When Lamar Jackson took the NFL by storm in his first full season as a starter, his runs grabbed the highlights, but his throwing ability truly spearheaded a 2019 MVP campaign featuring bonkers numbers that still make you do a double-take. The remarkable nature of that season cannot be overstated.
Jackson and the Ravens’ 2021 season, on the other hand, was completely wrecked with injuries that led to constant roster shuffling and sitting at home when the postseason began. Baltimore’s 191.2 adjusted games lost last season were the most in Football Outsiders’ database, even when prorating to 16 games. And those injuries happened at positions with a direct impact on Jackson and the Ravens offense, especially the passing game. Left tackle Ronnie Stanley missed most of the season, various receivers — including first-round pick Rashod Bateman — missed chunks of time, and playing running back for the Ravens became more like being a drummer for Spinal Tap.
In a season filled with highs, lows and every type of injury designation imaginable, we saw the limits of how much Jackson can bear before a right ankle injury forced his 2021 season to end prematurely, too. A simple comparison of Jackson’s traditional and advanced stats show the dramatic difference between his MVP campaign and a competitive but frustrating 2021.
Though it’s easy to predict a natural uptick in performance from the Ravens offense because of injury luck (I promise I’m not trying to jinx them), there is also room for growth for Jackson in execution and the Ravens offense in play design.
There are a plethora of ways to pass the football, but I’m going to focus here on two particular aspects of Jackson’s game and how the Ravens attacked defenses through the air. It might not be completely fair to compare any quarterback’s season to Jackson’s 2019 season, but highlighting where dips in performance and execution happened reveals how Jackson can approach previous supernova levels.
Empty formations
2019: Jackson’s performance when in empty formations, featuring no offensive player in the backfield with the quarterback, was one of the catalysts for his MVP run. It allowed the Ravens to spread out the formation and for Jackson to find an option with his arm or use his legs as the de facto checkdown with wide swaths of running space to take advantage of:
Jackson was simply devastating out of empty formations in 2019. According to TruMedia, no quarterback has generated more EPA out of such formations since. The gap between Jackson’s 2019 and the QB who produced the second-most EPA out of empty during this span (Deshaun Watson in 2020) is nearly the same as the gap between Watson and the 22nd-ranked Matthew Stafford during his 2020 season.