We've Never Really Seen Lamar Jackson In An Up-Tempo Offense. Until Now

Some of the ways the Ravens offense will change under rookie play caller Declan Doyle will be more esoteric, and others will be utterly obvious.

He is creating his own offense for the first time and installing it the first time for and, having just turned 30 and being in this role for the first time, Doyle will clearly not just want to be expounding on what Todd Monken built with Lamar Jackson in Baltimore.

Significant change is what the Ravens front office wanted, otherwise they could have kept Monken as the head coach when they fired John Harbaugh (instead he got the job in Cleveland). Doyle is going to try to establish his own entity, and will undoubtedly be borrowing heavily from some traits espoused by the elite play callers he has spent time under – Sean Payton and Ben Johnson.

We continue to decode what those mentors will mean for Baltimore’s offense in 2026, previously looking at short-yardage trends and a different mindset likely coming on first down . Payton and Johnson are not identical by any stretch, but there are some overarching principles they both subscribe to, and a rapid pace of play is one.

The Ravens have been a run-focused team, and prized bleeding the clock above all else under coordinator Greg Roman, and Monken ended up continuing that trend. They are monotonous and have left me griping for years about them adopting a two-minute approach more often and using a more hyper tempo to attack at times.

The Ravens talked about breaking the huddle more quickly and speeding up cadence last summer, but they were usually a plodding operation and have been for the totality of Jackson’s time here. It would be absolutely shocking if that doesn’t change, and change dramatically.

Speed Kills, Tempo Kills

The Ravens were the fourth slowest paced offense in the NFL last year, at 32 seconds of time of possession per play. Since Jackson’s first full season as a starting quarterback, the Ravens have taken the third-most time off the clock for every play run on offense. Payton and Johnson tend to demand just the opposite.

Last season, Payton’s Broncos offense was fifth-fastest in the NFL in time of possession per play – over two full seconds faster than Baltimore, which might not sound like much but is massive. Johnson, who Doyle was with in Chicago, ran the second fastest offense in the NFL. Johnson ran a league-average pace with Detroit, but that was a more plodding quarterback in Jared Goff who offers nothing with his legs and in terms of athletic deception, while Bears QB Caleb Williams is the exact opposite (as is Lamar).

Johnson was asked about the differences he sees with his offensive players during OTAs last week, compared with the initial install a year ago, and it didn’t take him long to mention tempo:

“One day down, but we didn't have that issue," (with speed of play) Johnson told reporters after their OTA last week. "The communication in the huddle, what it looks like to break the huddle, the urgency to line of scrimmage, the tempo that we want to stress the defense with. The quarterback plays a huge part in that - he orchestrates the whole operation, and those guys have taken that to heart. From that aspect, we feel really good about where we're at.”

As for Payton, he began preaching the need to attack defenses with a barrage of speed and intensity to amass a volume of plays when he got to Denver in 2023 and it was a major talking point as he took over the franchise.

“We’re on them about tempo constantly, it almost sounds like a broken record,” Payton said after an early August practice in 2023. “We want to make it harder here than it is in the game. Now that being said, there are installations that’s new, there’s motions, there’s shifts.

“Sometimes there’s a happy medium there relative to making sure they know what to do before the ball is snapped. So we had a couple of MEs (mental errors) but that’s not going to change our emphasis on in and out, up and down and on and off. It’s something that we think is important.”

When Jackson broke into the NFL, Doyle was still a student assistant coach at Iowa. Let that sink in. Payton brought him to New Orleans in 2019 and then to Denver after that. The voice in his head as he tries to create his own thing is Payton’s, and Payton wants things done with pace.

That will increase the learning curve through the summer, but, if executed properly, should eventually further tax the defense and complicate their adjustments and allow the QB to dictate even more to them. And perhaps that part of why Jackson has raved about what he’s gleaning from Doyle’s offense thus far.

Subscribe On YouTube For The Best Ravens Coverage:

Add us as a preferred source on Google