A lot to ponder after the bye week
With the Ravens off to a 3-4 start and staring at the AFC playoff race from the outside looking in, here are five questions they face coming off their bye week: Can the Ravens fix their offensive line? No problem has vexed the Ravens more consistently than poor play from their offensive line.
Every player on the line has produced at least one solid game. But each season-long starter, including two-time Pro Bowl selection Marshal Yanda, has delivered more mediocre-to-poor performances than good ones.
This has been especially true in run blocking, in which tight ends Ed Dickson and Dallas Clark have struggled as well. The Ravens have been stuffed at the line of scrimmage more than any other team in the league, even the lowly Jacksonville Jaguars. That’s a big reason why the Ravens running backs’ yards-per-carry average stands at a ghastly 2.75, more than a yard below the league average.
Right tackle Michael Oher is a better pass blocker than run blocker, so his difficulties are no surprise. But center Gino Gradkowski has been a significant downgrade from the retired Matt Birk. And a chronic back injury has kept left guard Kelechi Osemele from living up to the promise of his rookie season. There are reasons for optimism, however. Bryant McKinnie was a disaster at left tackle through five games, but the Ravens moved aggressively to replace him by trading for Eugene Monroe. Monroe, younger and more agile than McKinnie, has played well in both his starts.
The line also played perhaps its best all-around game of the season against the Pittsburgh Steelers in its last outing. That might seem like a booby prize, given that Ray Rice and Bernard Pierce combined for only 58 yards on 21 carries.
But coach John Harbaugh has said the Ravens now have the players they need to block effectively. With Monroe in place, there’s at least a chance he’s correct. Will Ray Rice get his season on track? From the time he established himself as the full-time starter at running back in 2009 through the end of last season, Rice almost never played two bad games in a row. Even when he received few carries, he compensated by serving as one of Flacco’s best possession receivers.
We simply have not seen that player this TV: Radio:
Line: season. Rice’s best running game of the year, 27 carries for 74 yards against the Miami Dolphins on Oct. 6, would’ve ranked as one of his worst in past years. He has averaged just 4.8 yards a catch, more than 40 percent down from his career average.
Some of the blame belongs with the offensive line. Rice’s backup, Pierce, has also seen his yards-per-carry plummet, from 4.9 in 2012 to 2.8 this season. If the line was doing its job, both wouldn’t be struggling to this degree.
But the story goes deeper than that with Rice. He suffered a hip injury in the second game of the season, and though he missed just one start, he hasn’t run with the same acceleration since.
Rice says he’s healthy and has his burst back. But we haven’t seen it in a game.
The troubling thing for Rice and Ravens fans is that running backs have a tendency to lose their abilities suddenly. Think of former Denver Bronco Terrell Davis, who rushed for 2,008 yards at age 26 and never played a full season again.
It’s way too early to predict anything like that for Rice. He hasn’t carried the ball nearly as much as many who have become cautionary tales at the position. But there is at least some unease about a player who means so much to the Ravens, both on the field and in the community. Can Joe Flacco produce the kind of hot streak that carried the Ravens through last season’s playoffs?
Flacco’s sublime postseason, one of the best produced by any quarterback in NFL history, helped land him a $120.6 million contract in the offseason. But it also created unrealistic expectations that he would sud- denly be a different quarterback than the guy we watched in past regular seasons.
In reality, Flacco is much the same guy. He’s incredibly durable. He’s unafraid to throw boldly in tight spots. And every so often, he plays a cringeworthy game.
Flacco has not thrown deep as often or as accurately as he did last season. But that’s in part because Torrey Smith (Maryland) has taken on a more varied receiving role and in part because Flacco’s other favorite deep threat, Jacoby Jones, missed the better part of five games with a knee injury.
The awful running game also is a culprit here. The easiest way to set up a deep throw is off play-action, but play-action can’t work as well if the run doesn’t present a realistic threat. Flacco recently said it himself: The Ravens have to run better on first and second down to set up the rest of their offense.
There are reasons to think Flacco will play better down the stretch than he has so far. He has developed a better rapport with Clark and wide receivers Marlon Brown and Tandon Doss. Jones is healthy. Dennis Pitta, Flacco’s safety blanket, might return from a hip injury in November.
Even so, Flacco might never again play four straight games as good as the ones he played in January. That’s just reality, given his broader track record and the history of NFL quarterback play. Will John Harbaugh find the kind of midseason corrections that have saved his teams in the past?
It’s easy to forget given the end result, but the Ravens were a lost team last December. A crushing home defeat to the Denver Broncos seemed to expose them as a noncontender. Mounting injuries made any course correction feel like a long shot.
But one of Harbaugh’s great strengths is that he has never let a period of turmoil sink a season completely. It’s hard to know whether he’s exactly the same way with players, but to the outside world, Harbaugh never seems to panic or blow a bad loss out of proportion. He always speaks of the team’s troubles as a collection of discrete, fixable problems. His consistency and attention to detail have helped the Ravens through plenty of rough patches over the past five seasons.
Harbaugh’s sixth season might present his most challenging puzzle, in part because the Ravens have given themselves no cushion in the standings.
Their coach has shown admirable aggression in recent weeks, calling games as if he expects his team to execute better than it actually has. That was the case when he went for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal against the Green Bay Packers instead of settling for a field goal that would not have greatly increased the Ravens’ statistical odds of winning. For all his team’s struggles in short yardage, Harbaugh believed it could surely hammer home a 1-yard run.
This optimism has worked for him over time, and it’s impressive to see Harbaugh not dissuaded by a few weeks of bad play.
But the Ravens did not score that touchdown against Green Bay, and they have not made obvious progress in correcting their weaknesses. All the belief in the world might not help them do it.
The Ravens made drastic corrections late last season. Harbaugh fired longtime offensive coordinator Cam Cameron and replaced him with Jim Caldwell, who placed a renewed emphasis on throwing downfield. Harbaugh also named McKinnie, who hadn’t played since October, his starting left tackle for the playoffs. We know, based on past evidence and on his own words, that Harbaugh is unlikely to sit still while the season circles the drain.
It will be fascinating to see whether he can dig out of another hole and maintain his record of never missing the playoffs. Can the Ravens stay afloat in the AFC playoff race? The Ravens have never had a losing record this late in a season under Harbaugh. They’re coming off two performances that raised questions about their ability to fix obvious flaws. Despite those realities, they might not be in the “state of emergency” Terrell Suggs declared after the loss in Pittsburgh.
That’s because there’s a whole heap of mediocrity competing for the conference’s last wild-card spot. Eight AFC teams finished the weekend with either three or four wins. Not one of them lurks as a sleeping giant. In fact, the Ravens and San Diego Chargers are the only teams from the group that haven’t been outscored overall.
The Ravens have not given up on winning the AFC North. But with the Cincinnati Bengals holding a 21⁄ game lead, the Ravens might have to win in Cleveland against the Browns next week and then beat the Bengals at home Nov. 10 to get back into the divisional race.
They can do it; Cincinnati has grappled with its own troubles on offense. But the wild card is the easier target.
The Ravens still face two games against the Bengals and three relatively tough nondivisional games against the Chicago Bears (a challenge if quarterback Jay Cutler is back), Detroit Lions and New England Patriots. On the plus side, they’ll play five of their last nine games at M&T Bank Stadium.
Analytics website Football Outsiders places the Ravens’ playoff odds at a mere 12 percent. But given the AFC’s wild-card muddle, expect them to remain in the conversation well into December.