Lamar Jackson has finally, at long last, been unleashed.
We’ve seen Jackson — the NFL MVP favorite — unleashed in various ways over his five years as Baltimore’s starter. He has terrorized opposing defenses as a runner, confounding defenders and their coordinators with frightening quicks and long speed and a preternatural ability to set up blockers and evade oncoming tacklers. The mere threat of Jackson as a runner has frozen defenders where they stand and left Ravens pass catchers wide open. It’s made Jackson perhaps the single most thrilling player in football.
The 2023 season saw the Ravens, under first-year offensive coordinator Todd Monken, unleash Jackson in a new and — for defenses — terrifying way. The Ravens are finally establishing the pass, dropping back on early downs and letting Jackson pick apart secondaries with cannon shots down the seam and touch passes and Dennis Eckerslyesque sidearm slings designed to avoid pass rushers and fit the ball into startlingly tight windows.
The Ravens under Monken have successfully broken free from the legacy of Jackson’s 2019 MVP season. They’ve shunned the Greg Roman model that worked so wonderfully for that one season but led the Ravens into an offensive rut from which they could not emerge over the subsequent three seasons. Lightning, it turns out, could not be captured more than once with a massively run heavy offense in the 21st Century.
No more. Lamar and the Ravens have established the pass. It’s a commitment that must persist if they’re going to catapult from the AFC’s top seed to Lamar’s first Super Bowl.
Letting Lamar Cook
Monken appears to trust Jackson the passer implicitly — a striking difference in how Jackson was treated in the Roman offense. Monken’s trust is very much reflected in the data and has forged a Ravens passing offense that posted the NFL’s sixth best drop back success rate of 2023. Over the season’s final month, Baltimore led the league in drop back success rate as Monken leaned hard into the pass and Jackson, naturally, delivered. With the drafting of Zay Flowers in the first round and the signing of Odell Beckham, it’s what the Monken-era offense was designed to do.
Establishing the pass, or throwing the ball on early downs, has been a focal point of Monken’s Ravens offense this year. It’s in stark contrast to the Roman-era Ravens, who in 2019 ranked dead last in early-down pass rate by a considerable margin. Not much changed in 2020: Only two teams had a lower early-down pass rate than the Ravens. That rate broke into the league’s top half in 2021 and 2022, but remained far below the likes of the Chiefs and Eagles and Bills and Bengals — elite offenses letting their quarterbacks cook on first and second down.
The magic of the 2019 season, which saw Jackson play transcendent football and Baltimore post the NFL’s highest expected points added (EPA) per play, did not last. It curdled, in fact, and the Ravens either didn’t notice or were determined to recreate the magic by sheer force of will. It led to three frustrating seasons for Lamar and the offense. That includes the team’s devastating Divisional Round home loss to the Titans after Lamar’s breakout 2019 campaign in which the Ravens passed on just 45 percent of their early downs. A run-first, run-only offense was designed to play from ahead, as we saw in that postseason loss to an underdog Tennessee team. Once the Ravens fell behind, there was no avenue for scoring points quickly through the air. In that way, Lamar has played in a hyper-fragile offense for his entire NFL career — until Monken’s arrival.
Monken, whose play-calling history includes some wildly pass-heavy teams, was done with all that. Baltimore had the league’s sixth highest early-down pass rate in 2023 and the second highest over the final five weeks of the regular season. Their Week 16 thrashing of the prohibitive Super Bowl favorite 49ers saw the Ravens post a 64 percent drop back rate in a blowout win, 9 percent above their expected rate. Lamar’s Ravens were 13 percent above their expected first down pass rate against San Francisco and its stellar rush defense, an unfathomable prospect even one year ago. They established the pass against the Niners and did not look back.
On the season, the Ravens were 1 percent over their expected drop back rate (expected drop back/pass rates, for those who don’t spend every spare moment poring over football data, is the probability of a pass play based on several factors). Just last season, the Ravens were 6 percent below their expected drop back rate. Only eight teams — including some of the worst in football — were more run-heavy than the 2022 Ravens.
Conventional and, frankly, highly problematic NFL groupthink said the Ravens had to be ultra run heavy because Jackson is unable to conduct a so-called traditional drop back passing attack. Unfairly maligned as a “running back” throughout his college and pro careers, Lamar humiliated his doubters in 2023, thriving in the Ravens’ pass-first offense. Look no further than Lamar’s success on middle-of-the-field pass attempts, which have increased under Monken. He posted the league’s eighth highest completion percentage over expected (CPOE) and the seventh highest adjusted net yards per attempt on those throws. Dak Prescott, Russell Wilson, Josh Allen, Tua Tagovailoa, and Brock Purdy were the only QBs to have a better overall CPOE this year.
With Monken calling plays and staying aggressive on early downs, Jackson has excelled with intermediate throws this season. From 10-19 yards, no one was more accurate than Jackson in the 2023 regular season. He was nearly 16 percent above his expected completion rate on those attempts. For a running back, Jackson is awfully accurate.
Jackson’s teammates and coaches have taken note of the differences between 2023 Lamar and previous iterations in Baltimore’s formerly one-dimensional scheme. Monken said he piled new responsibilities onto Lamar in spring practices and training camp because it was clear he could handle it.
“First off, he’s highly intelligent. He understands what you’re asking him to do and what you’re allowing him to do and when the situation presents that,” Monken said in a recent interview with the Ravens’ website, adding that Jackson has been trusted to “get us into a premium play” at the line of scrimmage, not to just run what the offensive coordinator has piped into his helmet. “And he’s embraced wanting to do that. Not every quarterback wants that on their plate and be empowered to change a play at the line of scrimmage or to put themselves out there.”
Jackson’s teammates said Monken’s trust in him to command the offense both before and after the snap has instilled a new confidence in the quarterback.
“He’s always seemed locked in, but this feels different,” longtime Ravens fullback Patrick Ricard told the team’s website this week. “Maybe it’s the experience he’s had or the maturity. But he’s always been a mature guy. I don’t know, it’s hard to pinpoint what it is. It just seems like he’s more focused.”
The Ravens Will Avoid Old Habits … Hopefully
Baltimore heads into the Divisional Round against the upstart Houston Texans with a backfield that doesn’t inspire much confidence from a purely statistical standpoint. The metrics are not kind to Ravens running backs.
Gus Edwards, who has 13 touchdowns as the beneficiary of Lamar’s read-options near the goal line, is coming off the worst season of his five-year career. Before 2023, Edwards had never had a yards per carry below 5; this year that mark fell to 4.1. Edwards posted the worst rushing success rate of his career and by far the lowest yards after contact per rush of his five NFL seasons. He was 58th out of 62 qualifying backs in Pro Football Focus’ elusive rating — which distills a running back’s success independently of the blocking in front of him — a year after ranking 13th. His glut of short scores obscured an otherwise down season for Gus Bus.
Justice Hill, meanwhile, was phased out of the offense in favor of explosive rookie Keaton Mitchell before Mitchell went down with a season-ending ACL injury in Week 15 against the Jaguars. Hill re-entered a timeshare backfield with Edwards and had some splash plays through the air but was middling, at best, as a rusher. Hill ranked 37th in PFF’s elusive rating. Like Edwards, he wasn’t creating much beyond what the Ravens offensive line blocked for him. The Ravens, by all indications, are going to miss tremendously Mitchell’s big-play ability in the playoffs.
Then there’s Dalvin Cook, who last week signed with the Ravens after being relegated to breather back status behind Breece Hall for the entire regular season. Cook, 28, has seen a precipitous drop off in efficiency and production: He averaged a meager 3.2 yards per carry on 67 attempts for the Jets and had the lowest yards after contact per rush of his seven years as a pro. The declining Cook managed just three rushes of more than ten yards on his 67 carries and zero rushes of at least 15 yards. No back, per PFF, was less explosive than Cook in 2023. The eye test did little to push back on the unkind metrics.
So it’s concerning to hear Ravens coaches, including John Harbaugh, talk as if they recently acquired the 2020 version of Dalvin Cook.
“We view him as potentially a very valuable weapon for our offense,” Harbaugh told reporters after signing Cook on January 10. “Dalvin Cook is a high pedigree player, a highly decorated player. He’s still got talent, ability. He’s smart. He’s in great football shape. … So I think he’s going to be a very valuable part of our team in the playoffs.”
Hopefully the signing of late-career Cook and Harbaugh’s comments don’t mean the Ravens are ready and willing to turtle into the same run-heavy team they have been in recent postseasons that left the team crushed and second guessing. It’s not as if the Ravens entered the league’s pass-heaviest group of offenses in 2023. Overall, they were 0.5 percent below their expected pass rate, well behind the Chiefs, who were a league-high 6.6 percent over their expected pass rate. In eight of their 17 regular season games, Baltimore was below its expected drop back rate (mostly in the season’s first half). There’s still, for better or worse, a strain of smash mouth football running through the Ravens offense.
Harbaugh, stung by analytically-driven decisions gone wrong in 2022, became one of the NFL’s most conservative fourth down decision makers this season. An analysis from FTN Fantasy’s Aaron Schatz showed Harbaugh — once an analytics maverick — was 31st in an index measuring head coaches’ aggressiveness on fourth downs. Only Bill Belichick, Shane Steichen, Antonio Pierce, and Josh McDaniels were less aggressive than Harbaugh.
Maybe that’s related to Harbaugh’s trust in the Ravens’ defense. That would check out, seeing that only the Browns allowed a lower EPA per play in 2023. But Harbaugh’s newfound conservative approach and the signing of Cook suggest the Ravens could stray from what netted them the AFC’s top seed: Being an aggressive, pass-first offense, fully emerged from the shadow of their brilliant 2019 season.
Hopefully the Ravens keep establishing the pass and letting Lamar cook, not as a vexing rushing threat, but as a passer. I have my doubts.
