That was the game all of the Lamar Jackson truthers out there were waiting for. You know the type: Before the draft, they questioned his ability to pick up an NFL offense. During his rookie season, they questioned his accuracy. During his MVP campaign this season, they questioned whether this was sustainable.
What would happen when defense’s figure out the Ravens offense?
As they moved the goalposts, Jackson continued to make their questions look foolish. By the time he had led Baltimore to a 14-2 record and the league’s best offense, the doubters had pretty much been silenced.
And then Saturday happened.
The Ravens scored just 12 points and Jackson turned the ball over three times in a shocking loss to the Titans. Jackson’s subpar performance was held up as a referendum on his style of play. This game was proof that he remains a limited passer who still needs to learn the intricacies of the position if he’s going win a Super Bowl. When a defense takes away the Ravens’ intricate run game, Jackson is exposed as a limited passer, this game seemed to suggest.
Tennessee was able to take away the Ravens run game. Baltimore couldn’t get anything going out of their heavier personnel sets — which how they get to their play-action concepts — and were forced to turn to a more traditional passing game. That’s all true, and Jackson’s stat line doesn’t look great, but this performance was not an indictment of his passing ability. Far from it. If anything, this performance serves as proof that Jackson has already developed into the kind of passer the doubters said he’d never become.
The Ravens may not have scored a lot of points, but they moved the ball at will and Jackson received little help from his teammates and coaching staff. It was all on him, and he played well for the most part.
Before we get to the good stuff, let’s take a look at the bad. The two interceptions stand out, obviously. But these weren’t mental mistakes leading to turnovers, which would have been far more concerning. Jackson simply missed both throws.
On the first, he left the pass a bit too high for Mark Andrews, and Kevin Byard was in the perfect spot…
On the second, he made a solid read and just left his pass too far inside, which allowed Kenny Vacarro to get to the ball…
Jackson’s accuracy has been questioned for years now, and it was an issue on Saturday night at times. But I don’t think it was as big of an issue as the numbers suggest. Yes, he completed just 52.5% of his throws against Tennessee (not good!) but there were six drops, eight pass breakups and a couple of mental mistakes by receivers that led to incompletions.
Let’s take a look at some of those mistakes, which led to throws that appeared inaccurate but actually weren’t.
This is a third-down throw from the first quarter. The Ravens have mirrored routes on the outside with both receivers running vertical routes downfield with the option to convert them into deep comebacks if the corners are playing over the top.
Jackson is expecting Marquise Brown to cut his route off at the 40-yard-line, but he takes it five yards further downfield which leads to a pass that looks underthrown. It’s a good throw and read by Jackson, but you wouldn’t know it watching the game live. It just looks like another inaccurate ball by Lamar.
On this play, Jackson tries to throw his tight end Nick Boyle open — something all great quarterbacks do on a routine basis. He’s expecting Boyle to bend his route away from the cornerback and into the void in the zone.
Instead, Boyle keeps his route straight upfield and adjusts too late. As a result, the throw looks off-line. Really, it was right where it needed to be.
I wouldn’t say Jackson was overly precise on Saturday but he certainly wasn’t inaccurate. He missed a few throws but there were more examples of him putting the ball in the perfect spot.
Jackson threw the ball well for the most part, but it was his mental processing that stood out to me. I expected Titans defensive coordinator Dean Pees, one of the craftiest play-callers in the NFL, to give the young quarterback all sorts of issues. Well, that didn’t happen. Jackson had no problem recognizing Pees’ disorientating coverage rotations and quickly figuring out a way to beat them.
This is a look you’ll see all the time from the Titans defense. They’re showing blitz before the snap but drop back into a conservative zone defense in an effort to get Jackson to throw into their shifting coverage.
It didn’t work. Instead, Jackson read the leverage of Tennessee’s defenders and found an open receiver. Thanks to his quick thinking, Jackson is able to fit the ball into a tight window before it closes.
Here’s another unsuccessful trap Pees set for Jackson. The cornerback (to the bottom of the screen) has help over the top, which allows him to jump the tight end’s route to the flat. There are plenty of veteran passers who would have taken this bait…
Not Jackson. He calmly moves onto his second read while the pocket closes in and finds an open receiver to keep the chains moving.
Playing the quarterback position at a high level requires that kind of innate feel for the game. Jackson clearly has it. He can read coverages and anticipate where to go with the football before his receiver comes open. Here he knows he’ll have a receiver running into an open zone and lofts the ball perfectly in between three defenders…
If that throw is just a half-second late, that pass is either broken up or, worse, intercepted.
Jackson also has a great feel for the pocket. That’s something he’s improved every season since his Heisman-winning campaign back in 2016. Scrambling quarterbacks have a tendency to drop their eyes when moving in the pocket, but not Jackson. Here, he not only keeps his eyes downfield while navigating a tight pocket, but he also uses his eyes to manipulate a zone defender and open up a throwing lane…
That’s high-level stuff. I don’t know if Lamar’s biggest supporters even realize he’s operating at that level already. He rarely gets credit for it, but Jackson is way ahead of his peers on the developmental curve … and the gap seems to be widening.
All of the clips I’ve shown are of straight dropback passes. There are no play-action fakes making Jackson’s job any easier. The defense isn’t being tricked by the Ravens scheme. This is pure pocket passing and Jackson is already really freaking good at it. He has been all season. On traditional dropbacks that resulted in throws from the pocket, Jackson ranked second in Expected Points Added per attempt and fifth in success rate, per Sports Info Solutions.
While lesser passers need play-action fakes to produce, that’s not really true for him. Jackson’s non-play-action numbers were actually far more impressive this season, as he ranked 11th in EPA per attempt and 27th in success rate on play-action attempts.
Those numbers should improve in the future, and if Jackson continues to grow as a pocket passer — he’s already one of the best in the league — he’ll have plenty more opportunities in the playoffs to quiet his critics. Those critics were right about one thing, though: The Titans game was a sign of things to come … it’s just not the sign they think they’re seeing.
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