Should Lamar Jackson be trusted this season? | The Exempt List
Yahoo Sports NFL writer Charles McDonald and The Ringer’s Ben Solak react to Shannon Sharpe’s comments about not trusting Lamar Jackson and discuss what is behind the Ravens late-game issues this season. Hear the full conversation on “The Exempt List with Charles McDonald” - part of the “Zero Blitz” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
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CHARLES MCDONALD: I will give Shannon some credence on the fumbles. It's pretty outrageous with Lamar. I think that's one thing you can say. You're back fumbling at your rookie year pace, where I thought, wow, you're fumbling so much, it's almost impossible to fumble at this rate again. I guess that's just going to be part of the Lamar experience.
But man, to say you don't trust him, that's a five out of five, flaming-hot take. I mean, this guy, for the most part this year, has been playing MVP-level football. And they've changed the entire structure of the offense from previous iterations of this. And they're still good. I personally-- I don't feel a lot of shame for a guy having a bad game against the Cleveland Browns defense this year.
BEN SOLAK: Relative measure here on bad game against the Browns defense, right? Obviously, they scored 31 points overall. Lamar ends with 2 interceptions, 1 of them was a tough pick. The other one bounced off of Ogbo Okoronkwo's helmet, went careening into the air, and Greg Newsome got underneath it.
It's hard to fault the guy too much for-- and it's a huge swing of a play. But you can't look at it and be like, this is predictive of how Lamar will perform in the future. It bounced off the crown of the guy's helmet. It's a weird play. It's going to happen.
Baltimore's just lost a ton of close games over the last two years. When you look, they've lost seven games with Lamar over the last two seasons. So they're all in the regular season. In each of them, they had at least a 75% chance to win in the fourth quarter by ESPN'S win probability measurement. In five of the seven, they had a 90% chance. They are achieving something very difficult to achieve with these late-game struggles.
I went and I looked at all right, how do offenses and defenses perform in the fourth quarter when like the score is still relatively close? The Ravens defense has been pretty tough in the fourth quarter in close games. They're like sixth worst in the league right now in turnovers per drive allowed. They're bottom 10 in scores per drive allowed.
I think that if you go to try to understand what's happening to the Ravens late, it's that in these close games, the defense isn't getting them the stops that they need. Overall, it's been an incredible defense. And so it's just, all right, this is probably more noise and small sample than anything else. I'm not too worried about that.
And I'm obviously not worried about Lamar. Lamar is playing excellent football. He's playing MVP-caliber football. And the system around him, the weapons around him finally are at his level a little bit. Probably not even fully there in terms of the passing game. This is going to be a really, really good team every single week. And the fact that the Browns had a perfect run in the second half to eke out a win doesn't hassle me too much.