Expect Much More Play Action And Deep Shots From 2026 Ravens

Declan Doyle’s impact on the Ravens offense will be felt in a multitude of ways.

We are gradually chronicling them all, whether it be pace of play or first-down tendencies, the beliefs of the offensive play callers who have influenced him the most offer vital clues about what is in store for Lamar Jackson.

And the use of play action, a cunning weapon for Jackson under previous coordinators, is something else that is likely to spike, perhaps exponentially. It would, frankly, be silly not to ramp it up considering what the film and numbers reveal about the effectiveness of it, and even with the QB expected to utilize fewer designed runs, he can still sell the handoff or the keeper and open things up downfield for deep shots.

The Ravens need to get someone other than Zay Flowers involved in the vertical game, and even Flowers could be used more on designed plays rather than what he’s able to make happen on scramble drills. While play action isn’t only about creating openings to push the ball downfield, it certainly can help with that, and the Ravens lacked vertical intent in 2025.

"I've been fortunate to be around some really great mentors through my time," Doyle said after Tuesday's OTA session.. "The cool thing is you can kind of pull ideas, and as you go through it, all the different spots, you have opinions on what is being coached and taugh.

"And you get to kind of figure out, 'All right, what teaching material do I want to take with me? What do I think is going to work here? How does it fit to our offense? How does it fit to our players?'"

No Risk It, No Biscuit

The Ravens were barely above league average in percentage of passing attempts 21 yards or more in the air last season (per TruMedia), at 10.7%. Doyle’s offense in Chicago (okay Ben Johnson’s offense but you get the idea), despite being in just their first year with young QB Caleb Williams and despite introducing a new system and new verbiage, ran an offense that threw it 21+ yards downfield 13.1% of the time, second in the NFL.

Substantially more than Jackson, a two-time MVP, did it with an established coordinator he was in Year Three with. Hmm. I expect this to change.

Especially because the Ravens were actually far superior to the Bears when Baltimore’s QBs did it (yeah, even Cooper Rush and Snoop Huntley got into the act. Ravens QBs led the NFL with a 125.9 passer rating on throws that went 15 yards or more downfield and were fourth in the NFL with 53.8% completions on those throws. But they attempted just 93 (26th in the NFL).

The Bears, with Doyle, attempted 145 such passes (second more in the NFL) despite completing just 39% of them (19th) with a rating of 94.5. You don’t think Doyle is going to want to hike those numbers up significantly?

Play Action Time

Doyle’s longtime mentor, Sean Payton, is a huge believer in play action freezing defenses and allowing receivers to hit double moves downfield. Johnson leaned heavily into it in Detroit as a coordinator and then in Chicago, with Doyle.

The Bears utilized play action 20.3% of the time last season, second-most in the NFL. The Ravens utilized it just 14.1%, 25th in the NFL. The Bears called a ply action pass on first down 7.2 times per game last season, second-most in the NFL. Payton was top 10 in doing it in Denver … The Ravens were 26th in first-down play action passes per game.

“That’s where you get a lot of chunk plays and explosives,” Johnson explained during a press conference last October, just before his offense really started to take hold in Chicago.

Johnson and Payton have shown to have a genius level of feel for play sequencing and layers to help play action be such a weapon for the carving up a defense. Doyle has certainly been around that enough have some of it rub off. If nothing else, he's going to try.

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