ExtremeRavens Posted September 20 Posted September 20 Another week, another elite pass rusher. The NFL schedule makers did no favors for the Ravens with a front-loaded slate that includes three playoff teams from last season and a division rival in Baltimore’s first five games. Amid them are also some of the sport’s most gifted and adroit “game wreckers,” as Ravens rookie right tackle Roger Rosengarten calls them. He should know. In Week 1, it was Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones, who roasted the second-round draft pick for a strip sack on his first career snap and had five pressures on quarterback Lamar Jackson. Sunday, it was defensive end Maxx Crosby who torpedoed Baltimore with six tackles, including four for loss, two sacks and a pass defended. His four tackles for loss were the most in a single game among AFC players this season and he was named AFC Defensive Player of the Week. Now comes a showdown with the Cowboys and their star outside linebacker Micah Parsons at AT&T Stadium. Dallas, like Baltimore, is coming off an embarrassing defeat, a 44-19 thumping at home by the Saints. In that game, Parsons was completely neutralized, held to zero sacks, just three pressures and three tackles, while New Orleans scored on each of its first six possessions. But Parsons, who has just one sack so far, has finished with at least 13 each of his first three years in the NFL and has been one of the game’s most dominant defensive players in that span. He is one of only five players to have at least 40 sacks over his first three years since 1982, when sacks became an official stat, joining Pro Football Hall of Famers Reggie White, Derrick Thomas and Dwight Freeney as well as Aldon Smith. Last year, he led the league in pressures (103), pressure rate (21.8%) and pass-rush win rate (35.3%) and his 14 sacks were a career high. And no matter the strategy, almost no one was able to stop him, despite Parsons being double-teamed on 35% of his rushes, the highest in the league among edge defenders, according to Next Gen Stats. “It’s gonna be a challenge and our tackles know that,” Ravens Pro Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum told The Baltimore Sun on Thursday. “He’s certainly a guy who you wanna know where he’s at.” Which is part of the problem as the Cowboys give Parsons the autonomy to move around and attack from all over. “It’s gonna be big to communicate, trust your technique and get to your spot,” Ravens right guard Daniel Faalele told The Sun. “Communication is huge when you have a really good rusher like that.” Baltimore’s offensive line struggled against elite pass rushers in the first two weeks of the season, and Dallas edge rusher Micah Parsons poses one of the biggest tests of the season for the unit. But given the struggles of the right side of Baltimore’s line in particular, it would not be a surprise to see Parsons camp out there to try to pick on Rosengarten and Patrick Mekari, who have shared snaps at tackle, as well as Faalele. “They’re not handling people at the line of scrimmage the appropriate way,” former NFL quarterback and ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky said on ESPN’s “NFL Live” on Wednesday. “If they treat Micah Parsons the way that they did Maxx Crosby, they’re going to lose this football game as well. “He’s going to do that same stuff, understanding it’s Derrick Henry in the backfield, play’s going to get blown up. You can’t pull people toward Micah Parsons. Second of all, you can’t down-block one-on-one versus these elite edge guys. Micah is going to do the same thing; Maxx just gets upfield, blows up the play, 5-yard loss.” Yet, there are ways to nullify Parsons’ impact, as the Saints showed last week. One way to slow a pass rusher down, of course, is with a strong running game and play-action passing. New Orleans had both, with Alvin Kamara rushing for 115 yards and three touchdowns on 20 carries and Derek Carr going a tidy 11-for-16 for 243 yards with two touchdowns and an interception. But they also took a different approach than most. Rather than trying to block Parsons in a traditional way with double-teams or by using a tight end to chip him, New Orleans offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak instead sent a variety of players at the 25-year-old, often utilizing motion as well as a running back to keep the 2021 Defensive Rookie of the Year guessing. The result: Parsons was held to the fifth-slowest get-off rate of his career, per Next Gen Stats. “Instead of having a lineman block me and max the protection with the chip, they just sent a chipper and a lineman, then sent the running back to cut [block],” Parsons told reporters after the game. “So, I was going through a maze, almost.” Saints using multiple tight ends to block Micah Parsons pic.twitter.com/PyvrgNd589 — Dan Pizzuta (@DanPizzuta) September 16, 2024 Other teams, meanwhile, have taken a more traditional route and found success. In the Packers’ divisional round playoff game against the Cowboys last season, Green Bay held Parsons to just one pressure on 19 pass rushes for his lowest pressure rate (5.3%) in a game in his career. A big reason was the play of right tackle Zach Tom, who held him to zero pressures in nine matchups. But unlike the Packers, the Ravens don’t have one of the best right tackles in the NFL. Baltimore has, however, made some progress when it comes to pass blocking. After allowing a whopping 14 pressures against the Chiefs, for example, they allowed just five against the Raiders. Still, slowing Parsons, who is fast, twitchy and bends extraordinarily well, will be a tough task for a line that had to replace three starters. “Those guys are hard to handle,” Ravens offensive coordinator Todd Monken said Thursday. “They disrupt the game. [The offensive line is] the starting point to everything we do, like it’s been every week in terms of those guys and doing everything we can within our power to try to neutralize those guys, and at times we haven’t and at times we have. “It certainly challenges you. Offensively, it all starts up front and defensively those guys make it hard … so it’s our job with those guys to do as best we can to stay ahead of the chains and not get behind the chains and allow those guys to tee off.” One solution is running the ball successfully, as the Saints did. Another is utilizing run-pass options, something Jackson can be dangerous with and the Cardinals had success with last season with then-quarterback Josh Dobbs running six times for 55 yards in a 28-16 upset win over the Cowboys in Arizona last September. Through two games this season, however, Ravens running back Derrick Henry has just 31 carries for 130 yards and two touchdowns. Jackson, meanwhile, has rushed 21 times for 167 yards. Employing more play-action has also been a point of emphasis after Baltimore had the sixth-lowest rate in the league in its Week 2 loss. “Play-action passes are really important for us,” coach John Harbaugh said this week. “Play-action passes are something we do really well, and I’m a big proponent. I want to see [us] show them the run [and then] throw it behind the linebackers.” In order to do that, however, Baltimore will have to find a way to slow Parsons. Said Faalele: “It’s gonna be a challenge for us.” View the full article Quote
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