The Ravens hired a new head coach, Jesse Minter, whose background is the defense. He has an obvious mission to turn that unit around. One thing Baltimore has is weapons on offense, concentrated around QB Lamar Jackson. But, like the Bengals, the defense has played a big role in holding them from reaching their full potential.
Minter wants Ravens’ players on defense to put their money where their mouth is. Or, perhaps the reverse, their mouth where their money is. Because it’s through communicating that they’ll all eat as a unit, and that’s what leads to big paydays.
The Ravens had their rookie minicamp last week, and there was an obvious theme on defense. Even though these are guys, for the most part, taking their first steps into the NFL, Jesse Minter wants to hear them. And hear them well, and clearly.
“You can’t play this game quietly, and you can’t play this game with doubt, and you can’t play this game without knowing what you’re doing,” Minter said via the Ravens’ website, commenting on the talkative defense reporters observed over the weekend. “We should be the loudest, most crazy, obnoxious, communicative unit in the history of football. And that’s the rookies doing that, so I give credit to the coaches that they had those guys prepared to come out here and be able to be like that.”
The Ravens as an organization carved out their identity via the defense. Year in and year out, they were routinely among the top units in the league. That has been less true in recent years, due to talent drain and, perhaps, coaching. The owner obviously thought so, relieving John Harbaugh of his duties this offseason.
I don’t know that the Ravens wanted to hire a head coach with a track record on defense, but they had an obvious agenda about addressing that side of the ball. Jesse Minter has been one of the best defensive coordinators in the league. While his scope is broader than that, he knows that turning that side of the ball around is key.
“The whole idea is that when you do it over and over again, you do it here, you do it every play [so] that it doesn’t matter if it’s the first play of the season … or in a game in February, that’s the standard of how we operate,” Minter said of his philosophy.
Of course, it’s far from a novel concept, and surely every team has heard and said similar things. Steelers fans, concerned about their defense for years, know exactly what the Ravens are talking about. As they say, it’s better for everybody to run the wrong play than to have half of them run the right play. As long as all 11 players are in sync with one another, you can work with the rest. After the Ravens finished 24th on defense last year, it couldn’t come soon enough.
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