Can’t oversell this opener
Game could be one of most important in team’s history
The Ravens are about to play one of the most important season-opening games in team history.
NFL coaches like to downplay the importance of the first game because it can produce unnecessary pressure. But season openers are the culmination of seven to eight months of work in which teams address major needs through the draft and free agency.
New schemes have been implemented and plays devised.
If you lose, it’s like having to stand in line for the restroom. If you win, there’s a big sigh of relief.
If the Ravens beat the Las Vegas
Raiders on Monday night, there will be a collective exhale in Baltimore. The Ravens’ roster has been decimated by injuries, including season-ending injuries to their top running backs J.K. Dobbins, Gus Edwards and Justice Hill and another to Pro Bowl cornerback Marcus Peters.
A win would show that they can still be competitive. A win gives them hope. A victory sends a signal that this team isn’t about to roll over and that, with time, it could still be a playoff contender.
Opening day has turned into a statement game for the Ravens.
“The biggest challenge is the unknown,” coach John Harbaugh said. “You just don’t really know yourself until you play, and you don’t know your opponent, because you haven’t seen them on tape. It’s one thing to watch them from last year, but they’re different. The preseason doesn’t tell you much. So, you just kind of go into the game without much information. You have a lot more information [for] Game 2, and it builds
of thing. As always, offensive football, it’s all about execution. So that’s what we’re working for.”
What the Ravens have been working for is an offense that hums like it did in 2019, when the ground game rolled up an NFL-record 3,296 yards, Jackson led the league with 36 passing touchdowns, and Roman ended the regular season with football’s most efficient rushing and passing offenses, according to Football Outsiders.
What fans and experts have been waiting for is something different. The Ravens ended last season with the NFL’s fewest passing yards, with Jackson throwing for just 162 yards in three quarters of a playoff defeat, with a wide receiver group considered among the league’s worst. Harbaugh has had a creative rushing attack, a record-breaking rushing attack. And yet, in three straight disappointing postseason exits, it has not been enough.
The Ravens haven’t ignored their shortcomings. In the months after their 17-3 loss to the Buffalo Bills, in which they set a season low for points, they upgraded their interior offensive line. They not only signed Sammy Watkins and drafted Rashod Bateman but also hired two highly regarded wide receiver coaches. They got a full offseason of workouts in for Jackson, who is throwing the ball as well as he ever has.
Now they have to figure out just what balance to strike between the run and the pass, between what’s reliable and what’s fashionable. When Harbaugh spoke at the 2020 team’s end-of-season news conference in January, he indicated that he did not necessarily want to pass more. He did want to pass more efficiently. What might that look like? It’s hard to say before a snap is played.
“That’s the art of the whole thing, and it’s week to week,” Harbaugh said Thursday. “There are big-picture observations, or what it looks like, but there’s also attacking the opponent from a gameplan standpoint. Also, in-game, what are they doing to you? You’re trying to move the ball. You’re trying to get first downs. You’re trying to find a way to score in battle, so to speak. So it all just kind of falls together in terms of specific opportunities to be successful on offense and win games. That’s really all you’re trying to do. So we’ll see as we go.”
In an increasingly pass-first, pass-second NFL, the Ravens remain an outlier. While Roman pushed back this offseason on the team’s run-heavy narrative — “There are more passing plays per year than running plays,” he said in April — no team has run as often as the Ravens.
Since Jackson took over as starter in November 2018, the Ravens have led the NFL in run play percentage. Last year, all but three teams passed more than they ran, and more than a third finished with a pass play share above 60%. The Ravens’ rate, meanwhile, was just 45%; the New England Patriots were next closest, at 48.7%.
After the preseason the Ravens had, Roman could be forgiven for wanting to put his running backs in bubble wrap and trade in his play sheet for an Air Raid playbook. In a 13-day span, he lost running backs J.K. Dobbins, Gus Edwards and Justice Hill to season-ending injuries and tight end Nick Boyle to a short-term stint on injured reserve.
The Ravens’ injury bug didn’t spare their wide receivers. Bateman, the team’s top pick in the draft, is out until at least Week 4 while he recovers from a groin injury. Miles Boykin, a starter at wide receiver over his first two years in Baltimore, has joined him on IR. Marquise “Hollywood” Brown missed most of training camp with his own hamstring injury. Watkins arrived with a checkered medical history and sat out the preseason.
But it’s not hard to look at the bright side. Or at least the brighter side: No active receiver landed on the injury report this week, and tight end Mark Andrews is still Jackson’s most trusted target. The NFL’s most depleting preseason might ultimately push Jackson and the Ravens to play more like the rest of the league.
It could take some getting used to. NBC analyst and former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees said in a conference call last month that the Ravens’ offensive success “is very much predicated on their ability to run the ball.” Still, his NBC colleague Rodney Harrison argued, would that approach really be enough to change the narrative?
“I was there when they got their butts kicked by Buffalo in the playoffs because Lamar couldn’t push the ball down the field,” said Harrison, a former NFL safety and current “Football Night in America” analyst.