reed20fence

I think it's a foregone conclusion that we don't draft WRs that well. The franchises model is to bring in veteran guys as free agents. Most deep contenders in the playoffs aren't really relying on 1st or 2nd year WRs anyway. That said, it's the wiser approach anyway. The first 4 years of a drafted WRs career can be used to determine whether he's robust enough to survive hits and play through the rigors of a 16 game season. They also take advantage of someone else's investing the crucial years in developing his technique and adding branches to his route tree. We need guys that can run every route now. We need guys that can take hits now. We need guys that have enough knowledge to quickly get on the same page with Joe now. We need contributors now. Free Agency is where this franchise finds them So first things first, let's figure out which guys are on the final years of their deals and unlikely to re-sign. Historically those tend to be the tradable guys mid-season.

Cam Cameron? Is that you?

Part of the reason teams don't take fan criticism seriously is because it's all praise when they win, and all doubt and disdain when they lose, regardless of how lucky the wins or how hard-fought the losses. 1. I'm excited to see Chris Givens get involved more in our scheme. That back-shoulder pass late in the game from Joe to Givens made me jump outta my seat. Maybe it's just me, but back shoulder passes are the sign of a highly sophisticated passing attack. QB-WR timing, WR athleticism, QB reading of defense, pinpoint accuracy with the pass, all around execution. All of this is required to pull off passes like that. I think we got a good player in Givens. 2. The refs made some atricious calls yet again. That Phantom PI call on a clearly uncatchable ball from Rivers almost cost us this week as well. Refs HAVE to stop guessing they saw something when they clearly didn't see anything. Flagging Will Hill for unnecessary roughness for body slamming Gordon even though no whistle was blown? This to a team that was robbed for not playing til the whistle last week by shoddy refereeing on the Chris Johnson run? 3. I hope the next 2 weeks with our bye are used to build more chemistry on defense. Some of those coverages we telegraphed to Rivers well before his snap were absolute amateur hour. I know they're reluctant to add layers of awareness because we're already struggling back in the secondary but Pees and crew have to build these guys' confidence enough to where they feel comfertable calling off blitzes prior to the snap if it's plainly obvious the QB has picked up on it and changed the play right in front of Darryl Smith and Mosely. 4. I think Asa has earned back the right to return some kicks. Rossburg should let him see if he can rip a good return off. 5. If it is indeed SSS last game, what a way to call it a career? 3rd and long and he finds a way to beat coverage, running so hard and fast that his own body gave out. Amazing man. Amazing athlete. PS- Ray Lewis. All Ravens fans have to do is look at each other and say those two words. Ray Lewis. We all know what he means to us.

This is a textbook sweet sorrow game. Great, we won, but losing SSS? It's painful.

We get on Ozzie's case for not finding a leader like Ray to take over his leadership duties. 31 other franchises weren't able to find a leader like Ray for the 17 years he played. There is no replacing Ray Lewis. He's a once-in-a-lifetime athlete and if you were able to watch him play live you should consider yourself lucky.

Aiken, Givens and committee for 3rd. Some Ross some Brown some and some FA acquisition to fill SSS roster spot.

Tricky thing is he was only with us for a season and a half but in that season and a half he was on fire from start to finish. I know the tenure with us may not be there for our Ring of Honor but if they ever asked fans for votes on it I'd be a solid yes vote.

I think the next battle for us as fans is to figure out how to formally protest to the League our disdain for the rules becoming incredibly one sided in favor of the passing game. Defense, especially pass defense is becoming impossible. The last 2 decades have constituted a perfect storm with the rise of fantasy football, and the rise of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady in particular. While the league has Rogers and Brees etc., I mention Brady and Manning especially because those two have lobbied very hard to have the rules in this league tweaked to favor them. Illegal contact, more stringent pass interference, the incredibly (and deliberately) loose calling of pick play violations by offenses. Tuck Rule. Brady Rule. Roughing the Passer strictness. It's all there. Fantasy football and these two QBs have a direct correlation to the amount of yellow we see on gamedays. And these cowards are all proud of their records. You don't think it's a coincidence that 5-6 QBs are all having record-breaking careers at the same time? You think Americans just breed super human athletes all the sudden? Ofcourse not. What these QBs and league have done is quite disrespectful to greats like Johnny Unitas, Namath, Marino, Jurgensen, Raymond Berry, and all those QBs and WRs that had to do what they did when the rules were still balanced and you as a QB were just as liable to get walloped as any other guy on the field if not more. Kinda makes you wonder what Unitas could have accomplished with these rules given that his consecutive game TD streak stood for half a century.

"The biggest thrill and greatest high is making a play on third down, especially in our home stadium. When you make a play, the place just gets that much louder. When you get to the sideline and everyone is slapping you on the back, there's nothing better." That's the mentality we need right now! The Flock at The Bank will be ready. We need guys who enjoy no bigger thrill in life than getting off the field on 3rd down. That's when you know that a defender's blood runs through your veins.

Also, this is one of the few years I'm looking more eagerly towards free agency than I am the draft. We'll probably go edge rusher with the 1st pick. And rightfully so. It's been shown not just by us but by the league in general, in spite of last year's WR trend, that picking a WR and immediately expecting to go deep into the playoffs is not likely. WRs need time to develop proficiency in the full route tree and expertise to create space with defenders. It takes time. Look at all the deep contenders in the last few years of the playoffs. No one heavily (or really at all) relies on young rookie or second year receivers to be an essential cog on their offensive schemes. So I'm looking forward to what we do to get Joe some veteran weapons that bring some savvy to our attack to fill the SSS void.

I think we might see some semblance of what this offense was intended to be had Perriman remained healthy. The fact that Givens found a way to get behind the Cardinals secondary, which is one of the youngest and most athletic in the league, twice during the game could mean that we start to use him reliably as our deep threat. Hopefully that means at least one safety and one corner are taken out of the box to help open up the run game. With a healthy Crockett and Boyle along with SSS working underneath we might start to see some more stability in the offense.

This right here needs to be done. The only thing that made people roll their eyes whenever it was suggested that Ray or Eddie be brought in as coaches was "why would someone who wasnt obsessed with football to a degree that theyd be willing to put in a year round committment to 14 hour days of banal film review, game planning and coaching agree to this? But it's obvious the Eddie does want to be a coach. Let's make it happen man.

The Miracle Man of Mile High. The Peoples MVP of Super Bowl 47. Fast as crap Dragonfly. Mr. Jacoby Jones. The Raven for Life.

It seems to me that 50% of defense is execution and 50% is perception. When you had guys like Ed Reed who had a knack and penchant for abandoning his zone assignments and jumping routes because he knew how QBs are trained to work through their progressions and read defenses, you get more turnovers. The result? No one even bothered to throw in the half of the field Reed was lined up in for a span of seasons. Fast forward to today. When you have one of the league's leading sack-duos, one of whom was the NFLs Defensive MVP in recent memory, QBs 'perceive' that they only have about 2.5 to 3 seconds to get the ball out. When one of those monsters is down? Suddenly you have a little more confidence and pep in your step to sit back there and dissect the coverage. We've seen this defense play well in fits and starts, but do they have the field presence and football IQ in enough guys to play the chess game for 60 minutes? That seems to be the problem. What Ray Lewis termed 'chemistry.' There are layers of challenges when building a defense. 1. staffing each level of defense with competitive talent 2. 'chemistry' or 'being on the same page.' Have the guys been together long enough to where they can just let instinct that's been polished by their practice reps take over? 3. making plays Right now we seem to be stuck on step 0.2. Can't even field enough talented guys for each level.

I don't blame Ross for this. In my book if the guy's knee, shin, ankle are clearly down while the defender is still in the process of trying to snatch the ball away the tie goes to the ball carrier. That's how I've always seen it called in 26 years of watching football. I think the problem is a ref that wasn't focusing called it a turnover, so the onus of proving the tie in our favor fell on overturning a close call as opposed to the other way around. Had it been called down by contact it would have stood as well. So yet another example of players not making mistakes or plays, but outcomes still being determined by refs.

Many fans here have said it and I've said it, and I'm hoping now that it was re-affirmed over and over by the national commentators on a national broadcast more and more of us get comfortable admitting the God's-honest reality of the situation. 1. When massive chunks of your salary cap (your playmakers) are either on IR (Suggs 4mm 2.8% , Pitta 6.2mm 4.4%) or are chronically injured and missing games (Canty 1.7mm 1.25%, Webby 9.2mm 6.6%, Perriman 1.58mm 1.15%) it's hard to compete. 2. Then you add in those three massive chunks of dead money we're suffering because of Rice 9.5mm 6.8% (really it should be 12mm cuz it costs us 3mm in Forsett to replace Rice) and the unavoidable parting with Ngata 7.5mm 5.35% and Jacoby 2.6mm 1.9%, and you've got another hand tied behind your back. That's more than 30% of our cap that won't suit up for us this year or struggles to suit up consistently for us this year. That's before you dive into the strategic importance of those guys in our gameplans on either side of the ball. Go ahead and take away 30% of any other team's salary cap and see how they perform. 3. Then you add to that the phenomenon that we went literally 3 years ago from being one of the oldest rosters in the league to one of the youngest now, and it's another incredible challenge for teams to overcome immediately. As Gruden pointed out, we have the youngest TE corp in the entire league and a starting WR corps consisting of career journeyman Aiken and an undrafted player in Marlon. Credit Joe Flacco for keeping us relevant. Any one of those things in isolation would be sufficient as an explanation (dare I say 'excuse') to explain why a team isn't winning. But consider that we, unlike any other team in the league, are cursed with all 3 of those things simultaneously. And yet these coaches (yes, Dean Pees included) keep trying to make the best with what they have and compete game in and game out in close contests. Not a single coach or player on this team will state these things during the season. Self-pity is not in the Raven organization's DNA. It's our job as fans to be fair and honest though. In 2015 we were dealt a crappy hand and we're trying to make the best of it we can. This may be the best 1-6 team in NFL history.

Many fans here have said it and I've said it, and I'm hoping now that it was re-affirmed over and over by the national commentators on a national broadcast more and more of us get comfortable admitting the God's-honest reality of the situation. 1. When massive chunks of your salary cap (your playmakers) are either on IR (Suggs 4mm 2.8% , Pitta 6.2mm 4.4%) or are chronically injured and missing games (Canty 1.7mm 1.25%, Webby 9.2mm 6.6%, Perriman 1.58mm 1.15%) it's hard to compete. 2. Then you add in those three massive chunks of dead money we're suffering because of Rice 9.5mm 6.8% (really it should be 12mm cuz it costs us 3mm in Forsett to replace Rice) and the unavoidable parting with Ngata 7.5mm 5.35% and Jacoby 2.6mm 1.9%, and you've got another hand tied behind your back. That's more than 30% of our cap that won't suit up for us this year or struggles to suit up consistently for us this year. That's before you dive into the strategic importance of those guys in our gameplans on either side of the ball. 3. Then you add to that the phenomenon that we went literally 3 years ago from being one of the oldest rosters in the league to one of the youngest now, and it's another incredible challenge for teams to overcome immediately. As Gruden pointed out, we have the youngest TE corp in the entire league and a starting WR corps consisting of career journeyman Aiken and an undrafted player in Marlon. Credit Joe Flacco for keeping us relevant. Any one of those things in isolation would be sufficient as an explanation (dare I say 'excuse') to explain why a team isn't winning. But consider that we, unlike any other team in the league, are cursed with all 3 of those things simultaneously. And yet these coaches (yes, Dean Pees included) keep trying to make the best with what they have and compete game in and game out in close contests. Not a single coach or player on this team will state these things during the season. Self-pity is not in the Raven organization's DNA. It's our job as fans to be fair and honest though. In 2015 we were dealt a crappy hand and we're trying to make the best of it we can. This may be the best 1-6 team in NFL history.

Look at it from a bigger perspective. The League is trying to help groom our young team. They haven't experienced what the Ravens of old learned. In this league, when you're the Ravens, you have to beat your opponent and the League with its cronies. Us against the World isn't just some chip on our shoulder that you inherit the day you walk in the castle as a player or become a Ravens fan. It's a second nature that you're forced to develop having experience heartbreak after heartbreak by this League and its minions. You have to be so beastly and good that not even the refs can bail out your opponent. And one day these same youngins we curse now will get to that level.

I'm proud of our team's performance for the most part. Can't scapegoat Pees on this game. There were a few mistakes on defense but for the most part it was a solid, good outting. Even offensively, we kept chugging away. So in my book boys, you're 2-5. You beat the Cardinals tonight. What you lost to were the Cardinals and an incredibly incompetent crew of referees who are quite likely the worst in the NFL. They not only blew huge, massive, game-changing calls against us, but you could tell the Cards were upset with some clear phantom penalties and flags too. The Urschel call and Johnson debacle were enough to break any teams back. Add in the Ross 'play stands' ruling when the replay clearly shows his knee is down at a point when the defender is stilll trying to snatch the ball and you just can't overcome those odds. Still, yet again, despite all the baggage, we kept it a close game right to the end.

Harbs kinda slipped and put this out there in a presser earlier in the week. The whole comment about making sure coaches aren't just "putting plays out there to put them out there." That plays should be in line with the talents of your roster and have some sort of scheme to test and stretch the opponent. Because everyone has been concentrating on the defense and Pees I think we might have missed that he could have been talking about Trestman. Can anyone definitively state what our offensive scheme is? 2014 - With Kubiak we knew it was zone stretch, short west coast passing coupled with an occasional deep shots to Torrey to keep safeties neutralized. 2013 - Off of the Super Bowl win and Joe's Mega contract it was the "Year of Putting it on Joe's Back" so there was a lot of spread and pistol formation 2012 - it was ground and pound with and occasional deep shot under Cam Cameron most of the year. And then under Caldwell it was an offense squarely designed around the talents of the roster. Rice in the check downs and flat, Boldin and Pitta roaming the intermediary and short routes, Torrey and Jacoby stretching the field. Every year the offense has a theme or scheme. Even when it's average results, there is a central scheme. What is this year's scheme? it just seems like we're calling random plays in reaction to the situation - not proactively hunting the opponents defense.

the two most impactful things to this year's downturn? 1. Joe's sloppy mechanics relative to last year with Kubiak; 2. the impact of Suggs' absence bleeding into the time required by an otherwise average secondary to cover passing attacks that are better than they are. Both things could be covered up in this year with coaching, but the coaching itself has been sub-par and quite frankly, looks lost and bewildered. We're so concerned with fixing the secondary but we don't realize that given the timing of Suggs' injury, it's gotten impossible to mitigate the impact he brought. The closest analogy we have is the first 6 games of 2012. Back then we had Haloti, Kemoatu, McPhee, Art Jones, and Kruger to keep the pressure on by committee. Not for nothing but 3 of those guys went on to sign lucrative mega-deals elsewhere. The other 2 are Haloti and Kemoatu, who retired. This also doesn't mention that we had two coaches on the field in Lewis and Reed to cover up some of the shortcomings. Now? Yes, we're putting decent athletes out there. Not making light of their talent. But there's a vast difference in football IQ and situational awareness, and this is becoming obvious where those two things count the most, late in close games.

That may be true for the first decade. Consider however that for over a decade (with the exception of Haloti) we havent produced a reliable pro bowler from the 1st picks until Mosely... and we've seen that he's digressed steeply this season. I'm not saying we're not good at drafting great players. Just that many of them lately seem to be mid-round players that we develop into greatness. If I remember correctly, even with Haloti, Ray Lewis had to lobby hard to get him here, it wasn't necessarily a given. We seem to be lacking the ability to pull the trigger on freakish high-end talent for some reason.

I really don't get this mentality. It's not just journalists that're putting this out there. After a few of the last losses Ravens fans have themselves said we should trade SSS. And not just because we'd be able get aomething of value in return, it's like this depressing, self-flagellating attitude. Kind of like "we're so terrible, we're not worthy of having these 'by-any-means-necessary' type of playmakers. But it's precisely because we lack more playes like SSS (like a Sizzle) that we're in this perdicament in the first place. We need to quit it with this self-pity loser talk.

Here's a list of our franchises 1st round picks. It's telling. One trend that jumps right out at you is that we haven't had a top 10 pick in over a decade. Also, just because a guy has been a top 10 pick doesn't mean he's a Hall of Fame player (both Ray and Eddie were 26th and 24th overall respectively). We're also really really bad at drafting high-end offensive talent. Really never invested in it seriously. And all this talk of "Leadership" and "locker room presence" draws attention to the fact that Ray, Eddie and Sizzle were all drafted by 2003. Which means we haven't drafted someone with that gravity for 12 years. 96 ogden 4 and lewis 26 97 boulware 4 98 starks 10 99 mccalister 10 00 jamal lewis 5 and travis taylor 10 01 heap 31 02 reed 24 03 suggs 10 and boller 19 04 - 05 clayton 22 06 ngata 12 07 grubbs 29 08 flacco 18 09 oher 23 10 - 11 Jimmy 27 12 - 13 elam 32 14 mosely 17 15 perriman 26

Absolutely great news on Pitta. And it's the kind of news that's welcomed at this point honestly. Now then, has anyone noticed that Joe's drop backs, playaction execution, and pocket presence in general has gotten considerably sloppier this year relative to last year under Kubiak? It's almost as if Kubiak prided himself on the precision with which his QBs execute every step. Every route broke in precise Bill Walsh-ian timing with the drop back of the QB. Now it seems like Joe is making a lot of sloppy back-footed throws, jump throws, and really pushing forward in the pocket as well. And we're not really doing as neat a job of shadowing run plays before breaking off in play action or setting up TE screens. Perhaps Trestman needs to stress emphasis on some basic West Coast principles and polish off the sloppiness.