Breaking News: Baltimore Ravens Confirm the departure of another experience Star as…
It is easy to be a prisoner of the moment. Player X is unstoppable, we yell. Player Y is the future. Player Z is washed up. Until they’re not.
Lamar Jackson’s Ravens – once seen as shoo-ins for a Super Bowl run – have lost three of their last four games, and they have failed to score more than 24 points in all four. Jackson and the Ravens offense are stuck in a rut. What was 12 months ago the definition of the modern confuse-and-clobber style now looks confused and clobbered. All the razzmatazz and excitement – the efficiency and explosiveness – from a season ago has been traded for the unthinkable: predictability.
Don’t panic – this is normal. A new quarterback or offense rises; the player commits more of their idiosyncrasies to tape; opposing defensive coordinators watch and adapt; the offense stalls. It’s then up to the player and his staff to evolve, to find new avenues to success while maintaining enough of the things that made the player and team successful in the first place.
It’s the trickiest challenge a quarterback faces, shifting from the one-off, good-when-everything-goes-right player into a genuine franchise star. What Jackson is faced with now was inevitable.
The good news: Jackson is a genuine pioneer, someone who can slot into any kind of system. He is the best athlete on the field at the most important position in the sport. He pairs Michael Vick-like athleticism with all the nuances needed from a player in a traditional passing system. He also has complete understanding and authority at the line of scrimmage.
There have been plenty of players throughout NFL history who have been blessed with one or two of those traits – great athletes, precision throwers, football savants – but you can count on one hand the players that have combined all three. Rodgers. Young. Wilson. Mahomes. Players who were and are so overwhelmingly dominant that you don’t even need to say their first names. And not one of them was or is the open-field athlete that Jackson has proved to be.
