The promising outlook of 2023 came to a crashing stop in the AFC Championship game for the Baltimore Ravens. The table was perfectly set for the Ravens to make it to their third Super Bowl, but the Kansas City Chiefs came to town and got the Ravens out of their game en route to a 17-14 loss to end the season.
Baltimore finished with only 81 rushing yards. The Ravens only ran the football 16 times including a number of scrambles by quarterback Lamar Jackson.
“That’s not the number [of rushing attempts] you want to have. When it’s all said and done, and you look back on it, that’s not really going to win us an AFC Championship game, for sure,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said.
The Chiefs jumped out to an early lead, but Baltimore answered. There was no reason to get away from what got them there. The Ravens averaged an NFL-high 31.5 rushing attempts per game culminating to 156.4 rushing yards per game, also tops in the league.
For some reason the Ravens abandoned the run despite a dominant attack on the ground all season. It was almost as if Kansas City dictated to the Ravens what they were going to do.
Harbaugh said the play-calling had a lot of fun-pass-options (RPOs) built into the game plan. RPOs are designed to take advantage by reacting to how the defense employs their players. If they crash the line to stop the run, the offense will throw the ball. If they drop back in coverage the offense runs it.
“The defense was lined up to take away the run, so the next thing would be to bring [the formation] in tight and just run the ball in heavy formations and wide receivers blocking the edge and protecting the edge that way. We could’ve done that, but we were down [in the score of the game],” Harbaugh said.
“We wanted to keep the formations open and give ourselves the best chance to try to move the ball and score points. Two-minute offense at the end of the half, two-minute offense mostly throughout the whole fourth quarter we were in. That’s going to take away rushing attempts. It’s not an excuse. You want to run the ball more.
Sometimes, you have to be willing to get big and run the ball that way. We just didn’t want to do it that way in the game. It cost us the opportunity to run the ball more.”
Although Jackson produced an MVP caliber season, the Ravens offense isn’t built to throw the ball as much as they did against the Chiefs. Jackson doesn’t need 37 pass attempts to be effective. The Ravens needed to have balance offensively. However, even though the plays were heavily slanted towards passing, Baltimore was very close to pulling the game out.
Jackson got the ball to Zay Flowers for what would have been a trip to the end zone if the ball wasn’t fumbled. That wiped seven points off the board.
Regardless, the attention shifts back to the lack of rushing.
“We could have ran the ball,” Jackson said after the game.
The Ravens have over 20 pending free agents to make decisions on in the offseason. Running back will be one of the positions they’ll need to address. It’s still early, but Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta shared the early part of their plan.
“Well, I’m glad we have Justice [Hill] on a two-year deal,” DeCosta said. “Obviously, we do have some free agents, and it was a challenge this year, with J.K. [Dobbins’] injury, which was unfortunate and terrible for us, and then with Keaton [Mitchell]. But we’ll assess that market, we’ll talk to those guys, [and] we’ll try to … We’ll see where things kind of lay with Gus [Edwards] and J.K. – both [are] two guys that I have a lot of respect for [and have been] two outstanding players for us over the past three or four years. We’ll look at the draft, we’ll look at free agency.”