Apparently Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson doesn’t pay as much attention to Baltimore Ravens news as I myself, a Pittsburgh Steelers blogger, do. The second-year player recently told reporters that he did not realize that “we would have a totally different offense”.
I did. I wrote about it. So yeah, he probably should have known as well.
To quote Greg Roman, who was promoted to offensive coordinator this offseason, “we’re literally redefining everything we do as a staff, as a group. Literally, everything. Every formation, every route, every run, every route concept. How can we make this offense, which up until this point has been good…we’re trying to make it as great as we can be. How can we make it as learnable, as understandable, as streamlined, as efficient” as possible?”.
In defense of Jackson, coaches only have so much access to players during the early portions of the offseason, and they’re not necessarily going to be reading websites about what’s going on with their teams when they can just wait to hear it for themselves.
Still, it’s kind of funny to hear a quarterback say he didn’t realize he was going to be running a different offense. I mean, it’s not like Eli Manning wasn’t aware that Ben McAdoo was going to come in and McAdoo his thing—which would nearly cost him his job and pretty much ruin the entire organization.
“When I got here, coach was like, ‘yeah, we have a totally new system. You’re going to have go through this and that’. It’s been getting to me a little bit”, he said, in a quote that frankly explains exactly why he probably should have known things were changing.
He came in and was caught off-guard by the changes, and admitted that he sucked in his first day practicing, only slowly graduating to ‘alright’ by the end of the first week of OTAs, with the heavy caveat that there are many things he has to improve upon.
I thought this was common knowledge by now, but for Jackson’s benefit, I’m going to reiterate that the Ravens have talked extensively about the fact that they are reorienting their offensive philosophy this offseason toward running the ball, part of that process being bringing Mark Ingram into the fold via free agency.
They even talked about this before, during, and after the draft, about how it changes the profile of the type of players that they are looking for, even in such ways that might result in having players on their draft board that other teams were not even paying attention to.
Now Jackson joins the rest of us in knowing that that is the offense he will be running in his second season, even after they invested first- and third-round draft picks in the wide receiver position.
