Fairly assessing the Lamar Jackson problem for Baltimore Ravens
Assessing the problem:
The key here is admitting that we have a problem. That’s not an over-reaction. It’s a fact. If Jackson even played a half-way decent second half of football the Ravens beat the Steelers and this post would have waited until the next time we got in this exact cross-road moment. You know the the one that we’ve been in after the loss to the Tennessee Titans and after the Chiefs rocked Baltimore on Monday Night Football.
So the Ravens have a problem, what do they do now? Well the first thing is that they have to instill confidence in Jackson. It’s easy to forget that he’s an incredibly young quarterback still in the early stages of his career. Whether you like it or not (and I very much like it) Jackson is the quarterback of the purple and black. The Ravens need to make this work right now. They cannot let it fester. They can’t let regression become gains that are forever lost.
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Jackson’s problems are seemingly psychological. He struggled in his first playoff game and he got a pass for that. It was his first playoff game and we tend to have patience for quarterbacks only when they’re rookies.
He had three tries at getting past the Kansas City Chiefs but couldn’t get the job done in the most painful of ways. After the Titans game, and the Steelers game that just happened, it’s a trend. Jackson is making invisible hurdles for himself. It may explain why he went from making the right decisions a year ago to missing wide open receivers all of the sudden. Something is clearly not right and he’s playing like a rookie again.
The second thing the Ravens must do is get Jackson some help on the field. Hopefully Dez Bryant ends up counting for that, though it wouldn’t be surprising if he doesn’t help much. The Ravens have a bottom five group of NFL wide receivers.
Marquise Brown is good, yet he didn’t take the leap the Ravens were hoping for. Devin Duvernay is good, but underutilized and incredibly raw. Duvernay and maybe even Miles Boykin could become part of the answer yet we need to stop asking rookies and second year players to produce like established stars. The fact is that other than Mark Andrews– who kind of has a vanishing act sometimes- Jackson has no superstar weapons.