“Attack the upfield shoulder.”
This was Ravens outside linebacker Odafe Oweh’s note to himself after his Week 1 whiff on a sack of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. It was his personal focus, he said Friday, as he went into Week 2 against the Las Vegas Raiders.
And then he stepped on the field for his first snap and strip-sacked Raiders quarterback Gardner Minshew. Over the next 60 minutes, he got to the quarterback two more times, finishing with 2.5 sacks and five tackles.
“Attack the upfield shoulder” was at the front of his mind as he ran Minshew down, and it made all the difference, he said.
“One of my sacks actually had to apply that upfield shoulder because no one blocked me,” Oweh said Wednesday. “So everyone thinks those kind of sacks are easy because no one’s blocking you, but actually it’s like, because you’re so zeroed in on one thing, so many things can go wrong. Like you might take the wrong angle; if he sees you, he spins out. So attacking the upfield shoulder gives him only one route to escape, and then he picks the wrong one, you just better be able to make the sack.”
In just one game, Oweh reached the halfway mark of his 2023 season sack count (5.0). After two games, Oweh’s 89.9 Pro Football Focus grade rates him fifth among the league’s edge defenders.
Yet Oweh wasn’t satisfied.
“I can’t say that I’m not happy,” Oweh said. “But I know that there’s another level to go to. There’s still even more I want to do better.”
Week 1’s sack that wasn’t was the most recent in a long line of “almost” sacks that will follow Oweh until he proves his consistency. Ravens pass rush coach Chuck Smith said during training camp that Oweh missed seven to nine sacks by his count last season.
But thinking about the inches he missed by, the twists and turns quarterbacks pulled to slip out of his grasp or sidestep his tackle, can lead to a dangerous spiral, Oweh said.
“Once you start thinking about the misses and the failures, that’s all you’re going to do,” Oweh said.
So he had to find a way to spend the entire offseason focused on that final step that would turn his quarterback hurries into sacks without letting it cross into a counterproductive obsession.
A text from Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta infused a shot of positivity and confidence into Oweh’s offseason. Instead of looking at the inches Oweh missed, they focused on how close he was and the progress he has made since returning from multiple injuries. The Ravens picked up his fifth-year option, adding another year to his rookie contract and guaranteeing a jump in his $2.2 million salary to $13.251 million in 2025.
“With Odafe, we just felt like this was a guy that has all the tools,” DeCosta said ahead of the season. “He plays hard; he has a great energy about him; he wants to be good. He has all the talent to be one of the better guys at his position. And we just decided to make a bet on him that he was going to do it, and so far I feel really good about it.”
The Ravens had spoken highly of Oweh before, but here they backed it up with money.
“That actually helped me a lot,” Oweh said. “Getting a text from EDC that he was gonna pick it up just gave me another motivation to just continue to get better, continue to work on all the things that you know I can get better on.”
He returned to camp feeling more dominant than he ever had, he said. He looked more dominant, too. As the weeks wore on, one thing stayed consistent: Oweh was pressuring the quarterback. DeCosta remarked that Oweh’s camp had him feeling good about the bet he made.
Then came the first test: the Chiefs, the same team that knocked the Ravens out of the AFC championship game in a shocking blow that left Oweh standing tensely, with his head down and his back turned, in the locker room after the game.
Halfway through the second quarter of the rematch, Oweh got his chance. He darted around two blockers for a shot at Mahomes. He dove. Mahomes dodged. Then Mahomes completed a pass for 30 yards to continue what became a field goal-scoring drive. Oweh finished with four tackles but no sacks that game.
Two weeks removed from the loss, Oweh is OK with how it happened because it forced him to grow.
“To be honest, I thought I was going to have this big game at Kansas City,” Oweh said. “So I knew that, the fact that I had missed that one in Kansas City, it would only set me up for the next big game. I feel like that was a test to see how I handled adversity.”
The way he rebounded demonstrated to Oweh how much he’s grown as a player and a person. Last year, he would have “ruminated and replayed it in my head” so much that it would start to affect his all-around performance.
Now it’s on to the next play.
The Raiders game taught Oweh what it feels like to close that final step and finish in a game. It showed him he can do it. Now he has a different note for himself: Don’t get too satisfied.
“I feel like I could have had a lot more, could have ended with like four,” Oweh said. “But I got real happy after I got that third one. Took my foot off the gas a little bit. Just keep on going.”
