Watching statistics pile in at the beginning of an NFL season is a perfect time to figure out who in your life is prone to making sweeping conclusions. The Ravens were headed to the Super Bowl after Week 1. At halftime of Week 2, they were left in a drainage ditch by A.J. Green.
So what exactly were we supposed to learn from the mish-mash of the two? We learned that Nathan Peterman is still incredibly bad. We learned that Jimmy Smith and C.J. Mosley are good football players, and that it is good to have good football players on the field. These are the obvious things.
What most interested me about Baltimore’s defense coming into the season was the pass rush. We knew that Terrell Suggs was getting older, and that the team hadn’t really come up with a credible second pass rusher. And with the caveat that we are working from small sample sizes, how the Ravens have pressured the quarterback is an interesting place to check for an early pulse.
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Against Buffalo, the Ravens pulled down six sacks on the overmatched tandem of Josh Allen and Peterman. Against the Bengals, Andy Dalton dropped back 42 times and wasn’t sacked once. There are subjective arguments both for and against how much that statistic matters. The Bengals had one of the worst lines in the NFL last year, but they did put some work into improving it this offseason. Bill Lazor’s offense is focused on quick passing. They also had a lead for much of the game … even though Dalton dropped back 42 times.
The breakdown of those Baltimore sacks is much less exciting. Sack leader Tavon Young, the cornerback, is not someone you’d expect to see leading the Ravens in this category. Between those two sacks and Kenny Young’s, half of Baltimore’s sacks are from nominally off-ball players. In other words: they are scheme sacks. They didn’t happen because a lineman won one-on-one, they happened because someone blew a block, misdiagnosed a play, or otherwise allowed a coverage sack.
Per Sports Info Solutions charting (courtesy Football Outsiders), the only Raven in the top 30 in pressures on an individual level is Michael Pierce. No one else on the team has more than two on their own. While Pierce is a player I really like — a value UDFA who I threw on top 25 prospect lists for a few years — if he’s your best pass rusher, you’re in trouble up front. The Ravens have maintained a middling overall pressure rate, but it’s mostly buoyed by the first game.
It’s early — there’s a lot of season left to play and I’m not coming at this purely with confirmation bias. But it’s also hard to ignore what you thought would be a big weakness when it is exposed by what you believed was a bad offensive line. If you can’t successfully find a way to pressure Giants cast-off Bobby Hart on the edge — a player who gave Margus Hunt two sacks in Week 1 — that’s at least concerning if not outright terrifying.
Suffice to say, the next couple of games loom large in our long-term outlook for Baltimore’s pass rush. The Broncos don’t have a dynamic passing game, but they have only allowed two sacks so far this season. The Steelers are, well, a shootout waiting to happen. One where Ben Roethlisberger is going to tear you apart if you give him infinite time to throw.
The Ravens don’t have to get six sacks a game to have a good defense. (It would help.) But they do need to be able to form a credible pass rush. Even if Smith and Mosley come back fully healthy and tilt the field a little more in Baltimore’s favor, they’re still going to need some pressure that isn’t scheme-generated.
That means that Terrell Suggs is going to have to show more burst than he has the first two weeks. It means that someone needs to wake Tyus Bowser up and let him know that it’s time for the light to come on. Matt Judon. Tim Williams. The Ravens have drafted and come up with a number of potential solutions. None of them has become an actual solution just yet.
And until that happens, they’re at risk of being bossed around by middling quarterbacks like Dalton. The next two games are going to tell us a lot about how far Wink Martindale’s crew is going to go. Scheme it up, get the best coverage players back, that’s nice. But disruption is king in NFL pass defense, and the early returns aren’t promising for Baltimore in this regard.
Ravens Analyst
Rivers McCown is a writer and editor who has written for ESPN.com, Bleacher Report, USA Today, and Deadspin, among other places. He’s edited for Football Outsiders, Rookie Scouting Portfolio, and Pre-Snap Reads Quarterback Catalogue.