This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

We've got a fun show for you guys today.

Big Tafer and Deshaun Reed are going to be joining us a little bit later to do our team visit about the Raiders. Ted Nguyen will be here to talk about the Dolphins defense, which I'm very excited about. Before we get to any of that, though, a football internet celebrity. Last week, he dropped the first piece he's written in a while. Ted actually had my perfect synopsis of it. It's like waking up and finding out that Banksie graffitied your garage door. That's the field that it had. Mr. Smart Football himself, Chris Brown, how you doing, buddy? Doing well. Just glad to be here with the myth of legend Robert Mace. I'll get out of here. We have known each other for a long time to the point that I was looking up some of the

pieces that you wrote for Grantland a long, long time ago that I edited.

And we're talking eight years, which it does not feel like eight years, but that's how long

it's been.

Well, for some of it feels like eight years since I've written anything.

But yeah, we've gone back a long way and for the, you know, the listeners don't know, you know, my early days, maybe not so early days of writing, a lot of my pieces, they're only readable and digestible because Robert, you know, just amazing, teaching me how to write a lead and, you know, actually make it presentable. That's a silly thing to say. The information was amazing. It continues to be. And I wanted to talk to you about several different things, but I want to start with the Ravens and Lamar Jackson. It was another uneven performance with them on Sunday night. We didn't talk about them much on Sunday show with Nate because I knew you were going to be joining us later in the week.

And I think you're uniquely positioned to talk about this because as someone who recognizes concepts well, can remember where you've seen them before, have a good sense for how they fit together.

I wanted to talk to you just about the second act of this Ravens offense. And also, when I was going back and reading some of those grand ones piece today, one of the ones that you wrote was about Greg Roman playing against the Ravens in the Super Bowl. And a lot of the stuff they did with the Niners back then and Colin Kaepernick, they're kind of trying to refresh for the modern era with Lamar Jackson. So there's a lot I want to unpack, but when you're watching the Ravens offense right now, what about it feels stale to you? Well, one thing that feels stale is, you know, some of the injuries on the offensive line, obviously. Well, of course. We get into that, yes. Yeah, yeah, but I do want to, like, set the table. I think much of it is feeling a little stale. And I think there's an interesting story with Greg Roman, where this is not the first time he's had a little bit of this explosion, and then every so ahead of the game, and then people feel like they start to catch up. And then all of a sudden, you know, he goes from the hottest name and sort of the coordinator world to, you know, maybe not so, people not so interested. He's certainly been let go several times and had a similar trajectory. I do want a level set in the sense that, you know, we could be having this conversation in eight weeks. And it's like, wow, Ravenss look great second half of things organized. You know, there's a bit of a sky is falling. They're, you know, they're 12th in scoring. The team is six and three. Like Lamar Jackson's pass rating, which is, you know, just, you know, I use just like a rule of thumb. It's like 98, 99. It's that, so they haven't fallen off a cliff, right?

So there are fixable things, and there's a lot of things that have accumulated.

But you're right to go back to that a lot of what Greg Roman was doing last year was literally,

and I have those old Harbaugh Roman playbooks with Kaepernick, including, you know,

the, what they would put in his wristband and everything. A lot of the same stuff, you know,

running power and inside zone from the pistol and then having extra blockers and tight ends,

etc. It was a lot of the same stuff. So that's one reason why Roman was brought in and sort of elevated because he was uniquely positioned there. But, you know, teams a little more used to seeing it. And one of the knocks on Roman, and we can come back to other issues, as lots of other things with the Ravens, but is that the passing game menu is limited. And it has been for a number of years,

even back when he was coordinating Andrew Luck at Stanford.

And when you watch them, they don't run a lot of different concepts.

Now, we can come into how much of that is Lamar Jackson as well.

But, you know, when you look at the Ravens,

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