Reigning NFL MVP Lamar Jackson had a huge night in the regular-season opener, even though the Ravens fell short. The problem for Jackson and the Ravens is that, if he keeps playing the way he did, he’ll fall short of a full 17-game season.
Jackson, who looked noticeably thinner during pregame warmups, took too many hits. He delivered too many hits, too.
For a quarterback, one hit delivered is too many. The goal is to avoid contact. Because any hit can be the one hit that knocks a quarterback out, for the game or a week or a month or the season.
Yes, he rushed for 122 yards on 16 carries. It won’t be wise to keep that up for 16 more regular-season games. It definitely won’t be wise to lower a helmet and crash into a defender, as Jackson did at one point.
Six years ago, Jimmy Garoppolo did the same thing, in the same stadium. And he tore an ACL. In 2016, Robert Griffin III did the same thing, during a Week 1 game for the Browns against the Eagles. And he messed up his shoulder.
The courage is admirable. The risk is unreasonable. The Ravens have little chance to do much this year without one of the NFL’s best players. He doesn’t need to treat each game like the Super Bowl, and he doesn’t need to treat each play like it’s the last play of the fourth quarter.
Slide, get down, get out of bounds. An extra yard isn’t worth the risk of missed time.
Through two games, the dynamic kickoff has largely gone as expected. Returns haven’t gone up.
In fact, they’ve gone down.
Of 24 kickoffs, five have been returned. Nineteen have not.
That translates to a 20.8-percent return rate. Or, conversely, as a 79.2-percent touchback rate.
Last year, 74 percent of all kicks were touchbacks.
Last night’s game featured one of the factors mentioned during the Thursday night pregame show — a line drive that hit inside the 20 and forced a return. The Packers did it, and the tackle was made at the 16. That’s a (math is hard) 14-yard improvement to field position.
Of course, the brilliance of Green Bay’s successful decision to put the ball in play was balanced by an idiotic decision to return the last kickoff of the game. The Eagles put the ball into the end zone, content to concede the 30 with 27 seconds to play and a five-point lead. The Packers brought it out — wasting five seconds and getting the ball to the 16.
It gave the Packers 22 seconds to go 84 yards. They would have had 27 to go 70.
Not that they would have won the game. But the decision made a slim chance even slimmer.
On Sunday, much more data will emerge, thanks to 13 total games. Some teams will refine decisions based on what happened Thursday and Friday night. Then, come Monday night, the 49ers and Jets will have the chance to even further sharpen strategies based on the 15 total games that came before them.
Much remains to be determined. For now, however, the new kickoff is indeed far more dud than dynamic.
The first game of the 2024 NFL season reached a massive audience.
NBC announced that Thursday night’s Ravens-Chiefs game had an average audience of 28.9 million viewers, which made it the most-watched of all the NFL Kickoff games since the league began the tradition of starting the season on a Thursday night.
The viewership increased by 5 percent over last year’s 27.5 million viewers for the Lions-Chiefs opener.
Kansas City was the top local market with a 43.4 local rating and 80 share, which means that 80 percent of all TVs in use on Thursday night in Kansas City were tuned in to the Chiefs. Baltimore had the second-best local viewership with a 24.5 rating and 60 share.
The NFL has proven to be the one television property in America that is immune to the viewership declines associated with cord cutting, streaming and the fracturing of the TV audience. As the election approaches, many Americans may watch news instead of sports, and the league’s ratings could see some drop-off. But 2024 started with a bang for the NFL.
Kadarius Toney might be a little closer to finding another team.
Per Field Yates of ESPN, Toney had a tryout on Friday with the Browns.
Toney previously had a visit with the Seahawks earlier this week.
Cleveland’s receiving corps is currently led by Amari Cooper, Jerry Jeudy, and Elijah Moore. But Toney could provide the group with a little more depth.
Toney was waived by the Chiefs after the team was unable to find a trade partner. He caught 27 passes for 169 yards with one touchdown last season in 13 games.
Tight end Peyton Hendershot has spent only 10 days with the Chiefs and has yet to play his first game with them. He was inactive Thursday night after the trade from the Cowboys.
Hendershot, though, already has made an enemy.
Ravens linebacker Roquan Smith warned Hendershot after the two got into it on the sidelines in the fourth quarter.
“Whoever [number] 88 is, I don’t know who he is, but he better watch himself,” Smith said, via video from the team. “He did a little slick push.
“I’ll see him when I see him.”
Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes scrambled for a first down on third-and-three, running out of bounds past the line to gain. Smith gave Mahomes a love tap that sent Mahomes to the ground.
No flag was thrown.
“He flopped. Yeah, he flopped,” Smith said. “That’s why the referees didn’t call it. That was a great no-call by the ref.”
Hendershot, who was not in uniform for the game, came to the defense of his quarterback and shoved Smith. Tempers flared briefly.
Smith finished with seven tackles and an interception, but Mahomes and the Chiefs got the 27-20 win.
Among the storylines in Thursday night’s game between the Ravens and Chiefs was four illegal formation penalties called on the Ravens over the course of the game.
Three of them were on left tackle Ronnie Stanley, who said after the game that he felt officials were trying to make an example out of him to emphasize a crackdown on the calls. Stanley also said that he didn’t feel the calls were being made evenly, but the flurry of flags caught the eye of coaches who are preparing to play this weekend and want to make sure that their team doesn’t wind up picking up a slew of penalties.
“We talked about it in practice,” Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo said during his Friday press conference, via a transcript from the team. “I had two guys on both sides of the line of scrimmage making sure those guys were lined up correctly. Once again, we always talk about we’ll do business as business is being done. So, we’ll see what this crew has for us this week.”
Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski also touched on the subject Friday. He said, via the team’s radio announcer Andrew Siciliano, that “when the league wants something emphasized, you better adjust” and similar messages will likely be shared around the league heading into Sunday.
Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson once said after a loss to the Chiefs that they were his team’s kryptonite. He now says that is not the case.
Asked about the comment after Thursday night’s loss, Jackson interrupted before a reporter could finish the question to say emphatically, three times, that Kansas City is not his kryptonite.
“It ain’t my kryptonite. It’s not my kryptonite. It’s not my kryptonite,” Jackson said.
In fact, Jackson said he believes the Ravens showed they can go toe-to-toe with the Chiefs — and can beat them if they cut down on self-inflicted mistakes.
“The whole game gives me encouragement, because I believe our guys were fighting. Unfortunately there were penalties almost every time we had an explosive,” Jackson said.
Jackson has now started at quarterback for the Ravens against the Chiefs six times in his career, and Baltimore is 1-4 in the regular season and 0-1 in the postseason against Kansas City. The Chiefs may not be Jackson’s kryptonite, but he sure would like to turn his record against them around. He’ll try to earn another chance at them in January.
During last night’s pregame show, I provided an update on the Rashee Rice situation. We addressed it in further detail this morning, during PFT Live.
The NFL makes paid leave available for players who face felony charges. Rice faces felony charges — eight of them — from a Dallas street-racing incident in March 2024.
So why has he not been placed on paid leave?
The most obvious explanation is that the league typically uses paid leave (a/k/a the Commissioner Exempt list) in cases involving domestic violence. Rice’s case did not. Although things could have turned out much worse, it involved behavior that should be deterred. Rice (and those in the other cars involved in the crash) got lucky this time. Next time, the luck could break a different way.
Still, the league has said it doesn’t anticipate placing Rice on paid leave, absent a “material change” in the case. One such change could come from a guilty plea, to one or more felony charges. At that pont, the league could put him on paid leave pending the official internal Personal Conduct Policy review and punishment.
A guilty plea during the 2024 season is unlikely, however. Per a source with knowledge of the situation, there’s no trial date. It will happen, as the earliest, in December 2024. Thus, there’s no urgency to reach a plea deal until the lawyers are staring at a trial date.
Of course, if the prosecutors choose to try to stick it to Rice, they could offer him a deal now — with a short fuse for accepting it and a threat/promise that, if he rejects it, the case will go to trial on all charges. That would force Rice to choose between legal outcome and career outcome.
For now, the thinking is that Rice (who had 103 receiving yards last night) could have a huge second season. If the case is resolved after the 2024 campaign and if he serves a suspension to start the season, he will already be established as a great player before the suspension starts.
It’s hard to imagine Rice not being suspended, eventually. But it’s currently unlikely that he’ll miss time in 2024 due to the off-field issue.
Last night’s regular-season opener didn’t come down to a one-play, winner-take-all, two-point conversion. If the game hadn’t been played last night, maybe it would have.
After Ravens tight end Isaiah Likely caught a pass at the back of the end zone, the ruling on the field of a touchdown was automatically reviewed. The standard is simple; the ruling on the field stands absent “clear and obvious” evidence to overturn it.
As explained less formally, 50 drunks in a bar must agree that a mistake was made.
Based on the initial replays of the Likely catch, it arguably wasn’t “clear and obvious” that his toe landed out of bounds. It looked like it probably did, but it wasn’t clear and obvious. Only when the last angle came through — with the “NB See It” brand on the screen — was it clear and obvious that the toe hit the white stripe.
That’s one of the realities of playing in a prime-time, standalone game. If this had happened in the No. 5 game on CBS in the 1:00 p.m. ET window, that last, definitive look probably would not have been available. Lesser games have fewer cameras. And thus reduced chances of having the kind of “clear and obvious” evidence to overturn a ruling on the field.
The good news (especially for the Chiefs) is that NBC had an angle that allowed the ruling on the field to properly be overturned. The reality is that not every game enjoys that kind of assistance to the naked eyes of the officials, who are trying to see through flashes and blurs in an effort to get these calls right.
Ideally, every game would have entail a thick blanket of comprehensive camera angles allowing all rulings involving the boundary to be seen with full clarity and specificity. Maybe, eventually, the league will get there.
Last night, the officials got to the right ruling because the game was big enough to merit more cameras than other games would get.
A call by replay officials on the final play of the game took a Ravens touchdown off the board, but calls by officials on the field earlier in the game drew a lot of attention from Baltimore as well.
Left tackle Ronnie Stanley was called for three illegal formation penalties and right tackle Patrick Mekari was called for it once, which wasn’t a huge shock given that officials told teams that the call would be a point of emphasis this season. The Chiefs were not flagged for the infraction at any point in their 27-20 win, however, and Stanley took issue with what he felt was a singular focus on how he was lining up.
Stanley said he plans to ask the league to review the calls because he knows “my helmet was breaking the center’s butt” and that he was “lining up more in front of what I used to do” because of the emphasis on the call.
“The way it was going through the game, I really feel like they were trying to make an example and chose me to be the one to do that,” Stanley said, via the team’s website. “As far as I saw, they weren’t doing it on both sides of the ball. I know that I was lined up in good position a majority of those calls they made.”
Two of the calls came on the Ravens’ opening drive. That possession ended with a touchdown, but Stanley said the calls “hindered” the offense and it will be interesting to see if other teams get hamstrung by a flurry of flags as the opening weekend plays out.