Ravens rookie head coach Jesse Minter is an old hand when it comes to deploying a defense.
He has proven to be something of savant at calling a defense at the college and NFL level, and so it’s always been more likely that we discrern much more about what novice offensive play caller Declan Doyle has in store from his preseason moves than anything on the defensive side of the ball. And sure enough, there were some significant clues in what Doyle did in terms of seismic formation shifts and where he plans to deploy the rookie wide receivers and even how they are fortifying Adam Randall to be a Joker.
On defense, well, I have a hard time drawing too many conclusions.
Minter is much more of a known commodity, for starters, with nothing much to really gain from the preseason. Then you factor in the Ravens ran only 40 plays on defense and faced only nine third downs (winning them all) and Minter went with a hyper-experimental mix of players on that side of the ball and rested even more marginal veterans, and it makes any study of the film and the stats feel a bit fugazi.
What I can most certainly posit is that Minter is running things incredibly vanilla for the most part, with a bit more of a lean to blitzing in his preseason debut (perhaps because he could sense early on his unit wouldn’t be on the field much). And that overall, from a coverage standpoint this was a very Jesse Minter replication of what Jesse Minter generally does on the back end.
During his two seasons running the Chargers defense, Minter was in Cover-3 on 44.4% of his first-down snaps. He was in Cover-3 on 40% of the first down snaps in his domination of the Eagles. So that holds. And he was in Cover-3 basically a third of the time overall, regardless of down, which tracks with what he was going handling Jim Harbaugh’s defense the past two years.
However, Minter, who played dime coverage as much as any team in the NFL while in LA (23%), never deployed a dime look once on Saturday (he had personnel limitations with top defensive backs not dressed). And, with some injury issues developing at the linebacker spot, Minter was in nickel for 30 of his 40 snaps against Philly; he was only in nickel around half the time with the Chargers.
As for other differences, he blitzed 39% of the time Saturday, and did it just 23.6% of the time with the Chargers.
Overall, the defensive numbers were quite staggering.
The Eagles had 76 yards through three quarters. Philly had 168 scrimmage yards and 45 came on total garbage time scrambles from third-string quarterback Cole Payton. As you might expect, being a perfectionist, that stuck in Minter’s crawl some.
“Defensively, we did a good job overall,” he noted after reviewing the film. “Would have liked to have contained the quarterback a little bit better a few times. But all in all, just a lot of good stuff on film.”
Eagles running backs had just 10 carries for 29 yards. Eagles quarterbacks averaged a mind-numbing 3.7 yards per attempt and Andy Dalton and Tanner McKee have both carved up defenses in the past in the preseason and the Eagles are running a new offense with a new offensive coordinator, so you can’t tell me they were totally okay with this kind of pathetic production.
Minter’s defense put forth the kind of outing one would expect from them. Even with almost none of the regular players involved in it.
Perhaps we will learn a little more this Saturday afternoon in Minnesota, but I kind of doubt it. Minter knows who he is and what he believes in and we saw it here before firsthand when Mike Macdonald was the defensive coordinator here for two years. This team probably won’t win a Triple Crown like Macdonald did in 2023 – most sacks and takeaways and fewest points allowed – but then again, I’m sure it’s the kind of lofty goal they are shooting for.
The standard is high. And the execution must meet the standard starting in Week 1.
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