Last season, the Baltimore Ravens finished with one of the NFL's best offenses. Lamar Jackson and Co. racked up the sixth-most yards in the NFL, as well as the fourth-most points. They ranked fourth in FTN's DVOA and tied for eighth in Tru Media's version of EPA per play.
The season ended with Jackson capturing the second MVP award of his career after leading the Ravens to a 13-3 record in his 16 starts, during which he completed 67.2% of his passes at an average of 8.0 yards per attempt, with 24 touchdown passes against 7 interceptions. He also rushed 148 times for 821 additional yards and 5 scores.
And now, the Ravens are going to put even more on his plate. Asked earlier this offseason what he would add to the team's offense for next year, Jackson told the coaching staff that he wanted to take on more responsibility to audible at the line of scrimmage.
"From us watching film and getting into games, teams changing things up on us, we just want to add extra layers to all of our calls," Jackson said, via ESPN.
Quarterbacks coach Tee Martin said that giving Jackson more autonomy within offensive coordinator Todd Monken's system is a good next step for the team to take.
"It's like that smart kid in the classroom, you can't allow them to get bored, right?" Martin said. "He's like that. You have to constantly add things, tweaks and things of that nature and responsibilities."
That's not to say that the Ravens haven't allowed Jackson to audible at the line before, but there are differences between the amount of leeway every quarterback has to go through and change plays in response to what the defense shows them at the line of scrimmage, and the Ravens will apparently be ramping that up for Jackson.
Martin also wants him to vary his cadence more often in an effort to draw more offsides penalties and create more advantages through manipulating the snap count, after the team only drew an opponent offsides once all of last season.
"It has been a tool in the past, and we're just going to continue to take it to the next level," Martin said. "Lamar is outstanding at it, whether we're going non-verbal on the road or whether we're going verbal at home. We have a lot of different ones that gives us an advantage so that people don't know when we're snapping the ball and slowing them down a little bit."
The Ravens have been one of the league's best teams for most of Jackson's career as a starter, and they've had several years ranking near the top of the league's offenses as well. But they've yet to get over the hump to representing the AFC in the Super Bowl, let alone winning it, so taking steps to make the unit even more dynamic makes sense. Given Jackson's centrality to their success, putting that responsibility in his hands does as well.
