An Encouraging Loss, but Not Without Cause(s) for Concern

Ravens Pass-Catchers Through One Game

We’re SO back, baby!

I dunno about you, but I have rarely seen a loss that I found so ENCOURAGING.  Most of the things that before the game we feared might hurt the Ravens, actually did hurt.  Chris Jones and the Chiefs pass-rush overwhelmed the new O-line starters a few times, including for a strip-sack, plus there were procedure penalties. On the other side of the ball, Chiefs 1st-rd pick Xavier Worthy was blazingly fast and scored two quick touchdowns, and Rashee Rice was over a hundred yards receiving.  And the refs, let’s not even talk about the refs.

And the Ravens still came within a toenail of tying the champs at the end, with the chance at a 2-point conversion for the win.

The grit and resourcefulness were obvious.  Lamar Jackson orchestrated and competed like an MVP. On the defensive side, the pass rush showed up, and new ILB Trenton Simpson looks amazing.  The strengths are real.  And some of the problems will clean themselves up.  The Offensive Line will steady down and come together.  This Ravens squad will be a good team by the end of the year.

The grit & resourcefulness side of the equation rings especially important.  From a sheer talent standpoint, these Ravens missed their most obvious Super Bowl window.  Last year was “it.” The best team in franchise history.  It was among the best teams we fans are ever likely to see.  The 2024 Ravens are not “better” than the 2023 Ravens.

But!

The 2012 Ravens were not necessarily “better” than the 2011 Ravens.  But they had a little more mettle, a little more experience.  (Uh: and a better kicker.)  The 2011 team lost a heartbreaker; the 2012 team won the Super Bowl.  Along the same lines, the 2019 Chiefs were not necessarily “better” than the 2018 Chiefs.  But they had a little more experience, especially at quarterback, and were a little better poised to handle the challenges of playoff football.  The 2018 Chiefs lost in the playoffs; the 2019 team won the Super Bowl.

Taking it over to the other championship in my heart, the 2002 Maryland men’s basketball team had more mettle and experience than the 2001 squad that lost in the Final Four to Duke.  Of course, the 2002 team was also better overall.  But their gains & losses compared to 2001 were complex.  One the one hand, Juan Dixon & Lonny Baxter & Steve Blake had another year of experience together, and Chris Wilcox emerged.  On the other hand, they lost Terrence Morris and Danny Miller, in a league where they needed to defend Mike Dunleavy.  The 2002 team was focused and driven.

The 1983 Orioles were driven partially by the disappointment of the 1982 pennant race.

Point is, it’s not uncommon for a champion one year to be tempered and driven by a disappointment from the previous year.  The Ravens’ purposeful play in the 4th quarter in Kansas City showed that kind of mental toughness.

Complaints

We all got ‘em.  Here are some of mine.

Refs

It’s usually bush league to complain about officiating.  Any team as successful as the Ravens have been over the years has gotten its share of calls.  Don’t ask a Lions fan whether the Ravens get shafted by the refs: they’ll laugh in your face, if they don’t punch it. At the very least we can say that the Ravens aren’t on the “bottom rung” for favorable treatment from the refs.

But man, they sure aren’t on the top rung either.  The refs called Illegal Formation on the Ravens Offensive Tackles five times in the game, and they called it zero times on the Chiefs OTs, who seemed to be lining up the exact same way.  On Xitter, Ken Filmstudy pointed out that the whole rest of the league (minus Monday Night Football) had only 6 such penalties called in Week One.

On top of that, the phantom holding call on Tyler Linderbaum wiped out a 29-yd gain by Lamar (though the Ravens got the touchdown just two plays later on the same drive).  And a Chiefs DB blatantly mugged Isaiah Likely downfield with no call.  It just felt like the NFL was determined not to spoil the Chiefs banner-raising night in the NFL’s season opener with Taylor Swift in attendance.

Ravens

When the Chiefs handed off to their speedy draft pick Xavier Worthy on an end-around, it was a funky way to generate usage for him and jump-start his NFL career.  He scored a touchdown on the play. Why didn’t the Ravens do something similar?  Where was the end-around to Tez Walker, who ran a 4.3 at the Combine?  Walker was a gameday inactive.  Now, I get the fact that he was considered a “raw” prospect on draft day, who would need some polish before he’d be ready to contribute.  But the Chiefs showed us that contribution can be jump-started.  In general they display an attitude of prioritizing weapons and diversifying their arsenal.   The Ravens display an attitude of slow & patient player development.  Seems like jump-starting might work better.

Put a gimmick in for your really fast guy.  Yeah, he’s one-dimensional, but as Mike Tanier says of Xavier Worthy in his Walkthrough column today, “He can be one-dimensional, because speed is the most important dimension in football.”

King Henry ‘s Usage

First of all, I didn’t like the way Derrick Henry was relegated to 1st- and 2nd-down duties, and taken off the field for Justice Hill on third.  This is not a Justice Hill complaint!  Hill played his ass off.  His pass-blocking on Chris Jones on back-to-back plays at the end of the game was downright heroic.  (Not that he should’ve been in that position at all.)  But – Derrick Henry is a weapon.  He’s not just a big-play machine in the running game; he’s lethal on screens, and he’s got great hands as a checkdown.  Limiting him to big-back bludgeoning duty is to handcuff yourself.  It makes your offense too predictable.

Related to that, I thought Henry should’ve been on the field when the Ravens got out to the 40-yard line with about 1:10 to play. The run threat is still viable with that much time on the clock, and he would’ve drawn some defensive attention.

Mark Andrews’ Speed

Is he healthy?  We know he missed some weeks at the end of camp after the car accident.  He didn’t look 100% to me.  A little slow.  This may just be a case of him having to play himself back into shape.  But it’s also true that he just turned 29.  If he’s lost half a step and is on the downslope, then a two-Tight End offense won’t put enough speed on the field to threaten defenses.  Something to monitor.  The idea makes a Tez Walker experiment look more important.

Lamar’s Wear and Tear

This isn’t really a complaint, more of an observation.  First of all, Lamar looked tremendous mechanically in the first half.  Fantastic footwork, throwing from a strong base.  And it highlights how, every year Lamar comes into the season looking about 2% to 5% better as a passer than he looked the year before.  Now, 2% to 5% may not sound like a lot: but remember Lamar is operating very high on the diminishing returns curve.  It’s extremely easy to get 50 to 100% better at something when you’re a raw beginner.  It’s damn hard to get 1% better when you’re already one of the top 20 human beings on Earth at what you do; an NFL MVP.  Eking out those last couple percents of improvement requires intense, incredible effort.  Lamar is clearly putting in the work.

But as the game went on, Lamar’s footwork started to get sloppy.  It looked to me like he was fading away from his right side (so drifting to the left), perhaps unconsciously.  And that would make all the sense in the world, as his pass protection to the right was awful.  But it led to his base not being set when it was time to throw, which led to some throws sailing inaccurately.  If you have an hour, there’s a fantastic breakdown of Lamar’s day on The QB School’s YouTube channel, here.  Again, this is not really a Lamar complaint, it’s more of a pass-protection complaint.

Right Tackles

Now this is a complaint.  OMG.  The play from the Right Tackles was atrocious, awful, I’m running out of adjectives.  Team-killing.  Patrick Mekari and Roger Rosengarten were, to be polite, ineffective.  On the bright(?) side, this ought to be as bad as Rosengarten and Daniel Faalale play.  Their first start together.  Rosengarten was an excellent draft prospect, and Faalale is – well, he’s a unique athlete.  So the right side of the O-line should improve as the season goes on.  But at this point it would need to improve a whole lot to get up to “below average”.  This right here could sink the entire Ravens season.  No joke.

The Ravens also stuck Justice Hill out on an island on the right side for a couple plays to block Chris $%*! Jones one-on-one, which is insane:

Incredible job by Justice Hill to take on and hold up against Chris Jones twice.

Absolutely bizarre/lazy for the Ravens to full slide the protections against these looks, especially against defenses like a 3 man rush. Puts a RB on Chris Jones and sacrifices a route. pic.twitter.com/XEbkdN43AT

— Nate Tice (@Nate_Tice) September 6, 2024

The fact that he did a pretty decent job is, well, amazing; but it doesn’t negate the fact that the matchup is insane for the offense.  I’m trying to come up with some explanation for how that could happen.  I don’t have much.  Two possibilities occur.  One, Chiefs Defensive Coordinator Steve Spagnuolo spotted something in the Ravens pass-pro “rules” that dictated how they call their slides, and he showed them a look that elicited a full slide left, leaving his D-end schemed-up on the Running Back.  On the first play you’ll notice that #22 looks like a blitzer off the left side (but why not shift the RB over to take him?), so maybe.  Or two, this year the Ravens are having Lamar call everything including the protections, and Lamar messed up.  I don’t know.

(Note: I wrote this before we got the Harbs-planation, here:

Harbaugh said because of crowd noise, the team didn’t get into right protection with tackles fanning out, which is why Justice Hill was man blocking Chris Jones on back to back plays. But he showed team video of how hard Hill battled on those two plays.

— Jeff Zrebiec (@jeffzrebiec) September 9, 2024

But the pass-pro must get cleaned up.

———————

Welcome to another year of me trying to sell the “analytics” idea of using Targets to measure receivers. When most stat services show receiver efficiency stats, they list yards-per-reception.  But a reception is already a (partially) successful play for the offense.  We need to know how many attempts the offense invested in the receiver – passes intended for them, aka targets – to judge if they’ve been efficient and productive.

The single most important “basic stat” for receiver efficiency is Yards-Per-Target.  Put another way, the receiver’s version of the Running Back yards-per-carry stat is Yards-Per-Target, not yards-per-catch. That’s the whole agenda of this column.  The rest of it is just rambling to pad out to a full column length.

Stats

Here are your stats from the game:

Rashod Bateman breakout??   Well – I would call his day “promising” rather than the big breakout we’ve been waiting for.  Lamar and Bateman still missed connections on too many plays for me to be confident.  Still: he was over 50 yards, two big plays, and the yards-per-target leader on the day is a promising development.  You develop confidence & connection with your quarterback by making plays.  This was a great building-block day.

This game was Isaiah Likely’s career-high in yards and catches.  He’s picking up right where he left off last year.  Last season, Andrews got hurt in the November Bengals game.  In the eight games since then, including playoffs but not including last year’s finale against Pittsburgh (with Lamar resting), here’s what Likely has done:

That’s half a season!  Double it for full-year projection: 900+ yards and 12 TDs.  The league leader in TD catches last year was Tyreek Hill with 13; Cee Dee Lamb was second with 12.  Likely’s yards-per-target is in CeeDee Lamb/D.J. Moore territory.

Isaiah Likely has become a superstar.

A lot of touches for Zay Flowers without a lot of production.  I think the “gadget” usage of Flowers (bubble sweeps and the like) is not the way to deploy him.  It lets defenders swarm him. I think the Ravens would get more out of Flowers throwing to him downfield, a la Steve Smith.  But I don’t mean that as a sharp criticism of Todd Monken: I suspect the quick WR screens were a sight-read to help deal with the Chiefs pass rush.

Stat Nerd Fun

I said above that Yards-Per-Target is the most important “basic stat” for receiver efficiency.  A slightly more complex stat is “Success Rate,” which includes the context of the play.  Success Rate was invented by Aaron Schatz, founder of Football Outsiders, originally to measure Running Backs.  This was the definition from their glossary:

A measure of running back consistency based on the percentage of carries where the player gains 40% of needed yards on first down, 60% of needed yards on second down, or 100% of needed yards on third or fourth down. A running back above 50% is very consistent; below 40% is very inconsistent.

You can find the same definition at Sharp Football, and a similar one at Action Network (a little stricter on second down).

Success Rate tries to measure if you’re staying ahead of the chains; consistently moving the ball

• On first down: if you gain 40% of the yards-to-go, that’s a success. Think of a 4-yard gain on 1st-&-10.
• On second down, if you gain 60% of the yards-to-go, that’s a success. Think of a 6-yard gain on 2nd-&-10, or a 3-yard gain on 2nd-&-5
• On third down (or on fourth down), picking up the first is a “success”. Anything else, isn’t.

Simple idea. And it turns out to be very useful.  Averages per-carry or per-target averages give you a sense of big-play production; Success Rate gives you a sense of consistency.  Two great tastes that taste great together! Last year PFR started including Success Rate last year on their Player Stat pages.  They extended it from Running Backs to receivers (using targets) and passers (using attempts), which I bet is something Schatz didn’t anticipate. Works great.

For the last couple years I’ve noodled around with the idea of combining Yards-per-Target and Success Rate for Running Backs, like the stat OPS in baseball.  You wouldn’t add the two numbers, since one is a fraction.  But you can multiply them.  Copying OPS, I call the idea YTS, for Yards-per-target Times Success-rate.

Here’s the Ravens receivers by YTS for the Chiefs game:

Like every other stat, you get some good info and some bad.  On the good side, YTS sorts Bateman below Likely because of all the incompletes.  And on the bad side YTS sorts Agholor above Bateman because his 1-for-1 gives him 100%.  Obviously you get weird results with efficiency stats with only have one game’s worth of data.

I go into all this detail because, despite Yards-per-target being central to my “mission” with this column, I’m thinking of using YTS to sort receiver stats in future installments. It just seems more informative overall.  But would that dilute the intended focus on Yards Per Target?  I have to think about it.

By the way, the league average YTS for all pass-catchers last year was 3.7.  Wide Receivers were at about 4, Tight Ends just under (3.95), and Running Backs were much lower, around 2.5.

After one game, Isaiah Likely is seventh in the league in receiving yards.  Rashod Bateman and Justice Hill are 29th and 30th.  Likely is 23rd in receiver Success Rate.  Lamar is 6th in passing yards, 11th in Net Yards Per Attempt (includes sacks), 12th in Success Rate, and 15th in passer rating.  The Ravens offense is 14th in Scoring Percentage and 15th in points-per-drive.  They’re 7th in 3rd-down conversion rate, 22nd in red zone.

Here’s something fun.  Check out the stats of your quarterbacks in the AFC North:

One of these guys is clearly better than the others (so far).

Next Up: Home opener!  Antonio Pierce brings Maxxxxx Crosby & the Raiders fierce pass rush into Charm City. Plenty of work for the O-line.

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2024/09/09/street-talk/likely-offensive-line-chiefs/