In late July, at the ninth practice of training camp, the Ravens prepared Lamar Jackson for early-September heat. On a sweltering Owings Mills afternoon, they aimed one blitz after another at their star quarterback. The defense could not touch Jackson, but its pass rushers could pressure him, maybe even rattle him.
They did not. Jackson didn’t miss a throw in 11-on-11 action. Three of his four red-zone passes went for touchdowns. He took just one would-be sack. Afterward, coach John Harbaugh called it a “big step for us.”
For Jackson, blitzes are in the forecast every fall and winter. He knows to expect them as he would humidity every Maryland summer. But the NFL’s reigning Most Valuable Player can still feel the heat. In last season’s AFC championship game, the Kansas City Chiefs’ defensive strategy seemed built on that premise.
It wasn’t even the volume of blitzes that stood out in defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s game plan; it was the intensity. In their 17-10 upset win over the top-seeded Ravens, the Chiefs blitzed Jackson on 43.5% of his drop-backs, according to TruMedia — above Kansas City’s season-long blitz rate (37%), but not even Jackson’s most blitzed game of the postseason. (In a divisional-round loss, the Houston Texans sent five or more pass rushers after Jackson on an incredible 75.9% of his drop-backs.) Jackson capably handled the Chiefs’ five-man pressure packages, going 7-for-12 for 112 yards and a touchdown.
What wrecked the Ravens’ offense were Spagnuolo’s “big blitzes.” Jackson faced at least six pass rushers on seven drop-backs. He was sacked once and finished 1-for-6 for 13 yards — the one completion, improbably, ending in Jackson’s hands after a tipped pass by safety Justin Reid. He ended the game with a dreadful minus-0.76 expected points added per big-blitz drop-back. (For comparison, the lowest overall EPA per drop-back any quarterback posted against the Ravens last season was minus-0.67.)
As the Ravens prepare for Thursday’s season opener against the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium, their own postseason aspirations could rest on Jackson’s blitz bona fides. They have seen every kind of pressure in Jackson’s five years as a starter. Now the Ravens must prove they can handle the biggest ones.
They need Jackson and coordinator Todd Monken to have escape plans, either before the snap or after it. They need their linemen to protect the pocket, or hold it together for as long as possible. They need their receivers to get open, whether their routes are planned or improvised. They need to tilt the risk-reward calculus back in their favor.
“It’s going to take ID’ing those pressures when they’re coming, ID’ing how we’re to pick them up or to block them or to throw off them if they’re hots [hot routes] ... and then executing,” Harbaugh said Sunday. “That’s what it takes. When a team comes after you and blitzes, you’ve got to meet them. You’ve got to meet them where they stand, stand your ground and attack them. That’s what you have to do. So we’ve been working hard at that. We always have, and looking forward to seeing how we do.”
The Chiefs’ big-blitz strategy was not exactly revolutionary. The week before, Jackson had faced 11 of them against Houston, finishing 8-for-10 for 66 yards and a touchdown and taking one sack. Three years earlier, one of his lowest moments had come in a dispiriting loss to the Miami Dolphins, who threatened him with “Cover 0″ all-out-blitz looks before nearly every snap.
Coverage plans have varied in the years since, but the heat on Jackson has remained steady. Over the past three seasons, he’s ranked seventh, first and eighth in opponent blitz rate, respectively, and second, first and fourth in big-blitz rate. Jackson has faced at least six pass rushers on 11.8% of his drop-backs since 2021, by far the highest rate in that span. No other quarterback with at least 200 pass attempts is over 10%.
The pressure keeps coming because, well, it works. In 2021, Jackson ranked 40th among 42 qualifying quarterbacks in EPA against big blitzes (minus-0.51). In 2022, his last year under offensive coordinator Greg Roman, he ranked 30th among 47 qualifiers (minus-0.16). Last year, Jackson’s first under Monken, he ranked 38th among 48 qualifiers (minus-0.37). Over that three-year span, relative to his drop-backs against five or fewer pass rushers, Jackson’s sack rate (9.4%) and interception rate (4.1%) ticked up, his accuracy plummeted (49.7%), and his yards per completion (11.8) remained largely unchanged.
Aggressive defensive coordinators have weaponized the strategy in the playoffs. In the Ravens’ 17-3 loss to the Buffalo Bills in the 2020 divisional round, Jackson went 3-for-7 for 26 yards and took a sack against big blitzes. In January’s AFC championship game, Kansas City didn’t wait long to force the issue; Spagnuolo sent six Chiefs after him on his first drop-back of the game. Jackson’s pass protection held up, but his third-and-7 pass over the middle to wide receiver Nelson Agholor was dropped and short of the sticks. Wide receiver Zay Flowers, running a deeper in-breaking route behind him, got open just as Jackson released his pass.
“I thought Kansas City did do a good job in the AFC championship game of challenging some of our protections and doing some things that did cause some issues, and that was an area of growth,” Ravens quarterbacks coach Tee Martin said in June. “That was an area of us looking at tape and saying, ‘How can we improve in those areas?’ And so our defense is doing a heck of a job [in offseason practices] of not only giving us those looks, but looks that challenge us even more than that. So we’re building the tools that we need to do to pick up those pressures and give Lamar a little bit more time and be successful in the passing game.”
The hope in Baltimore is that a more empowered Jackson can burn the blitz. Every kind of blitz. He was impressive against the more common five-man pressures last season, completing 67.9% of his passes for seven touchdowns and no interceptions. With a greater command of the offense before the snap — audibles, protections, cadence — Jackson will be entrusted with getting the offense out of trouble before the defense can start trouble.
Asked Sunday about the challenges the Chiefs’ blitz had posed in their last matchup, Jackson downplayed the significance.
“Man, it was all type of things that went on in the game that we felt like could’ve worked for us, went our way,” Jackson said. “We missed certain things throughout the game. It was all type of things. I just can’t pinpoint them blitzing us, because we picked them up sometimes, here and there. All type of things we could’ve done better that game.”
Come Thursday night, the pressure will be back on. With Jackson, it almost always is.
