To say this year’s Ravens team has been disappointing would be an understatement. The Ravens entered the season being pegged by many pundits to make the Super Bowl this season. Instead, the team is 2-6 halfway through the season and on pace to have the worst season since the franchise first moved to Baltimore.
To make matters worse, the Ravens will not have much money to make improvements this off-season. While dead money for Haloti Ngata and Ray Rice will cleared off the books, Joe Flacco’s escalating contract will mean the team will not have much money to fill holes that were evident this year. (My BSL Colleague Mike Randall discussed Flacco’s contract situation here.)So not only will the Ravens have difficulty adding talent, they may actually lose some: with Kelechi Osemele’s rookie contract up this summer, the team might lose one of their best offensive lineman to free agency.
So things look pretty bleak for the Ravens right now. But despite this lost season, there are plenty of reasons not to despair about a coming dark age for the franchise.
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Injuries: The Ravens currently have 15 injured players, which is among the most in the NFL. But even among teams with a similar injury count, I’m not sure any team in the league has lost as many impact players. An injured Terrell Suggs deprives the Ravens an elite pass rusher that would help take pressure off a weak and injury riddled Secondary. An injured Breshad Perriman (and now Steve Smith) deprives Flacco of a general receiver dynamic enough to help open up the offense. And an injured Eugene Monroe means that human welcome mat James Hurst is stuck protecting Flacco, and forces adjustments in the offense to give Hurst help.
All this is to say that the Ravens team we expected to be successful this year is not the team we are currently seeing on the field. While the parts that are on the field have under-performed, I have trouble believing the record would not be improved, if the roster was healthier. While that doesn’t change the team’s actual record, we should remember that the team is missing many of the working parts that we anticipated when the season began.
Close games: The Ravens haven’t only been unlucky with injuries: they also have been less than fortunate on the field. Every single Ravens game this season has been decided by one score or less. That’s crazy! Usually, teams win about 50% of one score games, which means the one would predict the Ravens should be a .500 team at this point in the season. However, they have only won two out of eight of these games, which is significantly less than one would expect.
There are certainly reasons for the Ravens under-performance. A porous Ravens secondary has reared it’s head numerous times. The inability to get stops allowing for comebacks. For an example, just re-watch the Ravens-Bengals game in Week Three). As my other BSL Colleague Shawn Brubaker illustrated this morning, the 3rd Down Defense is the worst in the league.
Flipping over to the Offense, the lack of a deep threat and reliable offensive weapons means the Ravens are uniquely ill-suited to complete their own fourth quarter comebacks.
But even with those caveats, statistical models project that even with all their injuries, this Baltimore team should be closer to a .500 team vs. the existing record.
Dynamic systematic changes: More than any other major sport, football is reliant on the play of teammates. A terrible offensive line one year can become a top five unit the next just by switching out a center. The addition of a shutdown corner can allow other defensive backs be utilized in situations where they are more likely to succeed. And a deep threat wide receiver can open up room for other pass catchers to operate.
Football is not a game like baseball. It is hard to measure individual production in a vacuum because of the interaction that teammates have on one another. And that means when team success and failure is much more dynamic than it is in other sports. A key free agent departure or injury can ruin a team beyond expectation. On the other hand, a team can go from bad to good in football faster than in any other sport. Which means some tweaks might do more than anticipated going forward.
None of this should take away from the fact this is unequivocally a lost season for the Ravens team. Just because Baltimore is one of the more competitive 2-6 teams in recent memory doesn’t mean they aren’t 2-6. But it should give all fans hope that watching the back half of games this year won’t be nearly as bad as watching the first half.
Will is a Ravens fan born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He has previously written for Baltimore Beatdown at SB Nation. He is currently a senior at St. Mary’s of Maryland.