Questions The Ravens Need to Address

The Answers Could Make or Break The 2024 Season

The 2024 Ravens feel less mysterious. While the past couple of seasons have started with giant questions over quarterback contracts, receiver depth and an offensive schematic overhaul, the narratives around this Ravens team feel more stable. While they did lose some key players and coaches on defense, last year showed that this group inarguably has what it takes to win a Super Bowl. This year, the questions surrounding this team are more on the margins. Each side of the ball has an abundance of talent, and the potential to be the best in the league. And while the team’s coaching staff is made up of figures that are familiar with the roster, there nevertheless are questions that need to be answered in 2024.

Defense – Will Zachary Orr be able to obtain a feel for in-game play calling?

Mike Macdonald is not an easy act to follow. Just as quickly as the young Michigan Defensive Coordinator returned to Baltimore and revolutionized the way defenses combat today’s highly sophisticated modern offenses, he left for Seattle, leaving Zachary Orr the unenviable task of succeeding the man who engineered the first defense in NFL history to lead the league in points allowed, sacks and takeaways. It is the Defensive Coordinator equivalent of trying to follow Queen at Live Aid.

As much as Macdonald’s absence feels like a gaping hole, he left a lot behind in Baltimore. Orr served on Macdonald’s coaching staff and is intimately familiar with his system. What’s more, there is no such thing as intellectual property in the NFL- the Ravens can still run everything they did last year. The man may be gone, but the plays are still there. And while the defense will of course have to grow and evolve like every NFL unit, the foundation of what made this group so dominant is still in place.

Perhaps the biggest unknown with Orr is how effective he will be as an in-game play caller. This is something we think about less with Defensive Coordinators than Offensive Coordinators, and there is some merit to that because of the degree to which every NFL defense represents the greater philosophy of their coordinator. But Macdonald’s play calling is what took him from a great coordinator to one of the best in recent memory. His Simulated pressures, four-man rushes where a player from the defensive line drops back while a player from the second level rushes the passer, were not lethal in design, but Macdonald knew when to use each call. He would sequence his calls to build off one another and always stay ahead of the offense, and he had an unbelievable in-game feel of what would make the opposing quarterback most uncomfortable. He was like the ultimate combination of Randy Johnson and Greg Maddux- he had an incredible toolbox, and he knew exactly when to use those tools. It may sound simple, but he simply always knew what the right call was at any given moment.

Getting comfortable with in-game play calling may be Orr’s biggest challenge in his first weeks as a coordinator. There is simply no simulating the in-game process of getting a feel for how both sides are operating and how to stay a step ahead at any given moment. While the volatility of defensive performance would have made it impossible to repeat the success of last year’s defense even with a full returning coaching staff and roster, how quickly Orr adjusts to in-game play calling may be the difference in just how much they regress.

This is particularly true when it comes to getting off the field, as defensive third-down performance tends to be one of the more volatile team statistics in football. Those tend to be the downs where coordinators bring out their most exotic pressure looks and a good play caller can be one way to curb third-down regression. Sure enough, the Ravens were second in the league last year in EPA/Play on Third Down, in large part because of Macdonald’s play calling.

The Ravens still have all the pieces to have a great defense, and if they are still healthy there is no reason their floor should be anything below being one of the top five or ten units in the league. But their ceiling may be determined not only by how Orr can evolve the unit from one year to the next but whether he is able to obtain a feel for the game that allows him to fully unleash the force of this Ravens’ defense.

[Related Article: Bold Predictions for the NFL’s 2024 Season]

Offense- What exactly will Derrick Henry’s usage look like?

Derrick Henry is not a young man. As much as it may aesthetically seem like he was always destined to be a Raven, the reality is that he will be first donning the Purple and Black after turning 30, an age that usually spells doom for running backs. And yet, Henry has proved to be an ageless wonder. The future Hall of Famer has maintained his top-end physical ability, reaching the third-fastest ball carrier speed in the NFL last season on a 69-yard Week 18 run against Jacksonville, a truly remarkable feat for any running back of his size- let alone one with over 2,000 NFL carries under his belt.

But even if Father Time seems to be having a harder time defeating Henry, there are still areas where he is no longer the same. As Ravens fans unfortunately know all too well, Henry’s greatest superpower was his ability to get stronger as the game went on. He never seemed to lose energy as defenses tired, and he was simply able to wear them down. In fact, he not only helped his team run out the clock when leading, but the Titans would frequently rely on the run game to help them come back from second-half deficits.

While he once got stronger as games went on, he got weaker in 2023, with his 3.3 yards per carry in the fourth quarter exactly half of his gargantuan number of 6.6 in his 2020 campaign where he broke the 2,000-yard barrier. As great as Henry is, this is to be expected. He may still maintain his top-form physical ability but asking an aging running back to never tire while receiving the type of workload the Titans would give him is just unrealistic.

With Henry on the Ravens, the hope is that he can return to some type of version of this form, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to reduce his workload. The Ravens have always rotated running backs, while the Titans never stopped feeding Henry. He had 9 games last year when he received at least 17 carries, a figure reached by a Ravens running back only once last year. Having Lamar Jackson to take some of the carries will obviously help, as will going from a Titans team that ranked 28th in the NFL last year in yards before contact to a Ravens team that ranked second.

This does not mean that the Ravens should not give him the ball, it just means taking away the five plays a game where Henry would run straight into a stacked box for little gain because Tennessee felt they had nothing better to do than hand it off to Derrick Henry.

Given the way the Ravens closely monitor Lamar Jackson’s workload to keep him fresh, it remains to be seen exactly how they dole out their carries in 2024. If they can find the right balance, they can fully maximize what on paper is one of the scariest thunder and lightning combinations that the league has ever seen. And considering the issues the Ravens have had holding on to leads over the past couple of seasons, having a guy to lean on for the last ten minutes could be a game-changer. Baltimore already has the best closer in baseball coming back next year in Felix Bautista. If the Ravens play their cards right, they might just be able to do the same and bring back one of the greatest closers the game of football has ever seen.

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