New look but same old goal: champions
The Ravens know training camp will be different this summer, and not just in the every-camp-is-different kind of way, either. After last season’s AFC North title reset expectations for 2019, the offseason changed the calculus on the path to a second straight crown.
The three Ravens who spoke to reporters after reporting to the team facility Wednesday seemed to understand that. If defensive tackle Brandon Williams rides a golf cart to the practice fields for the team’s first practice Thursday morning, it won’t be with Terrell Suggs. Tony Jefferson’s new running mate at safety is now Earl Thomas III, not Eric Weddle. Even some of the newcomers had paradigms radically altered, too: Mark Ingram, after eight seasons with the New Orleans Saints, has a second NFL home.
There are reasons to doubt the Ravens’ prospects. The Ravens themselves don’t put much stock in them. The division championship resides in Baltimore, not Pittsburgh or Cleveland, and Jefferson seemed offended by the notion that it would change hands.
“I wouldn’t see why [expectations] would be different,” he said.
“I guess if you would read what the press is saying, then I guess you’d go that way. But in this building, I’ve said it before, we believe in our roster. We believe in everybody that we have here, and championship is our goal. There’s nothing less.”
The Ravens have two weeks to prepare for their first preseason game and over six weeks before their season begins in Miami against the Dolphins. No story line will be scrutinized as closely as the development of quarterback Lamar Jackson, but even his emergence midway through last season represented a fundamental changing of the guard.
If the Ravens could, in the same season, move on from Joe Flacco and make the playoffs for the first time since 2014, other rough transitions could be smoothed out over an offseason and preseason. There are questions at linebacker and wide receiver and elsewhere, but then, even the NFL’s Super Bowl favorites have pressing personnel issues.
“Every year is different,” Williams said. “Every year’s a different team. The Ravens of this year are not like the Ravens of last year. Every year’s a different year, but we strive to do the same thing and be great every year. So coming in, it feels like a new team, but at the same time, we know our mission, we know our direction, and we know where we want to go.”
Williams said it’s “sunk in” that Suggs, Weddle and Mosley are gone, not to mention Flacco, Za’Darius Smith and John Brown. Jefferson acknowledged that he’ll miss having close friends like Weddle in the locker room. But he stressed that the Ravens are not looking back so much as they are forward — to a new offense, to a new season, to a new era of players eager to fill the void.
They can fixate only for so long on what was lost since January. A player and a personality like Suggs is “irreplaceable,” Williams said. Why try to be someone else when a new season offers the chance to improve on what came before?
“These training camp practices, it’s a race to get better,” Ingram said. “Every team’s in a race to get better every single day. So we’re in a race, and we plan on winning the race.”
End zone
Williams said he was not worried about Michael Pierce after the standout defensive tackle was dismissed from mandatory minicamp in June over conditioning concerns. “He’s a professional,” he said. “Sometimes it gets away from you. It’s happened to me before also. I’m not going to fault him for that.” After the Ravens placed Pierce on the Non-Football Injury list Friday, he was cleared to practice two days later. “If he would’ve came in and not looked as good as he does now in past conditioning tests, then there would’ve been a problem there,” Williams said.
Jefferson, who underwent offseason ankle surgery, said he is now 100% healthy. He did not participate in the three open practices held during organized team activities but returned for mandatory minicamp.