Early-Down Success Paved the Way for Ravens' Blowout Win Over Lions

The Ravens offense finally put it all together in Week 7. They racked up 503 yards on 55 plays (a ridiculous 9.1 average yards per play) against what had been a tough Lions defense through the first 6 weeks.

What we saw on the field was the Lamar Jackson that Ravens fans had been dreaming of since new offensive coordinator Todd Monken took over. Jackson finished 21-27 for 357 yards with 3 touchdown passes and another TD on the ground.

Monken did a great job of putting Jackson in position to succeed all afternoon with his use of personnel, formations, and route concepts. The key to Baltimore’s success was first down.

In the first half, the Ravens ran 19 plays on 1st down not including QB kneels. They called a pass on 13 of them, utilizing play-action 8 times.

For all of you offensive coordinators out there looking to get your quarterbacks going, that’s how it’s done. The results speak for themselves. Jackson completed 7 of those 8 first down play-action passes for 119 yards and a touchdown.

The Ravens’ first big play of the game was on a route concept designed to take advantage of a coverage that the Lions sometimes like to use on early downs.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Lions successfully used this coverage to take away the Packers’ play-action passing game, even generating an interception off of it.

You can see that INT below. This was on a 1st-and-10. Pre-snap, the defense aligned in a cover-3 look:

At the snap, however, the deep safety sat in the middle of the field ready to take away any intermediate routes over the middle, which is where play-action is often designed to target:

On the outside, the corners stayed on top of their receivers and were ready to defend the middle of the field since the deep-middle safety was out of the area:

Some call this “cover-3 robber.” The result here was an interception:

Monken wasted no time dialing up a play designed to take advantage of this coverage.