Last season, per Football Outsiders, no starting NFL quarterback was blitzed more often than Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens, and no starting NFL quarterback had a more glaring decline in performance as more defenders came right at him.
Jackson faced five or more pass-rushers on 33% of his snaps. He was good for 7.6 yards per play and a 35.5% DVOA with four pass-rushers. That dropped to 5.7 yards per play and a -21.9% DVOA against five pass-rushers, and 3.2 yards per play with a -67.5% DVOA against six or more.
The absolute nadir of this trend for Jackson came in Week 10 against the Miami Dolphins. In a 22-10 loss to Miami, Jackson completed 26 of 43 passes for 238 yards, one touchdown, one interception, four sacks, and 19 total pressures.
When under pressure, per Pro Football Focus, Jackson completed five of 13 passes for 50 yards, one touchdown, one late desperation interception (the first regular-season pick he’s thrown in the red zone in his career), and a passer rating of 45.4. Through the first nine weeks of the season, Jackson had completed 36 of 75 passes under pressure for 517 yards, four touchdowns, two interceptions, and a passer rating of 77.5, so it wasn’t just pressuring Lamar. There were other things afoot.
How different was the game plan put together by Miami defensive coordinator Josh Boyer? Per Next Gen Stats, safeties Jevon Holland and Brandon Jones were all over the field, and they blitzed at a rate Next Gen Stats had never seen before.
UPDATE: Jevon Holland (21 blitzes) and Brandon Jones (17) did not just blitz more times than any defensive back in any game this season — the two Dolphins safeties blitzed more times than any DB in a game in the Next Gen Stats era (dating back to 2016).#BALvsMIA | #FinsUp
— Next Gen Stats (@NextGenStats) November 12, 2021
The Dolphins sent defensive back blitzes on 24 of Jackson’s dropbacks, which was also the most he’s faced in his career. The Ravens had two plays of 20 or more yards in this game — they had averaged 5.5 per game before. Per NFL Research, the Ravens scored fewer than 14 points for the first time in their last 53 games. Their 52-game streak with 14 or more points was the second-longest such streak since 1940.
Ravens head coach John Harbaugh was not amused.
“That’s something they’ve done all year,” Harbaugh said of the safety blitzes. “We worked on it all week. We didn’t have a good enough plan for it, you know, as a group, and we didn’t execute well with the plan we had.”
Well, yeah, but this was a case of the Dolphins throwing the ice cream factory at the Ravens from a DB blitz perspective. As the Ravens face off against the Dolphins at 1:00 p.m. EST today, Harbaugh and his staff had better have a better idea than the one they had before. Boyer is still Miami’s defensive coordinator even after all the coaching churn that’s happened with the franchise of late, so given past results, Jackson and the Ravens should expect to see more of the same.