The Ravens can’t get enough first round corners.
It’s been a fetish for middling general manager Eric DeCosta for years and they have struck out on quite a few – Jaire Alexander, anyone? – and overpaid a bunch (Marlon Humphrey, anyone?) and rarely a year goes by without using a first-round pick on a corner or safety.
The secondary is supposed to be the strength of the team and rookie head coach Jesse Minter is a coverage savant and all of the genius stuff he did with the Chargers defense was supposed to carry over here, where he'd have a “better roster” and with DeCosta pumping the preponderance of the offseason resources into this side of the ball.
Yet here we are a third of the way through the season and the Ravens have faced one of the easiest schedules of offensive opponents in the NFL (that’s about to change in a major way) and mostly bad quarterbacks and they can’t get any of their corners to be playmakers. Hell, they can’t get most of them not to be a liability in coverage when the game is on the line. It’s ridiculous and sad, but true.
And with Joe Burrow and Josh Allen and Trevor Lawrence and even Bryce Young and CJ Stroud coming up ahead, they are about to be tested in ways they just haven’t yet. And they haven’t met anything close to a No. 1 receiver who hasn’t carved them up already to this point, and Minter doesn’t seem to trust Chidobe Awuzie at all, leaving them short of depth and quality on the boundary and Humphrey is a shell of what he was a few years ago and Nate Wiggins has yet to take the leap and just might not be a guy who makes a lot of plays on the ball (206 times thrown on; four career picks).
So for a team that has already dealt a second-round pick to try to fix its offensive line and that brought in competition already for its kicker (they could always trade for one of them too) and that should be getting healthier overall on offense, cornerback looks like a bizarre need to me.
Bad Metrics
Perhaps the latest injury to young corner TJ Tampa, who the Ravens wanted fans to know was getting trade interest over the summer, is a bigger deal than we may have assumed. Corner is supposed to be their strength and he has been injured quite a bit. But now the depth and quality looks shaky.
Quarterbacks have been coming after Humphrey for years, he was a bottom 10 corner in the NFL in many categories last season, and that isn’t changing. The corners do not have an interception all season as a group, they have just six pass break ups in 86 attempts and, again. the caliber of QB is about to jump up several notches. Maybe the pass rush really gets going, which would help, but some of this is alarming.
Ravens corners are allowing a QB rating of 94.4; the QBs they have faced, for the season, collectively, have a passer rating of just 86.0 and have combined to throw 23 picks already between them. Those QBs are averaging just 6.5 yards/attempt – this has not been big-boy football by and large – but have fared better against the Ravens corners than the rest of the league they have faced.
Hmmm.
Awuzie has played just 47 snaps in coverage all season and they seem loath to move Humphrey to the slot more because they don’t trust anyone outside. Problem is, the guys who are in the slot in the dime role – rookie Chandler Rivers til he got benched Sunday and now Keyon Martin – are both allowing a QB rating of 119 in the slot and a guy like Ja’Marr Chase, who already has three games of 190 yards or more against the Ravens, might eat them up in the slot.
For the season, here’s where the Ravens rank defending the slot (they have faced 58 passes there, seventh-most in the NFL):
Passer Rating: 117.7 (27th) Comp %: 74.1% (26th) Yards: 510 (27th) Yds/Att: 8.8 (23rd)
Lamar Jackson will eventually be back to save this offense – though perhaps not this week – but with each passing week this secondary gives me more pause.
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