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Do We Believe the Stat that Says the Ravens are the Best?

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Rashod Bateman signals first down
Shawn Hubbard/Baltimore Ravens
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Reading Time: 16 minutes

Ravens Pass-Catchers Through 8 Weeks

The Cardinals did something different on defense against the Ravens, that I haven’t seen other opponents do, and I think it really gave them trouble.  On early downs in the first half, the Cards dropped EIGHT defenders into zone coverage, rushed only three, and waited for the Ravens to go somewhere.

I stole a couple screencaps from Cole Jackson to give a sense of it (I hope he doesn’t mind!).  These aren’t from the exact downs I mentioned, but they show the idea.  Here’s the first one:

 

Count the Cardinals on the right side of the yellow line vs the left side.  That’s eight men in coverage.  The Ravens theoretically have five out in the pattern; but one of them is out in the flat waiting for the bubble screen, and two of them are sitting waiting to block for that screen.  There’s nothing to attack this defense with.  And notice all the defenders’ helmets.  What are they looking at?

Here’s another pic:

Again, count the Cardinal defenders downfield.  There’s eight.  (One is obscured by two Ravens, I put a tick mark to help find him.)  No one is open for Lamar to throw to – how could they be? – and there’s no back to run.

Ordinarily Lamar is a potent run threat by himself; but every coverage defender is staring right at him.  They’re going to converge in a hurry if Lamar starts to run.  That’s how the Chargers played Lamar’s run back in the 2018 playoff game: not with size but with speed, to get there quick with numbers.  It worked on Sunday too.  In the first half Lamar rushed two times for a total of 2 yards.  For the whole game Lamar had only one productive carry, a 13-yd gain.  Otherwise his rushing was completely tamped down.

A good opponent will tell you what your weakness is and what your tendencies are.  Can you imagine a defensive coordinator trying this against Greg Roman? Never in a million years (except on 3rd & very long).  But this coaching staff had done their homework.  They knew that Todd Monken would not immediately reach for the run to counter this.

The Ravens run less than 19% of the time they’re in 3-wide; going by the graphic the league median is close to 30%, maybe 29%.  This kind of zone look on early downs can be punished with the run, but that’s not the first tool that comes to hand for Monken.

The Cardinals also played around with something else on defense; a Rex Ryan special, the Amoeba D:

Just focus on the first 10 or 12 seconds of that clip.  Ignore the play the Ravens actually run, and focus on the defense milling around during those 10 or 12 seconds.  No one is prepared to take on a blocking lineman.  You could just smash them with Student Body Left and pick up an easy 6 to 12 yards.  Instead the Ravens try to get strategic.  A little smashmouth might have served them very well here.

Note that I am NOT saying the bubble screen they went with was a bad call.  It could easily have broken for a huge gain.  Ronnie Stanley just can’t quite get to #34 to block enough of him. Actually the bigger problem is that Zay Flowers makes a rookie mistake on this run.  He gets over-cute.  He tries to juke outside and then split the defenders upfield.  If Flowers just sprints to Ronnie Stanley’s backside, he gains leverage on the defender and actually helps Stanley finish the block:

Then a huge alley would have opened up, to a sea of empty green grass.  If he can beat #25 (iffy) this is a touchdown.  But Flowers has already declined that alley, sticking his right foot in the ground and running straight upfield into the tackle.

It’s a rookie mistake.  Mature NFL runners learn to use their blockers.  Zay’s instincts are still telling him that NFL defenders can be beaten as easily as college defenders.  It’s a learning process.

So.

The Cardinals tried some special Ravens-specific tactics; they caught Monken in some tendencies; a couple of plays that could have been explosives for the Ravens got shut down by mistakes plus defensive hustle.  (The Cardinals were really hustling on defense.)

And with all that: from the 2-minute warning in the first half until about the 9-minute mark in the 4th quarter, the Ravens scored 17 unanswered and took a 24-7 lead in the 4th quarter.  From there things got way too goddam interesting, as you know.  But the Ravens got the insurance touchdown they needed, and they withstood the flurry.

Overall this was a solid win against a scrappy team.  I think it was a better, more impressive win than the respective records indicate.  I’m kind of impressed.

Travelogue

Have you considered what a brutal month of travel October was for the Ravens?  They opened with @Cleveland and @Pittsburgh.  Then they traveled 3600 miles to play in London (and that far home again).  Then they hosted a 1st-place Lions team (now 6-2).  Then they traveled ~2,000 miles to Phoenix (and then back.)  That’s a rough 5-game stretch.  The logistics alone will wear you down; and there were opponents too.

Do you think they were dragging ass a little?

I dunno if you watched Harbaugh’s postgame press conference, but he sounded like crap physically.  Scratchy voice, tired, wan-looking.  He was able to summon it for the locker room speech, but he barely had anything left for the reporters.  Made me wonder about the whole team.  I mean, obviously the players get better rest & recovery than the coaches do.  That’s always true.  But they must all have been relatively less vigorous then their usual selves by the end of this gauntlet.

They all could use a cup of tea and a nap.

Fire Harbaugh?

When a supposedly “good” team loses on the road to a divisional opponent, it’s easy to reach for the alarm bell.  FIRE THE COACH!  We talked about this in relation to the loss at Pittsburgh.  Well, now let’s talk about the Kansas City Chiefs.  They lost this week to the Denver Broncos, who came into the game 2-5 with the league’s worst defense (by DVOA).  That defense held Patrick Mahomes & Travis Kelce & Mecole Hardman & Rashee Rice & Marques Valdes-Scantling & Skyy Moore & Kadarius Toney & Isiah Pacheco without a touchdown.

Fire Andy Reid?

Reid and John Harbaugh might seem like an apples to oranges comparison.  Reid’s most recent Super Bowl win was ten months ago, not ten years ago.  And he’s got two to Harbaugh’s one.  You might say he deserves more slack than Harbaugh does.  Okay, that’s a solid point.

But on the other hand, the Steelers are a tougher opponent than the Broncos are, pretty much every year; and Ravens-Steelers is a special rivalry.  It’s also true that John Harbaugh-coached teams have typically ramped up their level of play through November and early January.  Removing the coach mid-season is a great recipe for “selling low” and NOT taking advantage of the expected push.

I understand that “continuity” isn’t the highest virtue; not if it comes at the price of enshrining mediocrity.  But it’s also important not to be a clown franchise that responds with knee-jerk hysteria to every bump in the road.  The night season is dark long and full of terrors adversity.

Rescues: The Flip Side of Drops

When we talk about receivers, one thing we always talk about is “drops”.  One thing we don’t talk about, that I think we should, is what I think of as “rescue catches.”  A “rescue catch” comes on a pass that should be a bad result – at best an incomplete, at worst an INT – but the receiver makes a great play to “rescue” the pass.  We had a great example this week, on Rashod Bateman’s first catch of the game:

via GIPHY

This pass was, to put it politely, “ill-advised”.  (That gif is a little blurry: you can watch a high-def version of the play on YouTube here, from about the 11-sec mark to about the 20-sec mark.)  Lamar probably should not have thrown that ball.  But Bateman rescues the pass from a sure interception (it’s in the defender’s hands!), turning it into a 29-yd gain.  Bateman has done that twice this year.  Here’s his first catch of the season, against Houston in week one:

via GIPHY

That’s another throw that looks “ill-advised:” cross-body rolling right, throwing to the far side of the field, from outside one hash to outside the other.  It’s the kind of throw an anxious rookie would make; looks like it’s just begging to be intercepted.  But actually this is extremely well-placed.  No one but Bateman really has a play on it: it’ll fall harmlessly incomplete if he doesn’t get to it.  I’d call it “bold” rather than “careless,” a calculated risk.  But still, Bateman here turns a throwaway into a 9-yd gain.

To me, this is the part of the receiver discussion that’s missed when we talk about drops.  Especially true when evaluating college wide receivers!  I don’t trust college drop stats at all.

For one thing, I can’t bring myself to believe that a consistent set of standards is used across all college WRs to charge drops.  If the scout who watches Ohio State vs Michigan State is charging drops differently from the scout who watches Alabama vs Tennessee or Mississippi or Georgia, then how do we evaluate the drop stats of Jaxon Smith-Njigba/Jayden Reed/Garrett Wilson/Chris Olave vs those of Jonathan Mingo/Jaylin Hyatt/Cedric Tillman/George Pickens ??  These are day-1 and day-2 picks: players whose eval is important to get right.  If we blindly trust those drop stats, then is it garbage-in/garbage out?  Worrisome.

For a second thing, I think that tall WRs (and those with explosive vertical jumps) are charged with drops on throws that their smaller peers would have absolutely no chance of getting to.  They get penalized for making a huge effort to get their fingertip on a ball that’s juuuussst out of reach, while their smaller counterparts don’t even try, and for them the same pass is recorded as off-target/no chance for the receiver.  I betcha ten bucks that if we did a statistical study of college drop rates, we would find that receivers 6’2” or taller tend to be charged with a significantly higher drop rate than receivers 5’11” or shorter.

I’d be more comfortable with drop rates if we also considered the other side of the coin.  “Drops” are the throws the receiver fails to convert into a catch, plays where the receiver hurts his quarterback’s statistics.  But there is also this flip side, the bad throws that a receiver turns into a reception by making a great play.  On these plays, the receiver is inflating his QB’s stats.  We obliquely reference it in discussions about college receivers when we talk about “catch radius.”  A receiver gives his QB a bigger strike zone for completing a pass by having a large catch radius.

But “catch radius” is vague; it’s an impression.  Drops are a number: they look like hard data (even though they’re actually subjective).  What we need is a catchy one-word description for this other thing, and we need a way to count it.  Well, I have the solution: “rescues.”  You’re welcome.

If we counted “rescues” along with “drops,” then we could net them out.  The receiver gives us more with his “catch radius” on “rescues” than he takes away with “drops.”  Or he doesn’t: but either way we could count it and have a way to talk about it and know.  It would help complete the picture.

Bateman had an absolutely brutal drop in the end zone vs Pittsburgh a few weeks ago.  It was a play that could have won the game for the Ravens (along with Andrews’ drop in the end zone, Nelson Agholor‘s drop, and Tyler Linderbaum’s “ill-advised” snap).  But we should – and I don’t mean this to diminish the importance of that drop, or to try to insulate from criticism a player whom I really hyped over the offseason but who hasn’t produced as expected so far – but when we talk about drops, we should also mention the “rescues” a receiver makes.

Speaking of Bateman

He’s been getting a lot of love this week.  See for example here:

Also here and here and here.  Of course you could drive yourself crazy with all the breathless “could this be the week Bateman finally breaks out??” chatter on the season.  But it is true that his game has been inching forward week-to-week.  He’s been looking more and more like “himself”, little by little. Damn slowly; but it has been happening.  He didn’t have an offseason with the new OC due to injury; he’s been working his way back from the Lisfranc surgery.  Maybe he was more limited early than we all anticipated?  If so: well, this was his best game of the year, so there could be reason for optimism.

The reason people keep panting over it is because, at his best, Bateman has shown he’s a big-play weapon who defenses have to account for.  He could have a “straw that breaks the defense’s back” effect, added on to Mark Andrews and Zay Flowers.  Something to root for.  Indeed, if the Ravens are to make significant noise in the postseason, it’s probably something necessary to have a chance of keeping pace with the Dolphins/Bills/Bengals/Chiefs.  Defense is good, but you also need weapons.

#1 in DVOA, #5 in Our Hearts

Your Ravens are #1 overall in DVOA’s rankings of NFL teams.  They were #1 last week; Aaron Schatz (the Football Outsiders founder and creator of DVOA) tells us they’ve extended their lead:

The Niners and Chiefs both lost, and the Eagles suffer a bit in advanced analytics due to opponent adjustments and some questions about their pass defense.  DVOA rates the Ravens as the best team to post a 6-2 record in the 40+ years of history that DVOA tracks, and the 15th-best team through eight games overall. It’s a nice place to be.

Question: do you believe it?

I do not.  Or maybe the right way to phrase that is, I have trouble bringing myself to believe it.

Part of that is the inherent fatalism of the Ravens fan.  I can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop.  Is Lamar going to make it through the season?  Are Odell Beckham, Rashod Bateman, Ronnie Stanley, any of the top-3 running backs, any of the Free Safeties or top-two corners, enough of the pass-rushers going to?  Is Marlon Humphrey going to come all the way back to his Pro Bowl form?  Is the lack of a top go-to pass rusher who can win one-on-one matchups going to derail them when they face the Dolphins, or Trevor Lawrence, or Ja’Marr Chase & Tee Higgins with a healthy Joe Burrow?  (Let alone Mahomes!)

Am I going to be hurt again?

Even if the Ravens get to the end of the season still ranked #1 in DVOA, the ghost of 2019 is still standing just over our shoulders with a scythe.  Shudder.  Happy Halloween.

Another cause for doubt is, the Ravens offense has not actually played quite as well as the results they’ve gotten.  This is a good place to bring up Kurt Warner‘s observations about the Ravens offense vs Detroit.

That game was a big day (357 yds passing!) against a good defense (still 7th in defensive DVOA!).  But Warner points out that it was not because the passing offense was clicking in an efficient way, springing guys open and hitting them on-time.  Instead, what you see against Detroit is Lamar getting to the top of his drop, and nobody is open.  There are some spacing & route-running issues, and timing issues.

Against the Lions, the pass protection was superb and Lamar played out of his mind.  He had (or created) extra time to throw, and receivers were able to work themselves open.  The poster shot was the TD pass to Agholor after Lamar ran around behind the line.  But Lamar had to stay alive for nine seconds to get that throw off.  DVOA is a useful tool, but it can’t tell from the play-by-play the difference between the QB hitting a WR in stride from the top of his drop versus the QB having to run around and buy time to create an opening.

Dissecting a defense after five seconds in the pocket looks great on the stat sheet, but it’s no way to grow your business.  The Lions unit has been a very good team defense.  But they don’t have that one guy who “brings the danger,” like Trey Hendrickson; or Myles Garrett; or Alex Highsmith & T.J. Watt; or Leonard Floyd; or Chris Jones. (No disrespect to Aidan Hutchinson: he’s well on his way to being a monster, but today he’s still a second-year player who’s developing.)  That time will likely not exist as the opponents get tougher, and more playoff-tempered.

Another thing to be aware of: through its history DVOA has had a slight tendency to favor dink-&-dunk offenses over big play offenses that are less “consistent” from down to down.  As Schatz put it in the piece linked above, the Eagles “are more of a big-play team than a steady, consistent passing game” like the Ravens are. So DVOA likes the Ravens offense a little more than the Eagles offense.  But that seems like a recipe for regular-season success.  Don’t we trust AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith more in a postseason setting, than we trust the Ravens receiver corps?  Even if the Ravens’ is potentially deeper or “wider” than the Eagles group, the highs aren’t as high.

I dunno: I guess it’s nice to see the Ravens sitting at #1 atop the DVOA listings.  But I don’t trust it yet.  It feels fragile.  At the very least it’s subject to change without notice, as the saying goes.

Trade Deadline

The problem the Ravens have with going any further “all in” this year is that they have something like 24 unrestricted free agents pending this offseason, and Lamar’s contract on the books.  (They also have some 5th-year options to decide on, but those currently look like a “no.” Hopefully Bateman & Odafe Oweh will make a breakout move in the second half of the season to make that decision harder.)

The Ravens will need all the draft assets they can muster in the next couple seasons.  They could not have afforded to make the Montez Sweat deal; even spending “just” a 4th-rd pick on a rental doesn’t really make sense. If this set of Ravens squads has a “championship window,” it runs these five seasons 2023-7 (Lamar’s contract).  They can’t blow all their ammunition on Year One of that window.

That’s what I think, anyway.

Play of the Game

One strong candidate is Bateman’s INT rescue.  I also like his jet sweep for 18 yds + 15 penalty.  Those two plays were the longest gains for the Ravens on the day; 33 and 29 yards.  Another fun option is the play where Patrick Ricard took out three defenders with one block.  Ricard seems if anything even more of a beast under Todd Monken than he was under Greg Roman, which is crazy.  Lamar’s backhand flip to Gus while rolling left was beautiful: that’s one to consider.  It also might be reasonable to bundle Gus Edwards’ three touchdowns (his career high!) and call those collectively the “play” o’ the game.  All reasonable.

But at the end of the day the choice has to be this absurdity, illuminated by Brian Baldinger:

WHUT.  Are you kidding, Lamar?  Come ON.

It wasn’t clear on the regular-vision of this throw just how preposterous it was.  The announcer did catch that Lamar threw it “off his back foot”, but the angle was wrong for him to see how & why.  And they never went to a behind-the-O-line angle replay, so we never realized.

The body control here is insane.  Y’know, some quarterbacks would get injured when their 315-lb Left Tackle is pushed into stomping on the high-ankle-sprain area of their leg just as they’re stepping into a throw.  Instead Lamar just, I dunno, unweights the leg somehow and lets it move freely away from contact.  While at the same time he torques the whole rest of his body in the exact opposite direction to curve the bullet around the Defensive Tackle, hitting a receiver who’s not even in the picture when the pass is thrown.  It’s unreal.

It’s Officially Time to Worry About:

When Ronnie Stanley returned from injury, against the Steelers, one could notice a little rust in his game and at the same time not be too worried about it.  His first game back!  No doubt he would round into shape.

Now it’s three games later, and I don’t feel any better about it.  On the play above we see him get walked back into Lamar.  Stanley seems to have his mobility (he’s moving well), but not the strength (“anchor” as OL aficionados put it).  On some reps he’s wearing roller skates.  Not good.  Cole Jackson has some specifics:

Lamar is playing like he still has full trust in Stanley, as the 2019 All Pro.  They’ve always had some big brother/little brother energy between them.  When the two are at their best, there’s some O-line version of the chemistry Lamar has with Mark Andrews: Lamar seems to feel where Stanley is, without having to actually look.

But Stanley doesn’t seem to be that guy right now.  Maybe it’s another case like Bateman’s, a talented player coming off injury and slowly working back to his regular form.  If so, obviously there’s no reason to extend less trust to Stanley than to Bateman.  Stanley has achieved & proven a helluva lot more as an NFL player.  But it’s tough to be relaxed about a Left Tackle looking less than sharp.  A WR can make a bad play and drop a TD or let their QB be intercepted.  A Left Tackle can make a bad play and let their QB be out for the rest of the season.  It’s not the same size issue.  I’m a little concerned.

Stats

Yeah, Bateman!  Keep it going!  He also had the big gain on the jet sweep.

Zay Flowers’ worst game as a pro.  I hope there’s not some kind of “conservation of WR play” going on with him & Bateman, where only one can be good at a time.

Zay + Odell + Agholor = 19 yards on 12 total targets, 1.6 yards-per-target.  YUCK.  The Cards were playing pass all the way, and really keying on Flowers.  It’ll be interesting to see if other teams follow suit.

Season

Here are the full-season stats to date:

Two added columns on the season-stats table this week!  I added Receiver Success Rate: PFR is now tracking it, so it’s “official.”  The NFL avg on Receiver Success Rate is 51.13%, so everyone higher than that is “above average.”

The other new column on the table, far right, is “QS.”  You may remember last week I talked about a pass-catcher’s version of a baseball pitcher’s “quality start.”  In baseball, the quality start is 7+ earnings with three earned runs (or better).  Borrowing that idea, and those numbers along with it, this QS is receiving games with 7+ yards-per-target on 3+ catches.  That’s completely arbitrary, of course.  The point is to track how “regularly” a receiver is contributing.  I’m just using the same numbers to try to link the idea in your mind.

Having a “quality start” every time out is NOT going to put you in the Pro Bowl.  That would be a minimum stat line of about 50 catches for about 450 yards over 16 games (assuming a catch rate of 75%: NFL avg is 68%).  It’s approximately a “WR3” level of productivity.

Remember back in week one we included an imaginary player, “Odell + DPI”.  That’s Odell if the Pass Interference penalties he drew counted as receptions.  The same idea is on the table above, updated for the latest DPI he drew in the Arizona game.  He’s very savvy about doing the body language that draws ref attention to contact with the defender.  It’s interesting to watch how he sells some calls: would be nice if some of that rubbed off to the other receivers.

I was tempted to draw conclusions from how all those RBs are clustered at the top of the table.  “Todd Monken is really maximizing the efficiency of” etc.  But that’s a mistake.  Take out Gus Edwards’ 80 yard catch-&-run, which Monken made clear was NOT designed, and Gus is around 4.5 yds-per-target.  That’s a whole different picture.  Likewise Ricard has one big gain (28 yds), and Melvin Ingram also (23 yds).  All three of those guys have their stats skewed by one big play.  No disrespect to them: they’re talented players.  But there’s nothing “schematic” going on there to make them extra efficient.

Leaderboard Watch

Zay Flowers ranks 17th in the league in catches; 31st in yards.  Mark Andrews is 6th among Tight Ends in receiving yards.  Nelson Agholor ranks 13th in yards-per-target.  Mark Andrews ranks 3rd in yards-per-target among Tight Ends – behind George Kittle and Jonnu Smith (surprise!) not Travis Kelce.

Andrews’ team-leading Receiver Success Rate ranks 19th in the league; 6th among Tight Ends.  He fares better in advanced stats: 3rd in DYAR among TEs (behind Kelce & Kittle) and in DVOA (min 12 targets).

Lamar ranks third in the league in completion percentage, behind Josh Allen and Dak Prescott.  He’s third in yards-per-attempt, second in (low) INT%, and 17th (~average) in TD%, which adds up to seventh in passer rating.  He’s ninth in Passer Success Rate.

He’s a little lower in DVOA and DYAR.  They include things that happen when a pass is not thrown, like sacks & fumbles.  Lamar is 11th in DYAR (the counting stat) and 12th in DVOA (the efficiency stat).

Next Up: Pete Carroll brings the Seattle Seahawks into Baltimore!  This is their first matchup since “’Hell Yeah, Coach! Let’s Go for It!” back in 2019.

That moment seemed like the springboard for the Ravens 12-game winning streak to finish that (regular) season. Fine with me if that happens again.  But these Seahawks are pretty good: #10 in DVOA overall; 9th on offense, 15th on defense, 11th on special teams.  A tough matchup.  The schedule should benefit the Ravens: a 1:00 start usually hurts the west coast teams.  But they’ll still have to bring it.

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