The Best Team in Football

Five weeks ago I put out my annual midseason breakdown of every team. As in the past, I broke the league down into tiers, all leading up to the top four that I declared as the “real contenders” in the NFL. Typically I’ve done a very good job with this, nailing every Super Bowl winner and most of the Super Bowl participants each of the six year I’ve done this. So of course, everyone who read the post left feeling utterly certain that this year’s champion would be either New England, New Orleans, Green Bay, or San Francisco.

About that: I may have made a mistake.

Honestly, it’s a mistake that should have been clear at the time. The midseason review post came less than a week after Baltimore’s Sunday night thrashing of the Patriots, where they announced themselves as not just contenders, but possibly favorites in the league. I was hesitant to crown them at the time, and the games since have not made that choice look great. Baltimore rolled to victories over the Bengals, Texans, and Rams before earning hard fought wins over the 49ers and Bills, and after New England’s losses to Houston and Kansas City they now sit at the top of the AFC.

At this point, Baltimore is the betting favorite to win the Super Bowl. They have the MVP frontrunner in Lamar Jackson, and a relatively clear path through the weak AFC (even weaker now if New England continues their struggles). So I felt that I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge my error, and take a deeper dive into everything that makes the Ravens the best team in the league right now.

Defense

This is one piece that should have been obvious when I wrote this team up last month. Coming off back to back top 3 finishes in DVOA, it seemed like the defense would be the strong point of the Ravens team this year. This defense carried them to the playoffs a season ago, and it seemed prime to do the same again, even if they couldn’t figure out how to make their offense work with Jackson.

And yet through nine weeks, that certainly wasn’t the case. As they sat at 6-2, Baltimore was a team clearly powered by their offense, with the 4^th best DVOA on that side of the ball and only the 21^st on defense. And on the surface, there were plenty of easy explanations. They lost both Terrell Suggs and Za’Darius Smith, their two best pass rushers from last year, as well as Pro Bowl inside linebacker CJ Mosley. They turned over a couple pieces in their secondary, and it was easy to imagine them struggling to fit together the mismatched pieces of their new defense.

The thing about defense is, it is wildly inconsistent. From season to season especially, but even within the same season. Earlier this year I highlighted five teams that were being powered by excellent defenses, and while New England, San Francisco, and Buffalo still rank 1, 2, and 5 respectively in DVOA, Green Bay and Detroit have plummeted to 20^th and 24^th. And, inevitably, Baltimore has gone the opposite direction, rising to now rank as the league’s 4^th best defense by DVOA.

Some of this is just luck, as defensive success or failure often is. Some of this is cohesion, as the pieces of the defense have slowly pulled together. But part of the credit also goes to their addition of Marcus Peters in a trade from the Rams.

Peters struggled in Los Angeles, but that had more to do with his role than his actual ability, and now in Baltimore he is freed to be his best self. He has never been a lock down cornerback in man to man coverage, and he was overwhelmed as the lynchpin in the Rams secondary. In Baltimore he is the third best cornerback, and this frees him to play a lot more aggressive, trusting the secondary behind him to hold up as he makes borderline reckless plays on the ball. After averaging an interception every 2.5 games in Kansas City, that rate plummeted to an interception every 4.4 games in Los Angeles. In six games with the Ravens he has three interceptions, even better than his pace as the start of his career.

Coaching

Three quarters of the way through the season, John Harbaugh is (in my mind at least) the clear front runner for Coach of the Year. He’s been one of the best coaches in the league since he was hired, even if that’s gotten somewhat lost in the past couple seasons trapped in a Joe Flacco designed purgatory. But he’s proven it once again this year as he has elevated the entire roster through his game management and schematic innovation.

The most obvious change has been Baltimore’s aggressiveness going for it on fourth downs. For years anyone with a basic understanding of math has urged football coaches to be more aggressive attempting fourth down conversions, and while several teams over the past few years have been open to it, no one has embraced the analytics like Harbaugh has. He has someone up in the booth relaying win probabilities to him live in every game, an innovation I’m sure will be standard within ten years. And this has led to a rapid increase in fourth down attempts by the Ravens, and a corresponding increase in offensive production.

It certainly helps that the Ravens are uniquely suited to excel in short yardage situations. They are the best running team in football, and the ability to use their quarterback as an extra rushing threat makes it even more difficult for defenses to plug every hole. Getting two or three yards is almost automatic for this team, and Harbaugh has recognized this and adjusted his strategy accordingly.

It sounds simple, but it still seems to perplex most coaches when you suggest that flexibility is the most important trait a coach can have. Bill Belichick is the greatest coach of all time, and he has won every way you can imagine. A defense that grinds out games, a spread out aerial assault, a versatile offense attacking with players who can all fill interchangeable roles. Andy Reid is the next best thing in the modern NFL, and he has allowed his system to adapt as well, embracing concepts that were typically viewed as “college offenses” to build the most dangerous passing attack in football.

And this brings me to the biggest triumph of Harbaugh this season: his embrace of building an offense around his unique quarterback. But I think that deserves a section of its own.

Offense

Training camp began with Harbaugh proclaiming that his staff had spent the offseason developing a revolutionary new offense, and the world collectively rolled their eyes. After all, coaches are always saying shit like that, and it rarely amounts to anything more than a couple cute play designs each game. This offense was a disaster last year, both during Joe Flacco’s time as a starter and after Lamar Jackson took over.

But I guess we should have had more faith in Harbaugh, because he was absolutely right. This offense is the absolute peak of what we could have imagined being built around Jackson, a run-first system with the talent and the design to not just work in the modern NFL, but to thrive. For the past decade the NFL has been chasing notions of the zone-read and the air raid with mixed success, and now Harbaugh has finally figured out how to import a college offense into the NFL.

Except, that isn’t what has happened. It’s a cool story, but it falls victim to the same fallacy that got Jackson’s time at Louisville dismissed as a “college offense”. In truth, Jackson hasn’t run the sort of spread out, simple scheme that people often associate with college football since his time in high school. Louisville ran an NFL offense when he was there, and the Ravens are doing the same now, but both teams were smart enough to add unique twists to their offenses to make the most of a one of a kind player.

The zone-read fad in the NFL petered out fairly quickly because it was all based on deception. It’s about tricking the defense into running into trouble, and while that can certainly be an effective strategy, it isn’t one that is built to last. We’ve seen the same evolution in the college game, where the modern spread has evolved past the simplified schemes that were so successful for the Pat White era West Virginia teams and the Dennis Dixon Oregon squads.

The read-option isn’t gone. It is absolutely still a part of a lot of college offenses, and a handful in the NFL as well. The Ravens use it quite a bit, but it isn’t the heart of their offense. At its core, Baltimore’s offense is built around a power rushing attack, using the same schemes that have been successful in the NFL for the past eighty years, just with a little bit more window dressing on top of them.

Most of Baltimore’s plays are very simple in concept. Powers, counters, stretches, traps. If you just watch the offensive line and the running backs, you could convince yourself this is the most backwards team in the NFL. Their offensive line mauls people coming downhill, and Mark Ingram pounds the ball between the tackles. They regularly use a fullback and multiple tight end sets. Their wide receivers focus on making big plays down the field, and not so much on simply moving the chains.

What differentiates the Ravens from bland teams like the Seahawks and the Jaguars are the trappings they have built around this traditional rushing attack. Harbaugh has embraced analytics as I discussed above, and that means more than just being more aggressive on fourth downs. There are three key findings that analysis of NFL offenses have found that the Ravens have incorporated into their offense:

• Pass plays with play action are more effective than traditional dropbacks
• Plays with a player in motion at the time of the snap are more effective than plays with everyone set
• The biggest predictor of a running play’s success is the number of defenders in the box

The Ravens built a new offense designed to utilize all three of these advantages. They play with multiple tight ends, but they rarely pack the middle of the field, forcing defenses to spread out and open wider lanes for them to run. And they make their formations dynamic, sending players in motion before the snap to force defenses to adjust on the fly, provoking moments of indecision that can open things further up. And when they do pass, they use play action as much as any team in the league, taking advantage of defenses that are keyed up to stop the run in order to slow down the pass rush and open up holes in the secondary.

But of course, as effective as this scheme is, it wouldn’t work without the talent to make the most out of it. As with most great rushing attacks, the Ravens are excellent on the offensive line. Marshal Yanda has put together a Hall of Fame caliber career, and he remains a dominant run blocker on the interior. Ronnie Stanley is a former top ten pick playing as well as any tackle in the league, and Orlando Brown is a behemoth capable of overwhelming people on the other side.

But the key to all of this is, of course, Jackson. He is a puzzle that defenses still haven’t worked out, and one that they may never be able to work out. The key advantage to both the wildcat that prospered a decade ago and the read-option that found success a few years after that is that by making the quarterback a running threat, the number game that typically favors the defense is suddenly evened up. It more or less turns the quarterback into an extra blocker, letting him erase a defender by threatening to keep the ball.

Defenses quickly ended the success of the wildcat by loading up the box to fix this problem, counting on the opposing “quarterback” to be unable to throw the ball. It essentially became just another running play, and offenses soon moved away from it. The read-option has lingered a bit more, but teams are hesitant to use their quarterbacks to run the ball too frequently, as injuries derailed the career of Robert Griffin III and have caused problems for Cam Newton as well.

Jackson is different though. He’s a running threat unlike any of those other quarterbacks, unlike any quarterback we have really ever seen. He isn’t just a great mobile quarterback, he’s a great runner period, in the same category as players like Alvin Kamara, Saquon Barkley, Cordarrelle Patterson, and Christian McCaffrey when he gets into the open field. Even if defenses reclaim the numbers advantage, he can erase that once again by making a tackler look foolish in the open field.

Of course, none of this would work if he wasn’t also a threat throwing the football. That was the issue a year ago, and that is the problem that seems to have resolved itself to turn the Ravens into the most dangerous offense in the league. They don’t throw the ball a lot, and when they do it isn’t a very versatile passing game. They attack over the middle of the field with their tight ends, and they use speedy wide receivers to threaten big plays down the field.

But that’s really all they need to do. Because against this team, defenses are put in an impossible bind. If they drop an extra player into the box, Marquise Brown or Miles Boykin will sail past them over the top. Baltimore’s offensive line is too good for a four man rush to consistently pressure the quarterback, and if defenses try to blitz, they leave themselves vulnerable to Jackson breaking through a lane and taking off into the spread out defensive backfield.

I expected this offense to come back to Earth after its hot early season start. But this wasn’t some flash in the pan, and it isn’t something defenses are going to solve. After week 9 the Ravens were fourth in the league in offensive DVOA. Five weeks later they have moved up to number one, and with a defense playing at an elite level as well, it’s hard not to see them as the best team in the NFL.