Baltimore hung 41 on the Colts and our model tore up the July number
Updated
We said in July that this was the one AFC North preview we would double check, because our model had Baltimore at nine wins and an offense grade of 23rd, and neither of those numbers squared with a roster that has Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry on it. We said that if the passing game played to its ceiling rather than its grade, the Ravens were a clear eleven-win team and the market was right. Then Baltimore went to Indianapolis and scored 41 points, with Lamar Jackson going 17 of 25 for 324 yards, Derrick Henry running for 144 and three touchdowns, and Zay Flowers catching five balls for 150 and a score before halftime. When we re-ran the season with that game seeded in, the Ravens came out at 11-6 with an 80 percent playoff chance and a two percent shot at the title. Consider the preview double checked.
The offense is the whole story of the move. In July our projection had Baltimore scoring 311 points, a strikingly low figure that dragged the win total down. After Week 1 it reads 370, 15th in the league, and the pieces that make it up all climbed at once. Jackson's line now sits at 3,283 yards and 18 touchdowns against nine interceptions behind a passer rating of 95, up from the 2,927 and 15 scores we had for him in the summer, with another 362 yards and five touchdowns on the ground. Henry projects for 1,595 rushing yards and 16 touchdowns, up from 1,413 and 12, which is a 32-year-old back getting better in our numbers rather than worse. Zay Flowers moves up to 75 catches for 1,139 yards and six scores from the 66 and 907 we had in July, though the hamstring that ended his afternoon in Indianapolis is the first thing to watch this week. Mark Andrews adds 46 catches, and the model will lean on him and Rashod Bateman if Flowers misses time, because Ja'Kobi Lane fractured a wrist in the same game. None of that is a passing attack that grades in the bottom third of the league, and the model no longer says it is.
The defense was never the question, and it still is not. Our model projects Baltimore allowing 278 points, second in the entire league, and the second-fewest yards. The unit leads the AFC in interceptions at nearly 15, with Roquan Smith projecting for 112 tackles and four picks and Jaylinn Hawkins adding four more from the back end. Trey Hendrickson and Tavius Robinson project for roughly nine sacks apiece, and here is the one number worth flagging on this roster: the team sack total sits at 37, 30th in the league. Baltimore's defense is elite because it does not give up yards or points, not because it lives in the backfield, and against the better offensive lines in the conference that will occasionally show. It did not show in Indianapolis.
Put the two sides together and the arithmetic changes completely. A second-ranked scoring defense paired with an average offense was a nine-win team in our July run, because the offense kept losing close games it should have won. A second-ranked scoring defense paired with an offense that can put 41 on a playoff-caliber opponent is a double-digit win team, and when we ran the rest of the season Baltimore finished within a game of Cincinnati at the top of the AFC North. The division is still a meat grinder. Cincinnati is still a top-three offense and Pittsburgh still projects for ten wins. But the Ravens now go into those games as the team with the best defense on the field and a quarterback our model has stopped underselling.
The market opened Baltimore at better than ten wins, and in July we sat a full win and a half under it while telling you we did not trust our own number. Now we sit half a win over it, and the direction of the lean has flipped. That is not the model chasing one result. It is the model absorbing a game in which the exact thing we said would move the number, the passing game outrunning its grade, happened on the first Sunday of the season. The July caveat was that Lamar being Lamar would break the projection. He was, and it did.
The path to being wrong has changed too. The bearish case in the summer was that the offense would sputter against the division's front sevens. After Week 1 the honest risk is on the other side of the ball, in a pass rush that projects near the bottom of the league in sacks and could be exposed by the better quarterbacks on the schedule. If Joe Burrow and Aaron Rodgers get comfortable in the pocket in the six division games, the Ravens are back to splitting them and back toward nine or ten wins. That is the football uncertainty, and it is a real one.
But the honest landing now is a different sentence than the one we wrote in July. Baltimore is very good, the defense is elite, and the offense has just shown the model what the market already believed. When we ran the season the Ravens were a division favorite and a top-four seed more often than not, and we will take the over on ten and a half without the arm's-length caveat this time. Watch the pass rush. Everything else about this team is pointing the right way.
