Aside from the Usual OL Issues, Are the Ravens Evolving This Season?

[JimZipCode]

The defense won't be as good as last year, so the question is: will the offense be able to compensate for the extra points the D will allow?

And the other question is, how far will the defense fall from last year's performance?

Football Outsiders "DVOA" had the Ravens as the #1 defense last year, ahead of the Jets, Niners & Bears. With the loss of Suggs & JJ & Redding, we will regress some. Hopefully the emergence of Jimmy Smith, Pernell McPhee, Kruger, Upshaw, and maybe even Kindle, will help the team. We could regress and still have a top-ten D. Even a top-5 D would be a step back from last year; but that's still plenty good enough to win with.

[steelerhater]

Are the Ravens this year's Jets. A lot of training camp hype but then an 8-8 season. Nobody is talking about our killer schedule.

The schedule may look very difficult, but no one knows what teams will rise up and what teams will fall. I remember the first game of the 1999 season. I thought it would be a sure win against the 4-12 (previous season), sorry-ass Rams, who were starting a backup quarterback (some guy named Kurt Warner). I couldn't believe we could lose to such a bad team. Before last season nobody wanted to play the Eagles and their "Dream Team" It seems that every year the schedule difficulty changes during the season.

[steelerhater]

Flacco is the big contract they have to get done and they have a year to do it. Once that's done they'll be fine cap wise.

This is probably the last year of the Billick players. Reed's contract is up after this season and Ray is really up there in age. I don't see either with the team next year.

Hopefully this is also the last year of Cam's offense. Another middle of the road ranking with both Flacco and Rice costing so much should get him fired.
Suggs is the final big story. Will there be a good pass rush without Suggs for most of the season? When Suggs does come back will he be effective after so much time off?

A lot of endings this year that will lead to a very different team in 2013. Enjoy it

I think this is where the Ravens are in a bind. First of all, Cameron is not going anywhere. The front office is perfectly content with offensive philosophy, which is to play not to lose. I also believe that they feel any short-comings of the offense are on Flacco and not Cameron, so they may not want to give him a big contract next year. Add to it, with this conservative approach on offense, do we need a quarterback with a powerful arm? The answer in their minds is probably no. I wouldn't be surprised if this is flacco's last year as a Raven, as I think the front office believes they can get any number of quarterbacks to come in and be just as successfull in Cam's offense.