Anybody who studies football trends over time will tell you that defensive performance is far more volatile from season to season than offensive performance tends to be. It's highly unusual for a truly great defense to be truly great from year to year. For example, the Legion of Boom Seattle Seahawks led the NFL in fewest points allowed every season from 2012-2015, and the last team to do that at least four years in a row was the Cleveland Browns, who managed it for five consecutive seasons from 1953-1957.
It may not happen again for a similar space of time.
Therefore, we should not be at all surprised a when formerly great modern defense craters a bit after leading the league in multiple categories. That said, what's happening to the 2024 Baltimore Ravens may not be uniquely bad, but it certainly feels like it.
The 2023 Ravens under defensive coordinator (and now Seahawks head coach) Mike Macdonald led the NFL in Defensive DVOA. They led the NFL in fewest points allowed at 280. They tied with the Browns and the New York Jets for the league's lowest yards per play average at 4.6. They allowed a league-low 19 passing touchdowns, and they had 15 interceptions. Only the Detroit Lions and the San Francisco 49ers had more total pressures than Baltimore's 308. This was an utterly dominant unit from front to back in every possible dimension.
Once Macdonald left the building, the Ravens replaced him with Zach Orr, who played linebacker for the team from 2014-2016, and then began his coaching career as a defensive analyst for his home team in 2017. After one season as the Jacksonville Jaguars' linebackers coach in 2019, Orr returned to the Charm City to be the Ravens' inside linebackers coach in 2022 and 2023 before his recent promotion to defensive coordinator.
You can blame "brain drain" to a point for Baltimore's defensive regression, and that's much more about Macdonald's defensive genius than any assumption that Orr isn't up to the task -- we don't yet know whether he is or not. But it's certainly a thing at the moment.
These Ravens rank 16th in Defensive DVOA. And they've allowed:
The NFL's third-most points at 253, 5.7 yards per play, tied with the New York Giants and New England Patriots for fourth-worst in the league. 22 passing touchdowns (the most in the league), with just six interceptions. An opponent passer rating of 102.0, sixth-worst in the NFL, after last season's 77.9, which was the NFL's second-best behind the New York Jets.
The only thing keeping the 7-3 Ravens together is an offense that can outscore whatever the defense allows. That was certainly the case in Baltimore's 35-34 win over the Cincinnati Bengals last Thursday night. Joe Burrow completed 34 of 56 passes for 427 yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions, a passer rating of 108.3, and a Passing EPA of +8.7. The problem for Burrow (besides Clete Blakeman's officiating crew missing multiple Baltimore penalties on Cincinnati's final two-point conversion attempt) was the fact that Lamar Jackson completed 25 of 33 passes for 290 yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions, a passer rating of 141.4, and a Week 10 league-best passing EPA of +21.4.
Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.
But if the Ravens want to make their first Super Bowl since the end of the 2012 season, they'll have to do more than outscore their opponents as their defense continues to leak oil all over the road. How have things fallen so far so quickly, and what can Orr and his coaches do to fix it?
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