Ravens Squarely in the Crosshairs After Odell Beckham Jr. Signing
If I were starting an NFL franchise from scratch with the ability to poach any front office I wanted to get the thing off the ground, the folks on Winning Drive in Owings Mills, Maryland, would be high up on the list. The Ravens have lapped the rest of the NFL when it comes to finding the modern edge.
But sometimes when the smartest people stare at the same thing for too long, the edge begins to dull. Think of any innovation in any field throughout the course of time. It all looks silly in hindsight. Computers the size of ballrooms. Crankshaft engine cars. Paying a 31-year-old wide receiver who last played a complete, healthy season in 2019 and whose yards per target have diminished steadily since ’18 $15 million guaranteed (and, who, according to FiveThirtyEight’s receiver project, which combines metrics related to getting open, gaining yards after the catch and making difficult catches was, at best, the 71st receiver in the NFL during his last two fully healthy seasons, just behind Austin Hooper). You know, that kind of stuff.
Much like we’ve started doing in New England, it’s a hard question to ask of the Ravens, especially now that they have added Odell Beckham Jr. to the fold: What exactly is happening here?
Beckham's yards per target have diminished steadily since 2018.
Sam Greene/USA TODAY NETWORK
In Baltimore’s defense, signing Beckham doesn’t blow up their salary cap. As we saw on social media, it probably cools relations a bit between the franchise and Lamar Jackson (outside of a serious Colts power play, I still think a Ravens-Jackson reunion is the most likely of scenarios despite the public rhetoric). It doesn’t burden their flexibility down the road, and, if Jackson doesn’t come back, it places a veteran in the locker room who, despite what public sentiment—and his public actions—may sometimes say about him, has an almost universally high grade from teammates in terms of respect and likability.
But outside of a few ancillary benefits, it’s hard to imagine Baltimore getting $15 million worth out of Beckham. It’s hard to fathom why the franchise would even enter the bidding war fray for a receiver who had to take himself on a football version of Antiques Roadshow to drum up sufficient interest and who had already lowered his asking price once.
In a very broad sense, the hard-to-fathom aspect to all of it is this: Baltimore is currently battling through acrimonious negotiations to sign a quarterback who has not played a fully healthy season since 2020 to a fully guaranteed contract. They had to make the biggest acquisition in Wave 3 of free agency to sign a wide receiver who has not made it through a season since ’19, to supplant a wide receiving corps that does not have homegrown talent despite the club’s spending two first-round draft picks on the position in four years.
Fantasy Impact: Odell Beckham Jr. Signs the With Ravens
While Baltimore’s situation is certainly unique, the Ravens spent four years around both Lamar Jackson the player and Lamar Jackson the agent. They had plenty of time to understand his financial goals and interests. They had plenty of opportunities to penetrate his supposedly complicated inner circle of advisers and make this extension a tap-in. They also had chances to extend him before the Browns set the new high bar for quarterbacking contracts out of a complete and total lack of self-respect.
They have also had time to tweak and adjust the ways in which they acquire wide receiving talent. While I wrote, and still maintain, that their overdrafting of tight ends has been a brilliant piece of understanding market inefficiencies and has helped supplement their trouble in finding good wide receivers, Baltimore has had data on their wide receiver crisis going back eight years, when they took a swing at Breshad Perriman in the first round and missed.
If the Ravens were continually evolving, there is an argument to be made that they wouldn’t be in this particular mess.
We must point out that masters-level franchises often receive masters-level criticisms (for example, we might write a column complimenting the Cardinals on, say, making it through a season without using burner phones or providing their players with some complimentary to-go boxes after dinner; their bar is a much lower one). Baltimore acquired Jackson and all of these good-to-have problems in 2018 amid one of the greatest single drafts in modern NFL history. I would argue that their draft in ’22 will look just as good with 20/20 hindsight (Kyle Hamilton, Tyler Linderbaum, Isaiah Likely, David Ojabo and others).
We must also point out that new offensive coordinator Todd Monken could open up a blockade experienced by this passing game during the waning years of the Greg Roman regime, and that many of our criticisms unique to the wide receiver position might be a little misplaced.
But right now, at this moment, we can go off only what we see. And what we see following the signing of Beckham is a bit of flailing, a bit of punching in the dark. For most franchises, that would be standard operating procedure. The Ravens have placed themselves in the crosshairs specifically by outpacing other franchises for so long, which is why the current state of affairs seems so surprising.
