Ravens QB History: Joe Flacco, 2009
Whether or not winning was or is caused by quarterback play specifically, pro football teams tend to stick with quarterbacks they win with, or really even just that they’ve won with in the past, a loop the Ravens would end up stuck in a few years down the road. If you need a shorthand for this, you can call it “The Baker Mayfield Principle.” There are a number of factors that play into this, but probably the most significant is just the convenience of doing so.
Quarterbacks take a lot of resources to acquire, even more so to develop and support, and so as soon as you find a quarterback that doesn’t leave you in the bottom 12 passing offenses, there’s usually reason to want to leave that guy in place, even if only to find good pieces to put around said QB before moving on. (See: Alex Smith, and the perpetually betrayed Tyrod Taylor.)
One team notably ignored this, that being our beloved Baltimore Ravens, and some would say that they paid for it big time. After boldly releasing Trent Dilfer following their Super Bowl victory in 2000, intending to create a team culture where nobody got a free ride to winning, they created a 7-year span of unsuredness at the most important position in the spor when, in a stroke of luck that can only be called really awful, they were not able to find a better replacement for Trent Dilfer. As we learned a little while ago, one could argue that this singular decision ended up costing Brian Billick his job, even if the Ravens were headed for decline one way or the other. In all honesty, as team management I still think this was absolutely the correct move, but as often happens to the Ravens, they get the bad side of a good gamble.
So when a rookie quarterback comes along and takes you to the AFC championship but then throws multiple walk-off interceptions in said game, what do you do? You bury the stat sheet, throw your hands up and say “well the kid was playing against a really good defense” and keep going. 2008 was house money, a new coach, new runningback, new QB, nobody really expected what happened, so there’s no real good reason not to try again, right?
Ultimately, the Ravens decision to stick with Joe Flacco resulted in, from 2009–2014, a 6–4 postseason record with a Super Bowl win. Three of the teams in the NFC north would kill for that. As a fan, I’m more than happy with that being the reality of what occurred.
At the same time, looking back, there’s just no real argument that Flacco wasn’t a detrimental element in these early years of his career. A lot of people seem to believe that the Ravens got better from 2010–2012 as they worked towards a Super Bowl, and while they did steadily acquire more and more talent, I’ve seen the group at Ravens Film Study present analysis that would suggest this team, the 2009 Ravens, were the best team of the Flacco/Rice era, and that based on process and not results, 2009 actually should’ve been the year we did it. I’m not sure I buy that entirely, but they definitely do have one of the Ravens more impressive postseason victories.
Real Quick: The Draft
Listen. I’m a fan, and all these numbers and such have more to do with trying to have my facts straight rather than me acting like I know exactly what all of them mean. Just for example, my instinct at the time was that Ray Rice (more on him in a second) was absolutely carrying Joe Flacco this year. The numbers back that up. One of the reasons I can say that is we have good numbers available to diagnose that. Defense is significantly harder to quantify, as is offensive line play.
On that note, in 2009, the Ravens drafted three solid, memorable players: Left Tackle Michael Oher (of The Blind Side infamy, thanks Sandra Bullock,) defensive end Paul Kruger, and defensive back Lardarius Webb, who played a combined 16 seasons starting for the Ravens, and all three of whom played at least seven years in the NFL. All were good players, and I seem to have some memories of Lardarius Webb making some good plays, but these are not players of historic quality, not “ring of honor” players as it were. But in 2008, we definitely did draft one of those, and he would make his presence much more strongly felt in 2009. Unfortunately, that means . . .
We Have To Talk About Ray Rice Now
I can not forgive Ray Rice for what we all saw him do to his wife. That is not my place to do. However, whereas abusers like Chris Brown have never faced significant consequence and then they periodically re-enter the media because their abuse persists, Ray Rice is one of the few true examples where his career was legitimately destroyed, mostly because of the undeniable evidence of his abuse, and in the years after Ray has seemed to legitimately change. “Seemed” is the key word here. I’m certainly not convinced that his continuing marriage to the woman he physically abused is a good thing, especially given depictions of their relationship leading up to the infamous elevator video. Most people would call it a massive red flag, and ultimately it probably is, but his wife, and more important Ray himself, have seemed dedicated to making their relationship work and they both seem to desperately want to project that, especially through his faith, and as well as his separation from pro football, Rice has made serious amends. Rice seems to have been both humiliated and humbled by the experience of having his dirty laundry aired out, both of which were clearly necessary. To put it simply, when asked about it in a rare major media appearance for CBS News, he indicated that after the incident took place, he never believed he ever deserved a second chance to play in the NFL, and that his “second chance” is his continuing marriage to his wife, with whom he now raises two children.
All of this is to preface that, we’re just talking about a sport here, a game. My criticisms of Joe Flacco’s quarterback play are not at all critiques of him as a human being, although his stance on COVID vaccination is at best deeply disappointing. I met Joe Flacco at the Columbia Mall once and took a picture with him. Massive human being, and endlessly patient with all of the people around him. He seems like a pretty good guy. Similarly, I’m going to have a lot of nice things to say about Ray Rice as a football player, and I just want to make it clear that I really have no intention of celebrating him as a human being when I do that. I hope that what the Rice family is letting us see is what it really is. At the end of the day, Janay Palmer-Rice seems to be pretty openly asking people to believe that her husband, a man she has known since they were teenagers, is a good man, and if she’s the one saying it, I’ll at least give Ray Rice enough grace here that we can talk about what he did on the football field for a little bit. To discuss the career of Joe Flacco responsibly, you cannot address a void.
With That Said: Let’s Talk About Ray Rice’s 2009 Workload
In 2009 Ray Rice had one of the best offensive skill seasons by any Ravens player. It’s likely the very best, although it faces competition from the remarkable season that Mark Andrews is having in 2021. The numbers are pretty ridiculous.
Out of a total 5619 yards accumulated by the Ravens offense in the 2009 regular season, Rice’s own 2048 yards from scrimmage represents 36% of the total volume. His 708 receiving yards represent 19%, nearly a fifth of Joe Flacco’s total passing offense. He was the most productive rusher by more than twice the amount of the next guy while accumulating those 1300+ yards at an incredibly impressive 5.3 ypc, while also being the 2nd leading receiver on the team and putting up 70% of the receiving offense that the leading receiver did at a cool 7 yards/target on a catch rate of over 77%, which would be competitive with a guy like Alvin Kamara today. In short: he was the #1 rusher and the #2 receiver.
Most staggering, even more so than the production is just the overall workload. The 2009 Ravens ran 1019 plays in the regular season. Ray Rice either ran out of the backfield or was the intended receiving target on 355 of those, a staggering 34.8% of the total offensive plays ran. For context, this is somewhat similar to the workload of 2020 Derrick Henry, who ran 1031 plays with Henry getting the touch on 397 of them, which is 38.5%. Joe Flacco passed or ran on 534 plays, 52.4% of the total workload, but he also targeted Rice on 101 of those plays, just about 19% of his total snaps. If you take out Rice’s targets, it reduces Flacco’s overall workload by a whole 10%. Rice also did not lose a single fumble throughout the year and went for 10 weeks without losing the ball whatsoever. Meanwhile, if you were to isolate Rice’s efforts rushing the ball, his workload comprised a mere 24% of the team’s total snaps.
In short, the 2009 Ravens relied on Ray Rice as much as just about any football team has relied on any offensive skill player, and he produced. He did not have a truly bad game in a win and he was absolutely exceptional during six of the teams’ seven losses that season, easily avoiding “blame” as it were. During a 3-week losing streak, where the team went from 3–0 to 3–3, in that period Rice gained nearly 500 yards of total offense, had 3 touchdowns, posted over 7 yards per carry and 9 yards per target, playing particularly well in a loss to Minnesota that ended on a failed FG attempt from fading placekicking legend Steven Hauschka. In their fourth loss at Cincinnati, he posted a very efficient 135 total yards and a touchdown. In their fifth loss to Indianapolis, he put up yet another 130+ yard game on solid efficiency. He didn’t have a bad game until the Packers finally got the clamps on him in week 13, holding him to a terrible 3.4 yards per snap (in this case formulated as carries+targets, rather than the “touches” formula of carries+receptions.). He followed that up with his best game of the year in a win vs. Detroit where he put up over 200 total yards and a touchdown.
Comparing Rice to the NFL receiver group as a whole, Rice was also shockingly productive. He was 38th in total targets but 20th in the league overall in catches, though comparing his production as a receiver to other receivers is a tiny bit unfair otherwise. It’d likely be more fair to compare his impact in the receiving game to players with the same job in the receiving game, namely, other runningbacks.
Ray Rice was first in targets, receptions, yards, and first-down catches amongst runningbacks, and he had a receiving touchdown, as well as being fifth in yards/target while having, in some cases, near double the amount of targets and data pool as the other most efficient receivers amongst NFL runningbacks. In terms of gaining yards, the most important aspect of production in the sport, the only receivers playing better than Ray Rice were, well, designated receivers. And he outplayed a number of those as well.
As a pure rusher, Rice was 9th in carries, 6th in yards, 12th in first downs, and 7th in yards/carry. The Ravens had the 5th best rushing offense by total volume, and the 2nd best in EPA/play. Using pure rushing stats you wouldn’t call him the best runningback in football, but with the combination of rushing stats and receiving stats you would call him the . . . second, the second best runningback in football. (As it turns out, this happens to be the season that Chris Johnson of the Titans set the still-standing single-season scrimmage yardage record that still stands today because he rushed for 2000 yards while also adding 500 as a receiver. And he also rushed for more yards per carry and caught more yards per target with a worse quarterback. And the Titans had an offense of basically equal production to the Ravens. Yeah. I tried to defend my purple bird here but, CJ2K absolutely dominated this season.)
Although he only got a pro-bowl nod, there’s a pretty decent argument to be made that Ray Rice was, if not the best runningback in football, then the best player in football whose designated position was runningback given the versatility he added. I’m not sure if there was a bias against receiving backs in the time, but the fact of the matter is that the Associated Press got it absolutely dead wrong by not just ignoring Rice, but also skipping over the undoubtedly more impactful Chris Johnson by naming the Vikings’ Adrian Peterson, whose workload was larger but whose efficiency and total volume are both worse and who had Brett Favre under center, as first-team all-pro at the position. In 2009 Brett Favre had arguably the best regular season of his career. Comparatively, in 2009, Vince Young was Vince Young and, to get back on topic, Joe Flacco was Joe Flacco.
So How About Him?
Quite frankly, with a player like Ray Rice on the roster, Joe Flacco’s contributions barely warrant mention. The only serious positive I can offer aside from the fact that the Ravens, like virtually all teams across all years, accrued more offensive volume in terms of yardage through the air than they did on the ground. To repeat, that’s basically the bare minimum. Other than that I really can’t tell you what this passing offense did all that well.
In all fairness, Flacco did actually improve from the previous year. Attempts and completions were both up, as was completion%, yards, and touchdowns, and while interceptions did not go down, they also didn’t go up, so his relative efficiency improved. The bad throws were still there to an extent, but mixed in with a much healthier combination of good throws. (Duh.) He also took 4 more sacks than the year previous, but managed to do so much closer to the line of scrimmage as the yards lost per sack was down quite a bit, and if I had to guess I would also assume that means he executed plays more efficiently and took more sacks on instant line collapses rather than extended plays.
By definition all of his efficiency stats improved. His adjusted yards per attempt was still below his unadjusted, which is not what you want to see, but the difference was much less significant this year, and his overall grade via adjusted net yards/attempt went up by almost an entire yard, which is a pretty significant improvement. The problem is that it went from 5.3 in 2008 to 6.1 in 2009, which improved him from 23rd to 15th. He made a similar “leap” in passer rating from 22nd to 13th, and in this era, you weren’t doing much with the 15th or 13th best quarterback usually. The year 2000 is long gone. I could rattle off his rankings in other stats, but after how hard I went on basic counting stuff for 2008, I think it’s time we dig a bit deeper.
I think the real dagger for Flacco this year is the advanced stuff. The two teams that made the super bowl were 2nd and 4th in dropback EPA, whereas the Ravens were 13th, which is mediocre or even bad by comparison, but it only gets worse. The two teams that lead the league in dropback success rate that year, the Saints and Colts lead by Brees and Manning, were the two teams that competed in the Super Bowl. (That’s not a yearly trend, don’t worry about it.) By comparison, the Ravens, whose lack of a passing game was exposed in the wild card and then exploited in the divisional, ranked 14th, with a passing offense not capable of creating success plays more than 46% of the time. Now here’s the real kicker. EPA can be a real fucker because of how it scales out. In 2009 the Ravens earned measly .078 expected points per dropback. By comparison, Houston earned .159 per dropback, meaning that on a per play basis, their passing game was roughly twice as valuable. Houston ranked 9th. The Colts’ passing offense in the regular season was about three times as valuable on a per play basis, producing .241 EPA/dropback, and that team lost the super bowl to the Saints who got .231 EPA/dropback. This really ought to spell out just how big the difference was between the best quarterbacks of this era and the pretenders.
(By the way, I realize I didn’t use a lot of this stuff for 2008 but, spoilers, basically the same arc as in basic counting stats as you can imagine, which means the advanced numbers from 2008 are god-awful. The Ravens were the last team on the chart before EPA/dropback fell into the negatives. That is bad.)
You don’t really need to give this nearly as much serious consideration as I did to find that, comparatively, the 2009 Ravens were getting way more out of their rushing than their passing, at least compared to the league average. While I will always be a throw-first person when it comes to offensive philosophy because even a team like this throws the ball to greater effect than they do run (yards per pass attempt virtually always eclipses yards per carry, etc,) the reality of what’s happening here and why this team ultimately competed in the postseason, as we’re going to see, is that for a limited period of time, the Ravens were able to run the ball to just about the greatest effect you could run it that year, which meant having the league’s 12th best quarterback (according to EPA+CPoE composite) was exactly good enough to make a playoff run.
So let’s talk about it.
2009 Wild Card: Ravens vs. Patriots, Gillette Stadium: A Great Day for Every Raven Not Named Joe.
The idea that Joe Flacco was a great postseason quarterback is perpetuated by one legendary ring and the sort of small sample size you can only have if you ultimately don’t go to the playoffs that many times, and no game is a better display than this absolutely pathetic performance from the 2009 Wild Card where Joe Flacco, for the second consecutive postseason, proved absolutely useless.
10 passes. 4 completions. An Interception. No Touchdowns. 34 yards. A passer rating of 10, which you may know is worse than the passer rating you would get for spiking the ball on every snap. (What’s up, JaguarGator09!) Maybe the worst playoff game I’ve ever personally seen by a quarterback. The Ravens ran the ball extremely well this day, but they didn’t even try to let Joe eat some numbers in this game.
We could go over the rushing numbers, but to be honest, it’s easier to go to the tape. In a simply stunning occurrence, Ray Rice found a hole and rushed for literally over 80 yards in a single go to score. If the game wasn’t already in deep shit for the Patriots, it was over when Tom Brady got strip sacked by Terrell Suggs on the Patriots first offensive possession, meaning that the offense only had to gain another 21 yards to score, all of which were acquired on the ground with the score up the middle from Leron McClain, the other great rusher on the teams of this era.
It’s fair to say at this point that, having started the game with a 14–0 lead, the Ravens ultimately didn’t need Joe Flacco, they just needed to control the time of possession. The first two series proved that the Ravens would be dominant on both sides of the ball, so it was merely a matter of maintaining the lead rather than trying to expand it. That would be a fair point, except we’ve seen Flacco’s final statline, and the reality is that the team wanted Flacco to be a part of this game, even if only so he could look good, and he did not live up to the task. 5 whiffs, a pick, and 4 complete passes. There’s really no defending it, so it’s really not even worth explaining.
This is still one of the greatest Ravens games of all time, and I think the first quarter is probably the best single-quarter iteration we saw of the Run-and-D version of the Ravens until Lamar Jackson came in. The Ravens built their early legacy playing football like this.
Divisional: Ravens vs. Colts — Three Points.
See this is the kind of game you get yourself into when you don’t have a real quarterback and the team across from you has Peyton Manning.
Hey, here’s a fun trivia fact. The Ravens ran for 4.5 yards a carry, and Ray Rice who got most of the carries actually got 5.1 yards/carry, not too far off from his regular season average of 5.3 yards/carry, rendering him functionally as efficient as you should expect him to be on an average day. (Extrapolated across the 13 carries he got in this game, the difference between 5.3 and 5.1 comes out to less than two total yards in actual volume.) Given that it’s a divisional playoff game, perhaps we should expect more than average, but he had given a historic performance merely six days prior while the quarterback practically rested. So how’d the quarterback play?
Well, early in the game he lead a pretty efficient drive that “stalled out” at the 6 yard line when the Ravens took the points on 4th down. (Much easier to breathe back then even if going for it seems like the right call in retrospect.) Then after that he collapsed, generating a total of -7 yards passing on the next two possessions while Ray Rice did his job.
The problem is that the team on the other side is the Colts, and it’s 2009, which means that in the time I’ve taken to write this, they’ve generated 17 points in 5 drives, scoring at will on what is supposed to be a formidable Ravens defense. The thing is though, while it’s nearly impossible to blame a Ravens defense that finished outside of the league’s elite in passing defense per-game for not being able to stop the best quarterback of the era (fight me), it’s much easier to blame Joe Flacco for being unable to exploit a passing defense that was similarly mediocre.
This is really what it gets down to. I realize there’s an extreme example here because the man on the other sideline is Peyton Manning, a guy still ranks at pretty much the top of his era in postseason stats like EPA and CPoE, but the guy on our side doesn’t even come close.
What I’m about to say is literally the worst thing I can say about a quarterback: the Ravens should’ve run the ball more. As you look at the play-by-play, it’s extremely clear that Ravens offensive coordinator Cam Cameron made some pretty crucial playcalling mistakes. There’s an overriding theme of Ray Rice managing to get the requisite 4+ yards carrying only for Flacco to squander the drive with an incompletion. It speaks volumes that after that sequence where the Ravens went two drives with -7 passing yards, Flacco wouldn’t have another successful “passing” play until he threw it to Ray Rice who then took it for 26 yards, but the drive ultimately stalled out at the Indi 45 yard line after another failed pass attempt on 3rd and 3. It’s here that Harbaugh makes a pretty critical mistake and punts instead of going for it with an opportunity cost of 25 yards, I remember being absolutely infuriated by this punt when it occurred, but as if the fates were telling me to shut the fuck up, on their next possession after a stop by the defense, the Ravens ended up at 4th and 3 again on the Indianapolis 45, and got stuffed, forcing a turnover on downs.
That was the final Ravens possession of the third quarter, as the Colts would then burn the rest of the clock and beginning of the fourth quarter trudging downfield before finally deciding to take three points, expanding their lead to a basically-insurmountable three possessions.
The fourth quarter barely warrants mention as it feels like at this point virtually everyone on the team gave up, and while a more obnoxious sports writer would hit you with Rocky Balboa’s “one more round” speech, I’m not going to bother. The game was over at this point, and in spite of having eviscerated the Patriots, the Ravens season ended with a whimper, a terrible quarterback statline, and three points.
The verdict is simple: in 2009, Joe Flacco was not elite.
–Durante Pierpaoli, Lynnwood, WA, 2022
