Maybe the Ravens’ Passing Attack Will Evolve…Next Year?

Ravens Pass-Catchers Through 17 Games

It’s weird to tune in to a game with playoff implications, basically for the Division Title, and see personnel more suited to the fourth preseason game where the key starters are in bubble wrap. No Lamar. An Undrafted Free Agent rookie quarterback making his first start. Mark Andrews inactive. JK Dobbins inactive. Kevin Zeitler inactive. Was this a real game or an exhibition?

Adding to the preseason feel of the game, we saw rookies making their first statement plays. Charlie Kolar! David Ojabo got a strip sack! If next week were the season opener, rather than the playoff opener, we’d be encouraged by some of the performances from young players.

Alas, Sunday’s game was not the bang of a new season getting underway, but the whimper of an old one quietly slipping away.

One thing that was absolutely not a surprise about the game: the rookie quarterback committing three turnovers that led directly to three opponent touchdowns. Rookie quarterbacks turn the ball over: that’s just what they do. Especially when you throw them into the fire against a playoff defense with its ears pinned back.

But there was a huge surprise in the game. Would you believe the Ravens had Anthony Brown attempting 44 passes! Woah.  This is exactly the opposite of “a game plan to protect the rookie quarterback.”  Instead the Ravens took the exact opposite approach: let the rookie soak up a ton of experience. For context, Tyler Huntley’s career-high was 40 in the game against Green Bay last year. Lamar’s career-high in the regular season is 43, which he’s done twice: the record-setting game against Indy last year, and a 2019 loss home loss versus the Chiefs. (Lamar’s overall career high is the 59 he attempted against the Titans in the 2019 playoff loss.)

So the Ravens had Anthony Brown attempt more passes than either Huntley or Lamar ever had in a regular season game.

Why?

Well, I see two possible reasons. For one thing, I think Brown is a confident (or even cocky) passer. Quarterbacks routinely come to the line with two plays called, a run or a pass. Lamar frequently checks to the run; fairly often he keeps it himself, probably because fairly often he’s the best athlete on the field. Huntley tends to be a conservative passer, and it stands to reason that he would lean semi-conservative with those run-pass calls. If you’ve got Dobbins or Gus Edwards in the backfield with you, handing it off seems like a sound decision.

Brown seems different. If the Ravens sent Brown to the line with two possible plays to run, I bet each time he said “Sweet, I’m gonna throw it!” That may even have been the “correct” call for the fronts that the Bengals D was showing.

The other possible reason is – well: the Ravens are heading into the postseason with their top two Quarterbacks hurt. They couldn’t know for sure before this game whether either Lamar or Huntley would be available to start in the playoffs. It may be that they decided to force-feed Brown, to give him as much experience as possible before the playoffs. It’s like they said, “get a lot of reps against a playoff defense, learn everything you can, and then we’ll go from there to get ready for next week.”

If that was the Ravens thinking, then I think that’s really smart. It may not pay off – it’s never a good situation to play without your starting quarterback – but it’s a tremendous way to maximize a bad situation.

If you want a bright side to look on for Brown, his passing stats were pretty good for the last quarter plus a few plays. From about a minute left in the third through the end of the game, Brown completed 9 of 16 (56%) for 168 yards (10.5 yards-per).  Probably Cincy was in something of a prevent by that stage of the game, but it was only a two-touchdown lead, with a whole quarter to play. No way Cincy wanted to give up pass plays of 32, 22, and 47 yards – that’s how you turn a 2-TD lead into a zero-TD lead – but Brown got those gains. There absolutely IS some talent there to work with.

Even though Brown completed only 43% of his passes on the day, his 6.5 yards-per-attempt was better than Huntley’s full-season figure of 5.9 yards-per-attempt. It would have been Huntley’s second-best game this year by yards-per-attempt.  Brown’s aggressive style may be a better fit for the Ravens, who typically will see defenses crowded near the line of scrimmage, than Huntley’s dink-&-dunk style.

Maybe I’m overstating that: Brown’s Avg Depth of Target in this game was no higher than Huntley’s stat for the season. But it sure looked higher.

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Here are your receiving stats for the game:

Charlie Kolar sighting! Was it just me, or did you also think he looked just like Mark Andrews out there? What a smooth player.  You can see why the Ravens drafted him. Very promising player.

Isaiah Likely hundred-yard receiving day! His previous career-high was 77 yards against Tampa. He’s a good young player.  It’s frustrating, though, to have three excellent receiving Tight Ends (four if you like Josh Oliver), and not have any promising young Wide Receivers available for Sunday. How many Tight Ends do you need?? How many can you use? That’s no knock on Kolar or Likely though; they are good players and had excellent games.

Easily lost amongst the transactions last week is a player NOT in this box score. The Ravens released DeSean Jackson last week. This I don’t understand. With the playoffs about to start, you cut the one legitimate professional deep threat you have?? Makes no sense to me. Maybe he didn’t like the offense and didn’t want to be here; but on the other hand, who cares what he likes? He was under contract. Now he’s sitting at home watching the playoffs and the Ravens don’t have a situational deep threat.

There’s being player-friendly, and there’s shooting yourself in the foot. I seriously don’t get it.

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Rushers

Here are your rushing stats for the game:

 

“YTS” or Yards Times Success is the “Combo” stat I’ve written about before, It’s simply the product of yards-per-carry average and Success Rate. Any YTS over 2 is pretty good.

That’s a very good day for Justice Hill, against a solid D.

Interestingly, Quarterback Anthony Brown did not have a single rushing attempt in the game. He attempted 44 passes and was sacked four times, but did not have a scramble or option run. Do you know when the last time was that the Ravens had a game without a Quarterback rush attempt? It was another game against the Bengals, but it was back in the pre-Lamar days.  In the 2017 season finale, the Ravens hosted Marvin Lewis and the Bengals. Joe Flacco completed 25 of 47 passes, no other QB took any snaps, and he didn’t rush a single time. Alex Collins and Buck Allen handled the rush attempts.

That’s five full years of games with a QB running the ball at least once each game.

You will see some minor discrepancies between this and the official Ravens stats.  I’ve tried to remove QB kneels; Tyler Huntley gets credit for a 2-pt conversion; etc. The differences should not be large.

Three overall impressions from the above table:

1. The Ravens’ whole-team rushing stats are extremely impressive. 5.4 yards-per-carry and 57% Success Rate. Without checking I bet that team YTS is the best in the league. Even without Lamar, the stats are very good: 407 rushes for 1970 yards, 4.8 yards-per with 54% Success, for a YTS of 2.59. It was an exceptional running game. When you factor in how little passing threat opposing defenses had to account for over the latter part of the season, plus juggling the injuries to Dobbins & Gus, the run-game coaching is truly impressive.
2. Justice Hill should have been used more. His only “bad” games were three where he had only one or two total carries. In every other game he was over 50% Success Rate. Only twice on the year did he get stopped for a loss. He has matured into a very reliable, productive rusher.
3. Kenyan Drake should have been used less. His yards-per-carry is below the team average, even the without-Lamar avg. His Success Rate is probably close to the league average, which sounds like it should be okay. But in the context of a team whose overall Success Rate is over 50% (even excluding Lamar), it’s bad. Drake got tackled for loss 15 times on the year. He got stopped for no gain another 12 times (including some plays negated by penalty, which is a little unfair).  That’s a quarter (24.5%) of his rush attempts stuffed for zero yards or less. All of the Ravens other backs except Mike Davis had a higher value of yards-after-contact per rush.

When Drake got past the line of scrimmage, he had burst enough to make big plays. He had four runs of 29+ yards on the season, 9 (total) runs of 14+, 14 (total) runs of 9+. This has got to be why the Ravens leaned on him so heavily when Dobbins & Gus were unavailable: the extra-base hits. But his play-to-play consistency (captured in the Success Rate) wasn’t there. I think the Ravens would have benefited from giving some of Drake’s carries to Hill.

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That’s not an impressive set of receiving stats.

Mark Andrews’ season is excellent: fully deserving of his Pro Bowl berth. But where are the rest of the pass-catchers?

The leading Wide Receiver (by yards) was acquired off waivers just before the last preseason game. Of the top four by yards-per-target, three of them are no longer with the team due to either injury (Rashod Bateman & Devin Duvernay) or mystery roster move (DeSean). The receiver corps basically had its head chopped off.

The biggest disappointment to me (other than Bateman’s health) is the performance of James Proche and Tylan Wallace.  The Ravens seems to feel that this season was time to “see what the guys we have can do”. Those two guys combined for 12 catches on 24 targets for 95 yards: a cool 3.96 yards-per-target. Brutal. Wallace was on IR for a month with a hamstring, so there’s something of an explanation. Proche played the third-most snaps of any Wide Receiver on the team! (Well behind Robinson and Duvernay, who each played about 630 snaps; just ahead of Bateman – they each had about 190 snaps).

Way back in Week 9 I mentioned that both Joe Montana & Tom Brady had won Super Bowls without having a thousand-yard receiver on the roster. In the interest of giving you an absurd injection of hope, let’s talk about the 2003 New England Patriots, Super Bowl champions. They were a defense-and-running team. They had a very pedestrian offense, league average, but the league’s best scoring defense. They cobbled together an ensemble passing offense from some unimpressive individual receivers. Here are the top four receiver by yardage for those Pats, with the current top four Ravens receivers:

If you squint you can see a Ravens championship!  [insert smiley face ???? ]

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Some Ravens fans on Twitter are saying that we should not be happy “just” to make the playoffs. We should expect to make the playoffs; that should be a minimum, not something to celebrate. Really? I wonder if those fans were paying attention last year. Whatever the minimum is, and whatever happens next week, this is better than last year. I would aso draw attention to a few other fanbases who feel they should expect to make the playoffs every year:

Pittsburgh

New England

Green Bay

Players there get to watch Wild Card Weekend on TV.  Hope they enjoy it.

So can these Ravens beat the Bengals in the playoff game?

My favorite football writer is Mike Tanier, who currently posts at Football Outsiders. Tanier writes in his Wild Card preview,

With Jackson: A top-10 [offensive] unit, despite a receiver corps that reads like a 2018 fantasy bench … The Ravens have no shot without Jackson. With Jackson, this game may come down to the health of the Bengals offensive line: the Ravens secondary has little to worry about if Burrow is on the run. … If Jackson emerges … the Bengals may actually need it [home field advantage].

There IS a world where these Ravens beat these Bengals. It’s worth noting that the Ravens defense did not have a bad game Sunday. They held the Bengals to 5.1 yards-per-pass-attempt, their lowest figure of the season. The Bengals touchdowns came on short fields off turnovers. If the defense again plays light-out, and the Ravens dominate on the ground like to the tune of 40+ rushes for 200+ yards, then the Ravens will have a puncher’s chance to win the game. This year’s Bengals haven’t faced a fully healthy Dobbins & Gus; Gus was out the first game, and Dobbins was limited (only 8 carries). It’s conceivable that those two combine for a great performance. The Bengals D is very stout up the middle, esp with D.J. Reader; but may be vulnerable on the edges. Dobbins has speed to the edge.

I also have this fantasy where the Ravens line up with three Tight Ends – Andrews, Likely and Kolar –  along with Patrick Ricard and Dobbins. They break off some big runs until that forces the Bengals to go with bigger personnel. Then at that point the Ravens spread out the Tight Ends and Dobbins, leaving Ricard in shotgun with the QB, and go no-huddle, throwing it to whichever Tight End has the best matchup against a Linebacker.  We know Likely is capable of a hundred-yard game – he just did it! Against this very opponent! – and now we know Kolar is capable of a 50-yard game. Andrews has 10 career hundred-yard games, and two more over 95: he can feast if he gets rolling.

The Ravens could put more speed on the field with the three Tight Ends by bringing on Justice Hill for Ricard. Jet sweeps with Hill, runs opposite that motion with Dobbins, opportunistic passing to a group of dangerous Tight Ends.

It could work, right??

It’s not a complete fantasy; but the margin is damn thin. The Ravens would have to play almost perfectly on offense: no drive-killing holding penalties, definitely no turnovers, keep the chains moving all the time. (Man, everything would be much easier if Lamar can play!)

And even if they do, Ja’Marr Chase could still get free for a sudden touchdown at any time. Or Burrow could find any of the zillion other Bengals playmakers. The amount of weaponry they have given the Bengals much greater margin. They could play like crap for 3½ quarters, grab one easy touchdown and advance. They have “enough offense to win (some) games easily.”

I can see a path for the Ravens to win, but I’m not predicting it.

Next Up: Playoffs!  On to Cincinnati, again, this time to win or go home.