Ravens: The Elephant In The Room

It’s hard to talk about anything the Ravens are doing right now without it coming back to their pass offense feeling fundamentally broken. Lamar Jackson says teams are calling out the plays: Greg Roman (and many other Ravens) have said: “Well, that kind of happens.”

(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)

“Calling out plays on the defense is nothing new,” Roman said during his presser on Thursday. “They’re going to be right sometimes [and] they’re going to be wrong sometimes. I think we know that. But that’s definitely an element of the game. It always has been and probably always will be.”

They’ve had four negative pass offense DVOA games so far this year: at Houston, at Kansas City, vs Cincinnati, and vs Pittsburgh. They have not thrown for 200 total passing yards in a game since Week 4. They’re averaging 6.0 net yards per pass attempt, which is 25th in the NFL. And because they are 6-2, the defense is crushing anybody not named Patrick Mahomes, and the run offense has continued to be stellar in spite of offensive line talent — it is an extremely obvious issue. It’s something that anybody with a rudimentary understanding of statistics immediately goes to. 

And to be clear, as I pointed out a couple of weeks ago — it is a big deal that the offensive line talent has been downgraded. It’s a big deal that they don’t have an over-the-middle wideout that’s open even when covered. But a lot of teams are dealing with issues like this. What a lot of teams don’t have is an MVP-winning quarterback — and that is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing that the Ravens had a historically great offense last year, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Jackson was a finished product. It’s a curse in that … because he won the MVP, everybody already expects him to be a finished, incredible product as a pure quarterback. But nobody is at Jackson’s age. Even Mahomes has had people bring up issues with his pocket play this year.  

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The Ravens are probably going to be fine. I know you’re all fretting because I see the tenor of the posts. I do believe that their past history of success and the fact that nobody is gone that deeply mattered to the passing game beyond the offensive line will eventually lead them to the right areas and decisions. 

Moreover, I don’t necessarily believe that this is a bad thing for the Ravens. Remember last year that they fell in the playoffs because they didn’t actually face adversity as an offense. When you run the ball for five yards every down, life’s pretty easy until you get down by 20 points and there are 19 minutes left. I think these are normal bumps and growing pains that most offenses go through when things change, and I think that Jackson will play fine down the stretch, removed from the toughest games on the schedule. 

The question I think is the most important thing in the NFL is: Can you craft a reasonable explanation for this team winning the Super Bowl? The Ravens have two major elements functioning well, and they have a quarterback and passing game that has played well in the recent past. Now, it’s definitely harder to believe that the passing game will play well in the next eight weeks than it was to believe that coming into the season, sure. I think there’s a real point that’s been raised in the media about Greg Roman’s past regarding adjustments to his pass offense and how that worked out for Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers career. That rings credibly to me. 

But at the same time, given how smart the Ravens have played over the past 1.5 years — the analytics, the coaching staff, the general management — I have a hard time believing that they can’t fix this. It’s not like the elements of last year’s good passing game are gone forever. It’s not like Hollywood Brown can’t still blaze defensive backs. In my opinion, this is something I’m still willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the Ravens on. 

Until Jackson has another 300-yard passing day though, or something similar where he looks spectacular and puts some highlight reel throws together, it’s going to remain the elephant in the room for this team. The ideas they have to fix this so far have mostly been about reducing Jackson’s role in the passing game plan to simpler concepts. What they need him to do to be successful as a passing game is have him check the elevated concepts. The only way to do that is to give him time to sort it out on the field, and I think the Ravens need to spend this stretch of upcoming bad defenses giving Jackson more ownership of the playbook and letting him prove that earlier playcalling wrong. 

Until Jackson overcomes what has happened so far this year, it’s going to be all that really matters as far as the discourse around this team. The Ravens have created a team that wins in spite of a lack of passing this year. That’s unique in today’s NFL. It’s also not something that is necessarily sustainable in a four-game playoff run.