When John Harbaugh was named the Ravens’ head coach in 2008, he inherited a preseason mystery, a question that has resurfaced every odd summer in Owings Mills: What was he going to do about that offensive line?
The Ravens’ all-world left tackle, Jonathan Ogden, had retired five months into Harbaugh’s tenure. They’d cut their longtime starting center, Mike Flynn, and were replacing him with their left guard, Jason Brown. Ben Grubbs had impressed as a rookie at right guard, but now he was moving to left guard. Marshal Yanda had impressed as a rookie at right tackle, but he, too, was moving inside to guard. And then there was the whole learning-a-new-offense thing under first-year coordinator Cam Cameron.
“You look back, and it is kind of the nature of what we do,” Harbaugh said last week, as he tried to figure out what to do, exactly, with the 2024 offensive line. “It’d be nice to have 22 starters out there that they’ve been playing, and they’re all great players, and you knew how they were going to play, and they were self-sufficient and proven guys, but that’s never the case.”
Harbaugh’s first rebuild went according to plan. The Ravens finished fourth in the NFL in rushing, and the team’s pass blocking graded out as No. 3 overall in the league, according to Pro Football Focus. Rookie left tackle Jared Gaither, Grubbs, Brown, third-year right guard Chris Chester (replacing a soon-to-be-injured Yanda) and 33-year-old right tackle Willie Anderson (replacing Week 1 starter Adam Terry) combined to start 69 of a possible 80 games for an 11-5 playoff team, helping to establish the hard-nosed identity of a Harbaugh-coached team in Baltimore.
This year’s rebuild is perhaps more consequential. It could also be far more difficult. A shaky preseason has only intensified concerns that the Ravens’ offensive line will derail their Super Bowl dreams and imperil quarterback Lamar Jackson. Just two starters have returned from a line considered one of the NFL’s best last year: Pro Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum, who missed most of training camp with a minor neck injury, and left tackle Ronnie Stanley, whose injuries have limited him to 25 games since 2021.
Harbaugh previously declined to name the Ravens’ three other Week 1 starters, but at least two seem safe bets for the Sept. 5 season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs. Andrew Vorhees and Daniel Faalele took every first-team repetition at left guard and right guard in the preseason, respectively, and were never seriously challenged in camp.
That leaves only the right tackle battle between the versatile Patrick Mekari and second-round pick Roger Rosengarten.
Should Rosengarten win the job, the unit would effectively have a third new starter up front. It’s unclear whether any offensive line in franchise history has ever entered Week 1 with less experience.
If Mekari is the starter, the Ravens’ line would have another grizzled veteran (36 career starts). Even so, the group would rank among the franchise’s most inexperienced.
According to a review of Pro Football Reference data, here are the Ravens’ five greenest season-opening offensive lines, as determined by their combined starting experience entering the game:
- 2008: Gaither, Grubbs, Brown, Yanda, Terry (66 starts)
- 2020: Stanley, Bradley Bozeman, Matt Skura, Tyre Phillips, Orlando Brown Jr. (110 starts)
- 2001: Ogden, Edwin Mulitalo, Mike Flynn, Kipp Vickers, Sammy Williams (124 starts)
- 1997: Ogden, Leo Goeas, Quentin Neujahr, Jeff Blackshear, Orlando Brown Sr. (163 starts)
- 2002: Ogden, Casey Rabach, Flynn, Bennie Anderson, Mulitalo (175 starts)
A Stanley-Vorhees-Linderbaum-Faalele-Mekari lineup would rank as the fourth-most inexperienced (156 starts).
A Stanley-Vorhees-Linderbaum-Faalele-Rosengarten line would rank as the third greenest (120 starts) — but even that might be understating its relative newness.
The Ravens’ 2008 and 2020 lines were young, but only one of their Week 1 starters had never played in an NFL game. In 2008, that was Gaither; after him, their least experienced starter was Terry (11 games), and the line’s median starting experience was 12 games. In 2020, only Phillips had never started; after him, the least experienced starter was Bozeman (17 games), and the unit’s median starting experience was 26 games.
If Rosengarten starts next week, the median would be a whopping one start. Vorhees, who missed all of his rookie season while recovering from a torn ACL, has never played in a game. Neither has Rosengarten, who struggled in his last meaningful appearance for Washington, the College Football Playoff championship against Michigan. Faalele has one career start, and that was at left tackle two seasons ago. Stanley (87 career starts) and Linderbaum (32 starts) are plenty experienced, but that will be worth only so much amid the prime-time roars inside Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium.
Still, this Ravens line, for all its youth, has to start somewhere. Where it ends up — and how long it takes to get there — could be this season’s defining question.
“I’m excited about these guys, and the exciting thing about that kind of a situation is that the upside is something that you kind of lean into,” Harbaugh said last week. “From an optimistic point of view, you say, ‘What can these guys be? Why not be great?’ That’s kind of how I look at these guys right now. I can’t wait to see what they develop into. … I understand why the concern — I get the questions, and we’re all going to find out real soon.”
“I’m excited for the future,” general manager Eric DeCosta said Thursday. “We may have a couple of hiccups along the way, but I think we’ve started to build from the bottom up, and I think a year from now we’ll be in a great place.”
