Last season, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson led the NFL with 39 touchdown passes, threw just six interceptions, broke Michael Vick’s single-season record for rushing yards by a quarterback, and became the second player in NFL history to be unanimously named the league’s Most Valuable Player (Tom Brady, 2010). This season? Not quite the same. This season, Jackson has thrown just 12 touchdown passes to four interceptions. His Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt has dropped from 8.19 to 6.20, his DVOA as a passer has plummeted from second in the league in 2019 to 23rd in 2020, and Baltimore’s offense in general has dropped from first in the NFL in 2019 (by a crushing margin) to 23rd in 2020.
A few things are going on here. The Ravens lost in the divisional round of the playoffs to the Titans last season, and in that game, former Tennessee defensive coordinator Dean Pees threw late coverage switches at Jackson. The result? Jackson completed 31 of 59 passes for 365 yards, one touchdown, two interceptions, and a lot of missed opportunities. The NFL being a copycat league as it is, teams facing the Ravens are throwing more interesting coverages at Jackson, blitzing him more, and worrying about his mobility less. The thought when dealing with Jackson seems to be that if you stack the middle of the field, deal with the edges, and make him beat you as a pure passer, you’re in pretty good shape.
That’s proven true to this point. When asked about the decrease in overall efficiency on the Rich Eisen Show this week, Jackson pointed to the idea that defenses have too easy a time figuring out what Baltimore’s offense, led by offensive coordinator Greg Roman, is doing before they even do it.
We had to make sure we heard #RavensFlock QB @lj_era8 correctly when he told us why his offense is having a tougher time this year compared to 2019:#NFL pic.twitter.com/s9G7JgtmEA
— Rich Eisen Show (@RichEisenShow) November 11, 2020
“They’re calling out our plays, stuff like that,” Jackson said. “They know what we’re doing. Sometimes stuff won’t go our way if they’re beating us to the punch.”
Eisen asked Jackson if he can hear opposing defenders calling out the Ravens’ offensive plays.
“Yeah, they definitely do,” Jackson said. “Like, ‘Run’ and stuff like that. ‘Watch out for this, watch out for that.’ Sometimes that’s what’s going on.”
So… that’s not as big a deal as you may think. It’s certainly not the main reason Baltimore’s offense isn’t doing as well as it did last season. Baltimore’s passing game wasn’t particularly complicated in 2019, nor is it in 2020. Baltimore’s run game has been and is far more complicated; working everything from pre-snap motion to the mesh point on play-action and RPO concepts has made the total run game a nightmare for defenses.
But as far as defenses having an idea what the Ravens are doing? That happens all the time — and not just to the Ravens. ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky recently did a detailed breakdown of three staple concepts the Ravens used against the Steelers in Baltimore’s 24-28 Week 8 loss, in which Jackson completed just 13 of 28 passes for 208 yards, two touchdowns, and two interceptions.
When I asked Orlovsky a couple years ago about Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford pointing out that the Jets’ defense knew what was coming, Orlovsky pointed out that this really isn’t a big deal.
“Here’s the thing: As a defense, if your coaches are doing their jobs, you should have a relatively decent idea what lays are coming out of certain formations more often than not,” Orlovsky said in September, 2018. “Especially situational stuff. Like, you should know that if a receiver cuts his splits, these four things can happen. I don’t believe there’s this “Oh, we stole signals” thing.
“Also, you can’t always trust what you see on tape. Most offensive coordinators have multiple signals for a single play. If we’re going to run a slant/flat combination, there are probably two or three different signals for that. And all you need to do is put a signal that a team thinks is one thing one time and do something else, and then, all the other signals are unreliable. If you think my signal means we’re running a go route, and we run a stop route and you’re 15 yards off… I don’t buy into it that much. Maybe a play here or there, where a [defender] goes, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that, and I’ll take a guess.’ But defensively? I don’t buy into the fact that it’s knowing signals as much as it is knowing tendencies and formations.”
Is Roman too predictable with his play designs out of specific formations? It could be argued that this is the case. Is he giving too much away with his tendencies? Perhaps. Pittsburgh defensive lineman Alex Highsmith, who had one of Jackson’s two interceptions on the day, was able to suss things out pretty quickly.
“I knew when that play started they were coming back to that because they ran the same play on the first half, and I didn’t drop deep enough,” Highsmith said. “So I learned from that play and just dropped deeper… the ball just fell into my hands.”
Roman, of course, was asked about it.
“With no fans in the stands [and no] bands or music playing, you can hear a lot right about now – some of it I can’t repeat,” Roman said Thursday. “But Lamar is one of the great competitors I know. I define him as a winner. He only wants to win every game, every play. Game [or] practice, that’s what drives him. He definitely gives me feedback on when people are calling something out and whatnot. That’s definitely part of what we talk about.
“Now, calling out plays on the defense is nothing new. I can talk about Ed Reed and Ray Lewis, every play, they’re trying to guess what play you’re going to run based on what they’re seeing – that’s the chess match. That’s kind of where it gets interesting, because if you’re not good at anything, you have no tendencies. So, you really want to work to be good at everything. If you’re in the best possible situation, you can do basic things very well and people still can’t stop you. I think that’s what you’re always striving to do, but that doesn’t always work in the NFL. That doesn’t work all the time; you have to change it up. So, we work hard at changing it up.
“We’re very aware of our tendencies. We’re aware that there are some right now, and that’s, again, like I said, where it gets interesting. When you’re good at something and you can keep pressing that button, then you have the opportunity to flip the script at some point moving forward. So, I think there’s a little bit of a chess match there with how that goes. But as far as defenders guessing what we do; they’re going to be right sometimes, [and] they’re going to be wrong sometimes. I think we know that, but it’s definitely an element of the game. It always has been, and probably always will be.”
Pay attention to what Roman is saying, yes, but pay attention also to what Roman is saying through his playbook. When you have an offensive coordinator reducing the passing game for his quarterback, that says that there is a schism between play-caller and player as to what the player is capable of. Lamar Jackson’s primary problem right not is not that opposing defenses know what his offense is about to do. Again, that happens far more than people think. Lamar Jackson’s primary problem right now is that he has not yet proven to his coaching staff that he is consistently capable of executing beyond Passing Game 101 to the point that anyone is going to open the back chapters of that playbook and show the whole thing to any opponent.
As the late, great sportswriter Ralph Wiley once said, “A man’s got to know his own limitations. If he doesn’t, his coach had better.”
That’s where the Ravens are right now.