jump from the practice squad to the starting defense, I said nobody had told me how he got there. Bielski still hasn't, exactly. "Jihaad earned his spot," he wrote. "He's young, he works, and we think a lot of him. That's his story more than mine." Fair enough. On Monday night, it's going to be his story whether he wants it or not.

I'd also asked about Nick Herbig, the Steelers linebacker I was slow to notice. "Nick Herbig plays every snap like it's his last one," Bielski wrote, and then pointed me somewhere useful: for a profile, I'd do better going through the Steelers than through him. Noted. That's the next call.

And the question I'd been saving, about where he was when Cousins threw for 313 yards against the Blitz: "In my seat, not saying much. That's usually where I am." Having waited a week for these notes, I believe him.

Here's the part I didn't expect. Paden told me he and Bielski have been friends since the sixth grade. Bielski, for his part, didn't hide from Sunday. "The Dragons beat us," he wrote. "Jon's team played better and I'll hear about it."

My take hasn't moved, and now the owner agrees with it. The 118.82 was a good Sunday from a team that needed one. It was not a new team. A turn is two good weeks in a row, and the Annihilators are, at best, waiting on a linebacker to make this one interesting. I'll be watching Campbell on Monday night, and keeping my expectations where Bielski keeps himself: in my seat, not saying much.