Onus is On Monken to Pound “Easy Button” Early & Often

Entering Week 3, the Baltimore Ravens are faced with having to stifle yet another game-changing pass rusher. A if Chris Jones and Maxx Crosby were not enough, the Ravens now have to face Micah Parsons, the fourth-year unicorn pass rusher for the Dallas Cowboys who can affect the game in every possible way.

While this will undoubtedly be another challenge for a Ravens offensive line that has struggled, Offensive Coordinator Todd Monken will need to find more ways to help out his offensive line by scheming around pressure.

Simply put, Monken did not do enough in the Week 2 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders to come up with creative ways to avoid pressure. While there is only so much a coach can do to work around a bad offensive line, there are ways to try to take the teeth out of the defense and freeze defenders in order to make life easier for your quarterback.

One of the biggest reasons for bringing in Todd Monken as Offensive Coordinator was that he would be able to help press those “easy buttons”- the easy plays on early down that help keep the offense out of disadvantageous third down situations. While Greg Roman was unable to respond to the multiple-year odyssey of relentless opponent blitzes, Monken’s offense was going to be less about football ideology and more about doing whatever was necessary in any given game to get the ball in the hands of Baltimore’s playmakers.

The Ravens wanted to rely more on quick game and getting yards after the catch, and in 2023 the Ravens passing offense was successfully able to find those easy answers on early downs. But through two weeks, this has been a major problem for the Ravens offense in 2024.

Lamar Jackson is averaging 1.5 air yards on passes that come less than 2.5 seconds after the snap, a far cry from the 3.9 yards he averaged in 2023. That indicates a dramatic difference in the Ravens’ ability to quickly push the ball downfield, forcing Jackson into classic drop-back situations.

One of the most obvious answers is for Monken to run more play-action. Play-action is one of the easiest ways to scheme around a bad offensive line, freezing the linebackers and taking the defensive line out of a true pass rush situation. Monken ran play-action just on just 12.8% of plays against the Raiders according to Next Gen Stats and is at just 16.5% for the year, an inexcusably low number. This has forced Jackson into more drop back passing situations. While is not an inherently bad thing (Jackson is a great drop-back passer and is a one-man starting kit for positive offensive production in any situation), the problem is that one of Jackson’s worst tendencies is to take deeper drops when he does not trust his offensive line. This makes everything more difficult for the offense. The offensive line now has a less defined pocket to form and the receivers are running routes at a different depth from the passer than what was originally designed.

While Jackson has helped keep the Ravens in games by being his Superman self, he is currently just 27th in EPA/dropback with clean pockets according to FTN Data. The fact that he has still been a good quarterback this year is a testament to both how much he has been pressured, and how much better he is than everyone else in the league at making something out of nothing. But the problem boils down to the fact that Jackson may be the greatest problem solver the sport has ever seen – but when he does not trust his offensive line, he tends to treat every play as a problem to be solved. Monken needs to push these easy buttons in order to bring back coherence to the offense.

If he is looking for a roadmap he needs to look no further than at Dallas’ Week 2 opponent, the New Orleans Saints. Despite having a similarly questionable offensive line, they have scored 47 and 44 points through two games, with their 45.6% play-action rate pate. Just last week, they beat the very same Dallas Cowboys that the Ravens will play on Sunday by running play-action on 58.8% of quarterback Derek Carr’s dropbacks. In fact, over the first two weeks, Carr has taken just seven dropbacks on third down. This is not to say that the Ravens offense needs to be that restrictive – Jackson is a much better quarterback than Carr – but it shows how it is possible to find answers to work around a porous offensive line.

Monken displayed this in moments on Sunday, including the brilliants designed touchdown to Zay Flowers where the Ravens ran a fake toss from the shotgun to freeze the pass rush and move the linebackers horizontally, before running Zay Flowers in behind vertically, a concept similar to one they ran to score a touchdown against San Francisco. But those brief moments were outnumbered by early down straight dropbacks that put Jackson in way too difficult a situation, including the Crosby sack that killed a potential Ravens go-ahead drive before it could even start.

Successful NFL offenses need to have a good drop back passing game, but they need to avoid situations where dropping back becomes necessary. Through two weeks, the Ravens have been putting themselves in too many difficult situations. There is only so much this offensive line will be able to do to stop Parsons, and it will be up to Monken to find the answer to creating easy yards on early downs. If not, this Ravens season could be over before it ever has a chance to truly start.

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