The latest news covering the Baltimore Ravens.
The latest and greatest content covering the Baltimore Ravens.
Diontae Johnson trade grades: Ravens load up for Super Bowl run; Panthers focus on future
Jeff Howe, The Athletic
Ravens grade: B
The Ravens have been poking around the receiver market but missed out on more prominent veterans such as Davante Adams (New York Jets), Amari Cooper (Buffalo Bills) and DeAndre Hopkins (Kansas City Chiefs). After those three, Johnson might be the next best receiver to get moved by the deadline.
The Ravens have a budding star in Zay Flowers, who has team-highs with 41 catches and 527 yards, but their second-most productive receiver has been Rashod Bateman (22 catches, 422 yards, three touchdowns). Johnson is an upgrade over Bateman and Nelson Agholor and makes Baltimore deeper at the position.
The Ravens are going for it. And when Flowers was banged up with an ankle injury last week, they likely recognized how quickly depth could be tested at the position.
Diontae Johnson trade grades: Ravens get ‘A’ for low-risk, high-reward swing; Panthers taking their medicine
Cody Benjamin, CBS Sports
Ravens: A
Will Johnson be the cherry on top of an already encouraging offense featuring Lamar Jackson, Derrick Henry, Zay Flowers, etc.? Will he fizzle out as a secondary option in new surroundings? Either way, the Ravens are barely giving up anything for his services. The fit couldn’t be more ideal, to be honest. Johnson is best-suited playing off other weapons, and his route-running should complement the speed of Flowers and the power of Henry. His arrival also means less of a burden on fellow wideouts like Rashod Bateman, whose ugly drop against the Cleveland Browns in Week 8 may have gotten the gears turning on the deal. This is a classic low-risk, high-reward swing, and the Ravens can reassess Johnson’s value come the offseason.
Diontae Johnson trade winners, losers, grades: Who won deal between Ravens, Panthers?
Nate Davis, USA Today
WINNERS
Baltimore Ravens
They add another weapon to what is probably the league’s most dangerous and multi-dimensional offense. Want to load the box to try and stop the running threat of QB Lamar Jackson and/or RB Derrick Henry? Cool. Jackson is just going to pick you apart by throwing to the league’s best tight end combo (Mark Andrews and Isaiah Likely) or a corps of wideouts with first-round pedigree (Zay Flowers, Rashod Bateman and Nelson Agholor), a group that now counts former Pro Bowler Johnson among its ranks. Yet if defenses fret over the fleet of capable pass catchers … welp, hardly seems like a viable option when you’d have to pull resources from combatting the NFL’s No. 1 rushing attack. Pick your poison? A quick death might be preferable.
Eric DeCosta
One of the league’s top general managers, he learned quite well during a decades-long apprenticeship under predecessor and Hall of Famer Ozzie Newsome. DeCosta snagged Johnson for less than a song, making him the latest substantive acquisition in what’s become a tradition over the years in Baltimore – players like LB Roquan Smith, CB Marcus Peters, OLB Yannick Ngakoue and LT Eugene Monroe among the significant types who have joined the Ravens midway through a season.
Diontae Johnson
He switches sides from perhaps the league’s worst team in Carolina to maybe its best in Baltimore. Johnson will be a free agent after this season and could eventually be rewarded given there’s nearly always a premium attached when signing players fresh off winning a ring … if he can indeed help put the Ravens over the top in their quest to win the franchise’s first Lombardi Trophy in 12 years.
Trending after NFL’s Week 8, plus the continued decline of the Jets, Anthony Richardson
Jacob Robinson and Diana Russini, The Athletic
Baltimore’s pass defense. In 2023, the Ravens allowed 193.1 yards passing per game (sixth-fewest). This year, they’re fielding the league’s worst pass defense, allowing 287.1 yards per game before Jameis Winston’s 300-plus performance.
They were without Marlon Humphrey and Nate Wiggins, two of their top three corners, but their biggest issue was a lack of pass rush. Winston was pressured on just 23.2 percent of dropbacks, Baltimore’s worst mark of the year (per TruMedia). For context, the Panthers are averaging a league-worst 25.2 percent pressure rate. Historically, it’s rare to read that the Ravens defense is the problem.
NFL Week 8 takeaways: Are the Commanders good, lucky or both? Are the Eagles back?
Jeff Howe, Ted Nguyen, and Dan Pompei, The Athletic
Are there any larger lessons to be drawn from the Ravens’ suffering come-from-ahead upset losses to the Las Vegas Raiders earlier in the season and now the Browns on Sunday?
Nguyen: The Ravens always seem to have one game a year in which they cannot catch anything; though Jameis Winston mostly played a strong game for Cleveland, he also threw three point-blank interceptions that were dropped. On the final Browns drive, on which they scored the go-ahead touchdown, Winston threw one right to Kyle Hamilton, who ran for a couple of steps before the ball fell out of his hands.
On offense, they dropped at least four or five passes, including a deep pass to Rashod Bateman late in the game. Overall, the Ravens’ secondary has been a weakness and they were beat-up coming into the game. It’s going to be an issue throughout the season.
Pompei: Maybe the Ravens handle adversity better than they handle prosperity. Certainly, they are a better team than the Browns. And the Raiders. But they didn’t play their best football against either. Baltimore has a solid defense, but the Ravens gave up big plays late to a backup quarterback. The feeling here is this was a blip (the kind of which virtually every NFL team has over the course of a season, save for the 1972 Dolphins). The Ravens should learn and grow from it. They remain one of the NFL’s finest.
Howe: This has been an issue for the Ravens for a couple years, although this was one of the smaller leads that they’ve blown. They have some issues on the back end of the defense, and they surrendered scores on three of their last four series on Sunday. Lamar Jackson can only do so much. I don’t know if they get a little too comfortable with late leads, but it’s not going to be an issue that just magically disappears — it’s been hanging over their heads for way too long.