callahan09

Yeah and what happened the last time he had that lineup? Oh yeah, 11 TDs, 0 INTs, Super Bowl MVP. How does that help your argument about Joe?

Joe was throwing INTs at less than half the rate per pass attempt as Schaub did last night. Also, both of Schaub's were with no pressure and were entirely the fault of an inaccurate throw or bad decision (or both). On the pick 6 he had 3.5 seconds of a clean pocket and was able to fully step into his throw, and still throws an awful interception. On the second he steps into that throw as well, but totally misreads the defense and throws to a receiver who isn't open. Most of Flacco's lately weren't that bad. His 2 against the Jags were unlucky and partially to blame on the receivers (first one, bounces off Aiken multiple times, then another defender, before winding up in the hands of the guy who intercepted it; second one Givens doesn't even play the ball and just lets the defender have it... this pass was the mirror image of the one Schaub threw to Givens, only Givens learned his lesson from the one he let get picked off and this time he actually slowed up, played the ball, and caught it). Joe's 2 against the Rams were because he had a pass rusher coming in freely and he tried to throw the ball over their heads while dropping back to avoid the pass rush (on both plays). A couple of bad throws, for sure, but at least he had pressure as an excuse. Schaub is just plain inaccurate with no external influence required to make him make a mistake.

The system is good for Schaub, but he was wildly inaccurate yesterday. He also benefited from a lot of wide open receivers and receivers making awesome plays after the catch yesterday. Against better teams & defenses (seriously, Browns are absolutely one of the worst defenses in the league right now, they were atrocious last night letting our playmakers ball all over them, even with an inaccurate QB) he will have to clean up the accuracy big time. I don't have a lot of confidence, honestly. And the O line was blocking great last night, as well. That was the biggest surprise to me. Honestly, that game was just the story of the Browns defense being totally checked out. We play a real defense, that O line is going to crumble, the receivers aren't going to be nearly that open, and Schaub will be in trouble if he can't find some accuracy on those throws. I will say this... his mental game is pretty strong and impressive. He made some big mistakes in this game, but didn't seem to get mentally hurt by them, he kept focused. The problem is his arm.

Schaub threw a pick 6, so really our defense only gave up 20 points. We didn't turn the ball over our first time against them, so our defense was responsible for all 33 points given up. Schaub was only a part of 20 points on offense, the other 13 were special teams TDs, and he did throw a usually game-losing INT on his last play of the game that led to the winning field goal attempt for the Browns, and he lucked out that our special teams was clutch and got the win for him instead of us losing the game. Defense was better this game than in our first against them, offense was worse, special teams were the real difference this week.

My initial reaction to this post is just to point out that averages can be misleading. 12.75 INTs per season is his career average? That may be technically true, but it's totally meaningless considering he's only thrown more than 12 INTs in a season ONCE. So he's been under his 'careeer average' in 7 out of 8 seasons. The average means nothing because it is heavily skewed by a massive statistical outlier in one of his seasons. Similar arguments about these kinds of numbers could be made for your whole post. Flacco is better than his numbers make him appear. And Schaub was worse yesterday than his numbers made him appear. Schaub's deep pass caught by Givens was more underthrown than a couple that Flacco threw his way (one of which was dropped after being slightly deflected by an incredible & very unlucky for us defensive play by Mathieu; the other was intercepted because Givens didn't play the ball like he did last night... he just overran it and let the defender have the only shot at the ball). Yet for Flacco those two throws that were of a similar nature were incomplete + intercepted, but for Schaub, Givens finally learned how to play that pass and made the catch. Then there's the touchdown passes: Buck Allen breaks and avoids about 5 tackles to get into the end zone. Flacco wasn't getting that benefit this year, all those short dump off passes were getting blown up when Flacco was throwing them. The execution was just better last night by the guys that Schaub was relying on, than it was when Flacco was relying on them. And then the other TD by Aiken, he was about to get tackled at the 1 yard line, something that happened multiple times on passes thrown by Joe this year and the TD not going on Flacco's stat sheet, but this time Aiken is able to evade the tackle long enough to stretch the ball over the goal line for the TD. All season Flacco's playmakers weren't completing the TD on either of those same types of plays. If they had been, and hadn't dropped a bunch of TDs in the end zone, Flacco would have had like 24 TDs this season through the first 10 games. I'm not exaggerating, I have been keeping tabs all season long on how Flacco was getting unlucky with these playmakers not getting TDs for him. Schaub was lucky last night. He was pretty inaccurate and made a lot of his yards on easy throws to receivers that for some reason were getting wide open last night and making awesome plays after the catch.

I think Joe's performance this season has been underrated. He's thrown a couple of bad passes off his back foot, but I don't think we can expect him to be perfect. A lot of his interceptions have been on desperation plays at the end of games. I don't count those too much against him, it's hard to score a TD when you need one at the end of a game, which is the situation a few of his INTs came in. A few more came because his receivers let him down and the ball bounced off their hands or the receiver just didn't play the ball or played it stupidly or didn't play physically the way receivers are expected to do so, and let the defender take the ball that shouldn't have happened. That happened a lot this year. If Schaub doesn't throw as many INTs as Flacco, it'll be because the receivers played smarter and more physical than they did for Flacco. If they play like they did for Flacco, Schaub is going to have plenty of INTs, because a large part of the equation is that if the receivers aren't playing their part of the play correctly, bad things happen at a much higher rate, and during Flacco's 10 games this year, that was happening waaaaay too often. And there's all the touchdowns that were dropped, etc. With receivers doing their jobs and catching those catchable balls and playing those others smartly and physically and with a little less bad luck, Flacco's actual passes made on the field this year should have been good for about 22 or 23 TDs and 7 or 8 INTs to this point. But bad luck and bad receiver play effected those numbers significantly. It is what it is. Also, Flacco leads the league in 4th quarter go-ahead scoring drives, despite the fact that we have the lost many of those games and have a win percentage that is 3 times worse than the NFL average in games where we took the lead in the 4th quarter. Flacco did his part this year and was just a victim of bad luck, inopportune displays of ineptitude from the defense, and bad receiver play. A lot of people don't want to buy it that he wasn't bad this year because he threw some interceptions, but my eyeballs tell me that Flacco was playing well this year and it was the rest of the team that wasn't, and to the point that it effected even his numbers.

Don't know why, but for some reason my gut is telling me that this team plays really well down the stretch and has a chance to finish .500. Not sure there's much consolation in that for the fans, as we almost certainly can't make the playoffs even if we managed to win out, and every win from here on out just hurts us in draft position. But my number 1 favorite thing in football is watching the Ravens win games!

We have had 3 games where we took the lead with less than 4 minutes left, that's pretty good. All of our lead-taking 4th quarter drives were with less than half the quarter remaining (about 7 minutes or less remaining in all of them), so it's not like we took the lead in the opening minute of the quarter and expected the defense to stop them for just about a full quarter. But those 3 different games with less than 4 minutes left at the end, those should all be won. We lost 2 of them. The one we won was the Chargers game where we actually had TWO drives where we left them under 4 minutes, and the defense gave up the lead on one of them and we had to come back and get a second one, so we could just about be 0-3 in those games, and the defense did give up the lead in 3 different games following a 4th quarter lead-taking drive with under 4 minutes to go. The rest of the NFL is 27-5 (that's an .844 win percentage) in those situations, while we're 1-2 (a .333 win percentage) and our defense actually gave up the lead in all 3 cases and the win was after a 2nd such drive that ended as time expired, not giving our defense a second chance to relinquish the lead. To me, that's pretty damning of the defense in all 3 of those games that we couldn't hold them for a win. But even on the ones where we had left between 4 and 8 remaining after taking the lead, another couple of losses resulting, other teams are 11-3, which is almost as good as when leading under 4 minutes, at a .786 win percentage. So the time left following these lead taking drives is still strongly correlated to winning games for most teams in the NFL, but not our team.

Almost every stat I've posted this season has been about the defense with no mention of Flacco or the offense, really presenting no context at all, just giving the numbers, so I'm not sure where you get that from.

Saw on ESPN that Blake Bortles now leads the NFL in 4th quarter game-winning drives, with 4. I wanted to do some research, because this statistic only counts if your teams win the game. But sometimes your defense lets you down and you don't win the game, despite the fact that you still did lead a go-ahead drive in the 4th quarter. Blake Bortles has actually led 5 go-ahead 4th quarter scoring drives this year. That is actually only good for SECOND most this season. Guess who has the most? That's right, it's our own Joe Flacco, with 6. The thing is, we've only won 2 out of 6 games in which we had a go-ahead 4th quarter scoring drive. That means that this team has already LOST 4 games in which Flacco led a 4th quarter go-ahead scoring drive. That's 4 "game-winning drives" taken away from him by this defense. In case that doesn't sound ridiculous enough to you, let me now inform you that as far back as I can look up drive statistics (18 seasons, back to 1998), no other team has EVER in a single season lost 4 games in which they had a 4th quarter go-ahead scoring drive. And we're only about half-way through this season! And we already hold that dubious record. In fact, we have lost 10 games in which Flacco has led a 4th quarter go-ahead drive in his career. That is the most since he entered the NFL in 2008. We have a .630 win percentage in these games since 2008, which is 5th worst in the NFL over that span. The NFL average over that span for the other 31 team is a .753 win percentage.

I think that when a ball has to bounce off both your receivers hands, and then that receiver bats it away while trying to make a second effort at catching it, then it bounces off of one defensive player and into another, who bobbles it before he can complete the catch... just for the ball to become an interception... then I see very little blame to go around to the QB. It's a fluke. That throw is rarely intercepted in the NFL unless you get a "the ball didn't bounce my way" (numerous times on the same play) type of fluke, like what happened.

The Ravens have the 5th most games in which they put up 20+ points this season, we have put up that many points 7 times. The only teams that have put up that many points more times this season are the undefeated Panthers, undefeated Patriots, and the division leading Giants and Cardinals. BUT, we have the *worst* win percentage in such games, at 2-5, we are winning at a .286 rate. The NFL average in 20+ point offensive outputs this season, outside of our 2-5 record, is .663, so teams win damn near 2 out of 3 games in which they put up 20 or more points. Why are we losing so many of these games? Well, because we are giving up 20+ points in all but 1 of our games (and the 1 where we didn't was 19 points allowed to one of the worst offenses in the league in the Broncos). The only other teams to have given up 19+ points in every game this year are the Saints and Chargers. The bottom line is, we don't have a defense can go out there and shut a team down. We allow too many points in *every single game*. The Texans the other day held the Bengals, one of the best offenses in the league, to just 6 points, at Cincinatti! Our defense hasn't even come close to putting up an effort like that this year. It'd be nice if they did. I miss the old Ravens defenses that would do that from time to time.

Maybe he can be our first 1000 yard (redshirt) rookie? Does that count for something?

We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel right now.

I just wanted to say that I agree with so much of this. Great post!

Utter made-up nonsense. Since Flacco entered the league he has 67 games (including post-season) with a QB Rating of 90 or better. There are only 5 QB's with more than that in the same time span: Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, Philip Rivers, and Peyton Manning. 4 out of 5 are unquestionably going to the Hall of Fame, and Rivers has been in that conversation as well. So only played at a high level in a handful of games? Not true at all. He doesn't make other players better, they make HIM better? Are you for real? Flacco has been working with undersized receivers over the age of 30 and on the decline as his #1 for his entire career, except in 2013 with Torrey Smith, who is clearly not an NFL #1 quality receiver, and this year with Kamar Aiken, who isn't even in the same ballpark as Torrey Smith. You want to be overly critical of Flacco because of THIS SEASON? When he had a few games with a healthy Steve Smith Sr (who happened to have a serious case of not being able to catch in the end zone) and a few more games with an injured Steve Smith Sr, and more than half the season including the rest of it will be without him at all. He's got 5 undrafted players and a guy that has only been here a few weeks and wasn't with this offense during training camp and pre-season, who couldn't get snaps in St Louis (possibly the 2nd worse receiving corps in the NFL this year, and we're so bad that we're picking up THERE scraps!). He's got 2 rookie tight ends and a 2nd year tight end who was never supposed to be a receiving threat. Crockett Gillmore is having a great year. This is not a player that was supposed to make Flacco look good, he was a blocking tight end coming out of the draft. Suddenly he's a good receiving threat, and you give him all the credit AND discredit Flacco by saying he's being made to look good by the receiver? If this were Tom Brady, you'd be saying "Wow, look at Brady making Gillmore a great tight end receiving threat!" But since it's Joe, you give Gillmore credit for making Flacco look good, rather than the other way around? Kamar Aiken couldn't catch a single pass when he was in Tom Brady's system. Why didn't Tom Brady make him "better"? Oh, but I guess it's Aiken who is making Flacco look good, not the other way around? Well, this is besides the fact that Aiken DOESN'T look good, and is making Flacco look WORSE than he is, because Aiken ISN'T good! That's why Aiken couldn't do squat on the Patriots, with Tom Brady, a system and player who are adept at making the most out of anyone, but Aiken just isn't good enough for them, but here Joe is with Aiken as his freaking #1 receiver. Flacco's stats even look worse than they should because his receiver let him down a lot. He leads the league in two dubious categories: TD passes dropped by the recevier in the end zone, and pass completions where the receiver was tackled within 1 yard of the end zone. Joe could easily have 20 passing TDs on his stat sheet right now if his receivers were actually even NFL average in the red zone and could get that extra yard for a TD, or hell just catch the ball when it comes your way in the end zone. A lot has gone wrong for Flacco this year and he's working with the worst receiving corps in the NFL, but you want to put all the blame on him and give him none of the credit and say that his receivers make HIM look good. That's such a joke.

Lost in all the noise of our numerous close but not close enough games that we lost this year is that a huge portion of major ref screw ups have cost us significantly in many of them. Refs giving favorable calls to one team (and it's universally been our opponent this year) is a major factor in deciding the outcome of a very close game, and all our games have been close. It's unfortunate. We just are having bad luck this year, with turnovers that usually aren't but the defenses we're playing are getting lucky "bounces" or making uncharacteristically athletic plays, with our own defense doing the exact opposite of that, the ball never bouncing their way and making bumbling butter fingers drops on otherwise "sure" takeaways. You add all this misfortune up, you lose the close games. The two games we won were basically the opposite... the misfortunes went the other way. Missed field goals and dropped opportunities for the Steelers & Chargers. It's just one of those things that makes you realize with this team, as close as we compete against everyone, it really comes down to getting the calls and fortune making the ball bounce your way, and we've been very unlucky in those regards in 7 out of 9 games so far.

Quarterbacks do it *regularly* in the NFL. Last night Andy Dalton threw a 3 yard pass to Giovani Bernard on 3rd and 10, and he got some good blocking and made a shifty move and made guys miss their tackles and wound up taking it 14 yards. The bread & butter of today's NFL offenses across the league are short, high percentage completions and yards after the catch. The problem is that those plays don't seem to be working for the Ravens this year. Our guys aren't shifty enough, tough enough, or fast enough to make guys miss tackles, and the playmakers aren't good enough at blocking either. So in that sense, perhaps I agree with you haha. We keep trying to do what other NFL teams are succeeding at with the short field and backfield stuff and trying to get yards after the catch, but it's quote clear that we don't have the horses to run those plays, they just aren't getting it done. So maybe we do need to move away from that stuff as long as it is consistently failing to get us YAC.

Our OC has been trying it this year. This is by far a career low in terms of yards in the air per attempt for Flacco. The problem is that for some reason the play designs and/or execution just isn't working on that short and backfield passing stuff. The receiving aren't getting yards after the catch. I think it's because our receivers are all below average not only in the obvious category of receiving, but in the less visible (on the stat sheet) category of blocking. The screens, backfield, and short to intermediate stuff relies pretty heavily on receivers & tight ends executing picks and blocks and helping the one who gets the ball make something happen after the ball is in their hands. It also requires that whoever gets the ball be fast and shifty and tough and able to avoid tackles. We don't really have that either. Some of these guys are occasionally showing flashes of ability in some of those categories, but overall our personnel just isn't good enough to *consistently* execute those kinds of plays with a high rate of success and get yards after the catch. It also doesn't help that both for some reason our guys seem to get butter fingers on those short routes. Aiken and Brown have both had a large number of drops this season on those plays. Trestman is REALLY trying to call those plays often, but the players are completely failing to execute them and actually get yards on them.

In fairness, they Browns are going to fight us hard for that distinction Haha

This statement is just not in sync with reality. We had a lot of backfield passes get blown up before they could make much gain, including numerous third & short passes that didn't get blocking upfield to help convert it into a first down. We are actually somewhat of a struggling team at making yards after the catch on the backfield passes. The other issue with your statement is that Joe completed a large number of his deep passing attempts yesterday, so the gunslinger mentality got us more touchdowns than it did interceptions yesterday as a matter of fact. The one deep pass that was intercepted, OK, but you can't expect him to never throw deep. The other interception wasn't a deep pass, and it bounced off of three different players before it wound up unluckily in the hands of a defender. Big deal. In case you're forgetting, Joe led us on a go-ahead touchdown drive in the 4th quarter, and then on their final drive we had two runs get totally stuffed, and then on 3rd and long he did throw the backfield pass that you're hankering for and claiming he wouldn't throw, only, once again, it got stuffed, so we had to punt. Then the defense lost the game on the Jags' final drive.

Joe going for the back-shoulder throw, Givens had no separation, he was trying to throw him open. Somehow their defender can read the ball in the air better than Givens. Defender adjusts and plays the ball, Givens just keeps running straight ahead, makes no effort whatsoever. This is why Givens couldn't get snaps with the Rams (who probably have the 2nd worse receiving situation in the NFL behind us, and he couldn't even get snaps with them!) he just doesn't play the ball smartly, and since he hasn't been here very long he is not on the same page as Flacco on that play either. This is what happens when the receiver isn't on the same page as the QB, mistakes like that happen, it looks like a bad throw, but it's really a throw that should not have been intercepted if the WR plays the play correctly.

You can't be serious... Flacco has one of the most masterful halves of his football career, and then comes out and throws a ball that is only intercepted because it bounced off his receivers hands and deflected into the hands of a defender, a pass that is IMPOSSIBLE to be intercepted unless it happens like it did, bouncing off his receivers hands... And you're going to be calling for Schaub now? Give us a break.

This is sarcasm, right?

This team is so unlucky this year.