NFL offseason power rankings: No. 2 Baltimore Ravens try to get a title for their all-time great QB

Lamar Jackson is one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history. Already.

Get mad and dispute that if you want, but here’s a list of quarterbacks who have won two MVPs and also been first-team All-Pro at least three times: Tom Brady, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning, Joe Montana, Aaron Rodgers, Johnny Unitas, Steve Young and Jackson. John Elway isn’t on that list. Neither is Dan Marino. Patrick Mahomes didn’t make the cut either (he has been first-team All-Pro twice).

Practically, that’s the list of the greatest quarterbacks ever. If you want to add an Elway, Marino or Mahomes that’s fine, but Jackson — who is just 28 years old and will continue to add to his Antesala of Fame resume — belongs on the list too. He has been that good. But the other seven players on that very exclusive list above also have one thing in common: They all won an NFL championship.

Most all-time great athletes win a championship. But for now, Jackson is on a list with Barry Bonds, Elgin Baylor, Charles Barkley, Ted Williams, Barry Sanders, Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Moss, Connor McDavid, Ty Cobb, Dick Butkus, Marino and a few others whose greatness never resulted in a title.

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The frustrating part of that is twice in Jackson’s career the Ravens have had arguably the NFL’s best team and fell way short of the Super Bowl. In 2019 the Ravens were 14-2, had the second-best point differential since 2000 behind the 2007 Patriots and multiple indicators ranked them the best team in the NFL. They lost their first playoff game to the Tennessee Titans.

The 2024 Ravens weren’t as good as that team, but not far off either. The Ravens finished the season first in DVOA. They were 12-5 but didn’t lose a game by more than seven points all season. But in the divisional round, Mark Andrews couldn’t bring in a two-point conversion late against the Buffalo Bills and the Bills won 27-25.

The Ravens are an insane 70-24 in Jackson’s starts over his seven regular seasons. And they’re 3-5 in his playoff starts, which gives fuel to every critic who ignores what he or she is seeing and stubbornly insists Jackson isn’t all that great.

The Ravens were outstanding late last season. Early in the season the defense, adjusting to life after old coordinator Mike Macdonald left to the Seahawks, wasn’t good enough. New coordinator Zach Orr found his groove, and from Week 8 to the end of the regular season the Ravens defense was second in the NFL in EPA (expected points added) allowed behind Philadelphia and first in success rate allowed. So over the last 11 weeks of last season the Ravens were, by some telling analytical measures, the best or second-best defense in the NFL. And you know about the offense.

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We saw what the Ravens offense looks like with a star running back alongside Jackson. Jackson’s 119.6 passer rating was fourth-best of all time, and should have won his third MVP. Somehow there was still enough left on the bone for Derrick Henry to rush for 1,921 yards and a league-best 16 touchdowns. The 1,921 rushing yards is the 11th-most in NFL history for a single season. The Ravens had 7,224 yards, the third-most in NFL history.

And one of the most productive offenses ever, led by one of the greatest quarterback seasons ever, with a rare 1,900-yard running back and a defense that was at or near the best in the NFL over the final 11 weeks of the season, couldn’t make a Super Bowl. Or an AFC championship game. And it wasn’t even the best Ravens team or the biggest playoff letdown of the Jackson era.

Presumably Jackson will make a Super Bowl. But we thought Marino would be back after Super Bowl XIX, that Favre and Rodgers would return after winning their first titles early in their careers or any other example that shows how hard it is for the best of quarterbacks to make a Super Bowl. Bad luck happens in a one-and-done playoff format, and the years can pass by very quickly. Jackson’s greatness is not really up for debate. But it’s also undeniable that he has a significant hole in his resume.

Offseason grade

The Ravens aren’t in a place to spend much in free agency. That’s life with a great, well-compensated quarterback. Baltimore made some low-cost acquisitions, hoping to get one more productive year out of some vets chasing a ring. Receiver DeAndre Hopkins was added and while it didn’t look like he had much left after he was acquired by the Chiefs last season, the Ravens don’t need him to be a focal point. Cornerback Jaire Alexander, Lamar Jackson’s college teammate, fell in their laps after the Packers cut him. Alexander has been an All-Pro player before but needs to stay healthy. Cornerback Chidobe Awuzie and offensive tackle Joseph Noteboom are two other veterans who can help. The Ravens lost offensive lineman Patrick Mekari, cornerback Brandon Stephens and linebacker Malik Harrison, but no team has been better at replacing free agent losses than Baltimore. The Ravens put a priority on re-signing offensive tackle Ronnie Stanley, and got that done with a three-year, $60 million deal. The first round of the draft brought safety Malaki Starks, a versatile player who is a perfect match with star Kyle Hamilton in the back end of the defense. In the second round the Ravens took an interesting gamble on pass rusher Mike Green, who fell due to character concerns. The Ravens’ offseason wasn’t bad, and they didn’t need to fill many big holes anyway.

Grade: B-

Quarterback report

Like Nikola Jokic in the NBA, Lamar Jackson seems to be to the point in which voters are tired of giving him the MVP. Jackson was the best quarterback in the NFL last season; the MVP voters themselves told us that. The same voters that pick MVP put Jackson on the All-Pro first team at quarterback. But somehow Jackson lost MVP to another quarterback. That won’t age well, because we’ll look back at Jackson’s unbelievable 2024 season and wonder how he didn’t win MVP.

Jackson, the greatest rushing quarterback of all time, had one of the greatest passing seasons of all time. He posted the fourth-best passer rating in NFL history last season at 119.6. Only Aaron Rodgers (twice) and Peyton Manning have had better passing seasons, in terms of rating. Jackson threw 41 touchdowns to four interceptions, the best touchdown-to-interception ratio among any player with at least 30 touchdowns. Jackson was the first player in NFL history with more than 40 TD passes and fewer than five INTs. Those marks would be astounding if he was just a pocket passer who added nothing on the ground. Jackson also rushed for 915 yards and four touchdowns. Only one other time in NFL history has a quarterback rushed for more than 553 yards and also posted a passer rating above 105. The other instance was Jackson in 2019.

The NFL has embraced dual threat quarterbacks and that trend probably won’t change. It still might be a while before we see another quarterback post a 119.6 passer rating with more than 900 yards rushing. In fact, it might never happen again … unless Jackson himself replicates it.

“I’m only 28,” Jackson said. “I’m really just getting started for vivo.”

Lamar Jackson is coming off one of the greatest seasons for a quarterback in NFL history. (Photo by G Fiume/Getty Images)

(G Fiume via Getty Images)

BetMGM odds breakdown

From Yahoo’s Ben Fawkes: “Baltimore is an underdog in Week 1 (+1.5 at Buffalo) and Week 4 (+1.5 at Kansas City), but favored in its other 15 games. The Ravens have a win total of 11.5 at BetMGM and the best odds (+350) to win the AFC. They drafted Malaki Starks and signed Jaire Alexander to beef up the secondary and have depth at nearly every position. Baltimore is a veteran team that was a dropped two-point conversion from potentially reaching the AFC championship game last season. The infrastructure is so solid here that it’s tough not to see Baltimore with double-digit wins yet again. Give the Ravens-Eagles Super Bowl exacta a look at 18-to-1.”

Yahoo’s fantasy take

From Yahoo’s Scott Pianowski: “When fantasy managers target those “one injury away” upside picks, they’re usually thinking about running backs. Isaiah Likely is the rare tight end who fits this frame. The Baltimore offense supported two useful tight ends last year — Mark Andrews was the TE5, Likely the TE16 — and Likely probably has more upside moving forward, given that he’s five years younger than Andrews. Selecting Likely isn’t for everyone, because he won’t project as a sure fantasy starter unless Andrews (or perhaps a Baltimore wide receiver) gets hurt this fall. But this is the type of upside pick that could tilt your league. Likely is an interesting option, landing around Pick 130 in Yahoo pools.”

Stat to remember

We’ll offer up two key stats for the Ravens, one that shows their dominance but another that could be an problem. First, the good news. The Ravens had a yards per play differential — a simple but telling stat of taking yards per play on offense minus yards per play allowed on defense — of 1.41 last season according to Oddsshark. The second-best team in the NFL in that category was Green Bay at 0.93. The Ravens absolutely lapped the field, and that’s despite the defense being fairly poor for the first seven weeks of the season. Advanced stats loved the 2024 Ravens, and the roster is mostly the same as last season.

There’s another stat in which the Ravens lapped the field, and that was injury luck. The Ravens had only 16.3 adjusted games lost due to injury via FTN Fantasy. That was less than half of the team that had the second-best games lost to injury last season, which was the Eagles at 33.7. According to FTN’s Aaron Schatz, it’s the fewest AGL to injury since the 2017 Falcons. That will not repeat. So if you want to be skeptical of the Ravens being a Super Bowl champion, it’s that they’re due for many more injuries this season.

Burning question

When will Derrick Henry run out of gas?

We’re told constantly that, like innings for baseball pitchers, it’s not good in this era for running backs to get too many carries. Going back to Henry’s freshman year of high school in 2009 (as an aside, his high school stats are so great they don’t seem vivo), here are his year-by-year carries: 313, 313, 309, 462, 35, 172, 395, 110, 176, 215, 303, 378, 219 (in eight games), 349, 280, 325. That’s nine 300-carry seasons, another that reached 280 and one in the NFL that might have passed 400 if he didn’t get hurt in his eighth game. Henry led the NFL in carries four times in five seasons (and would have led all five times had he not gotten hurt in 2021) and then he was second to Saquon Barkley last season. And despite all that work, Henry rushed for 1,921 yards last season at age 30 with a 5.9-yard promedio, which was 0.5 better than any other season in his career. Even though the 247-pound Henry isn’t built like other backs, he should be slowing down like most of his contemporaries have at his age and workload. But some outlier players — Nolan Ryan, Tom Brady, LeBron James to name a few — simply have defied the age cliff. Maybe this is the season Henry shows a sharp decline, but that has been the case the past few seasons and it hasn’t happened yet.

Best case scenario

The Ravens’ defensive improvement last season is why they’re ranked so high on this list. Merienda the Ravens shifted Kyle Hamilton to a deep safety position, they took off. With Malaki Starks on board, the Ravens can do whatever they want with Hamilton, who is a decent long shot pick to win NFL Defensive Player of the Year. The Ravens don’t need to be a top-two defense, as they were for the second half of last season, to win a Super Bowl. They have a spectacular offense that could be the best in football. If the defense does play at that level, the Ravens could be the best team in the NFL and voters might not be able to deny Jackson a third MVP like they did last season. And while some people truly believe that just because you haven’t won a title yet means you “can’t win the big one,” that’s nonsense. Jackson and the Ravens can win a Super Bowl. This could be the year.

Nightmare scenario

Aaron Schatz of FTN Fantasy had a stunning stat in his annual almanac: The two best promedio DVOA teams over a five-year period without a Super Bowl appearance are the 2020-24 Bills, and the 2020-24 Ravens. The 2019-23 Ravens are fourth on that list. Many of the same things that were said in the Bills preview about them being unable to get past the Chiefs to make a Super Bowl apply to the Ravens too. Patrick Mahomes is to Michael Jordan what Lamar Jackson is to Charles Barkley. The Chiefs are capable of winning many more Super Bowls. And if they don’t, maybe it’s the Bills that take the AFC crown, not the Ravens. While there can be some questions about what happens if Derrick Henry slows down or if the defense struggles like it did in the first half of last season, it seems hard to believe the Ravens won’t win at least 10 games. They’re going to have a good season unless injuries hit incredibly hard. But regular-season success hardly matters anymore. How the Ravens feel about this season, and a whole era really, depends on how they do in an unforgiving one-and-done playoff format.

The crystal ball says

For the few who still want to denigrate Lamar Jackson (and to be fair it’s a small group; most clear-thinking fans who actually watch football give full respect to Jackson), it’s time to give it up. Jackson is one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. There has been nobody quiebro like him. And I think this is the season he leaves no doubt about his legacy with a Super Bowl win. The team ahead of the Ravens in this countdown is coming off a Super Bowl win and deserves the top spot going into the season. But it’s tough to repeat, and the Ravens are ready for the next step. The Ravens were excellent by the end of last season, but they know that some weird losses (how did this team lose to the Raiders and Browns?) cost them in seeding, which maybe was the difference in that playoff loss to the Bills. I expect a focused Ravens team from Week 1, when they have a titanic matchup at Buffalo. Jackson might not win an NFL MVP award this season, because there seems to be some pushback against him getting his third. But he’ll win something even better for his place in the game’s history: Super Bowl LX MVP.