Baltimore Ravens: Tight end cannot be an overlooked need

If the Baltimore Ravens want to keep moving forward with Greg Roman, they have to upgrade the tight end position. Mark Andrews is an elite tight end in the NFL and Nick Boyle is a great blocking tight end. Why do the Ravens need to upgrade at this position?

Most offenses would be set with two tight ends. The Ravens desperately need somebody to come in and fill the Hayden Hurst role for this offense. The Ravens predicate everything on the run game and like to use heavier personnel sets. The third tight end becomes way too important in this offense.

One thing that seems evident is that the Ravens aren’t overly committed to making big changes. It looks like Roman is coming back. On one hand, that is perfectly reasonable as his overall offense is productive and both the run game and pass game are efficient. To get the kinds of numbers the Ravens need though, the passing game has to be sorted out.

The problem with the passing game isn’t efficiency. Lamar Jackson had a 64.4 completion percentage. In the 2019 season, that number was 66.1. Jackson has a career passer rating of 102.6. Jackson is getting the job done in the passing game. Can it be better? Yes. The point is that the problem with the Ravens ariel attack is volume.

The Ravens throw the football less than the rest of the NFL. That makes sense. They have the only quarterback to have two seasons with 1,000 yards rushing. They broke a record in the 2019 season for the most rushing yards as a team. The Ravens don’t need to be a passing juggernaut.

What they need are the tools to get more out of the passing game. The Ravens have two players that defenses worry about. They have Mark Andrews and Marquise Brown. While the Ravens absolutely need to fix things at wide receiver, Roman needs a third tight end to be a key weapon.

With his new team, Hayden Hurst had 57 receptions for 571 yards and six touchdowns. That’s not horribly far off the pace of Mark Andrews. In 2019 the Ravens had two players who could be star tight ends, with Boyle being a surprisingly good weapon as the blocking tight end.

While Boyle and Hurst had similar production in the 2019 season, Hurst’s came in a different role. It wasn’t about the number of receptions but the utility it offered the offense. Hurst was like a lite version of Andrews in the passing game and a lite version of Boyle in the blocking side of things. He was a bit of everything.

If the Ravens want to keep their identity on offense, they have to maximize what they can do with it. Having a third tight end is a big part of that. Pat Ricard is a great fullback, he’s not a tight end. Eric Tomlinson is a fine fill-in, yet Baltimore needs more than that.

Let’s just look at what a third tight end really means to this offense. It means an extra answer in the blocking schemes of Greg Roman. It means that teams have to give a more balanced look to the Ravens defensively because it’s not as simple as just stopping Andrews. It means that the Ravens can have a full passing menu out of a personnel grouping that most teams would use strictly for the run.

When Nick Boyle went down with an injury against the New England Patriots, the problems that come from not being fully stocked at the tight end position were magnified. Without Hurst in Baltimore, it was already putting more pressure on the wide receivers. Without Boyle, it was even more obvious that the offense needed more from receivers.

The Ravens don’t have to address the tight end position in the first or second round of the 2021 NFL Draft. They do have to find a sneaky playmaker at the position though, it’s not a need that can be overlooked. Free agency is a way the Ravens can go.

If the Ravens can get a player like Gerald Everett for a little more than the same price as Willie Snead, they should consider doing it. Everett caught 41 passes for the Rams in the 2020 season and has had at least 30 grabs three years in a row. He’s exactly the kind of tight end that the Ravens need to compliment Andrews.

The bottom line:

Jackson had 401 passing attempts in the 2019 season. That number was down to 376 in 2020. Jackson had 242 completed passes this year, which was 23 less than his MVP season. In 2019, Hurst had 30 receptions 349 yards. The Ravens didn’t just lose those 30 receptions this season, but they lost a player they targeted 39 times in the passing game.

It would have been very hard for the Ravens to turn down the Atlanta Falcons trade offer for Hurst. Hurst always was a replaceable player. The Ravens made the mistake though, of thinking he was just an extra tight end. The Ravens had three starters at tight end and it worked. They need to get back to that if they want to keep their offensive identity but help the passing game.