Ravens OC Greg Roman says the risk of Lamar Jackson taking big hits is ‘overrated’

During his rookie season, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson threw 158 passes in seven starts — an average of 22.6 per game. That’s far less than the 34.5 per game the average NFL team threw during the regular season. Jackson also carried the ball 119 times during those seven starts, which is 18 more times than any other NFL quarterback ran the ball all season long. 

Still, Ravens offensive coordinator Greg Roman thinks the risk of Jackson taking big hits due to his playing style is overblown. 

“I think it’s a little overrated, the whole danger thing,” Roman said, per The Baltimore Sun. “Why? Because, and this is empirical data here, over the years, you kind of realize that when a quarterback decides to run, he’s in control. So now [if] he wants to slide, he can slide. If he wants to dive, he can dive, get out of bounds, all of those different things. He can get down, declare himself down.

“A lot of the time, the situations that [have] more danger are when he doesn’t see what’s coming — my eyes are downfield, I’m standing stationary from the pocket, somebody is hitting me from the blind side. My experience, and I kind of learned this, is that when the quarterback takes the ball and starts to run, there’s not a lot of danger involved in that relative to other situations.”

The thing is, Roman might be correct. A few years ago, Omar Bashir and Chris Oates did a study on the injury rates of different types of quarterbacks, and found that mobile QBs don’t get injured meaningfully more often than more stationary ones: 

The test we were most interested in was the most straightforward. If we separate the mobile quarterbacks from the conventional ones, which group misses more starts due to injury? We used a couple of different metrics to separate the Vicks from the Bradys: rush attempts per start and rush attempts per total number of plays called for the quarterback (what we call “rush share”). We also realized that our results might depend on whether we looked at games lost over a quarterback’s entire career instead of treating each QB season as a separate observation, so we decided to measure both. Finally, we ensured that each of the four total ways of separating “mobile” passers from the rest yielded a reasonable set of names. For instance, when mobility is defined by four or more rushes per start over a regular-season career, nine of 82 players in the dataset qualify: Michael Vick, Robert Griffin III, Vince Young, Daunte Culpepper, David Garrard, Quincy Carter, Colt McCoy, Cam Newton, and Tim Tebow. (Kaepernick would also qualify under the four-rushes-per-start criterion.)

…

Regardless of how we sliced the data, there was no statistically significant difference in injury rates between mobile and conventional quarterbacks. Quarterbacks of both types tend to lose 11 to 14 percent of their starts to injury. Even without counting the thus-far injury-free Kaepernick, three of the four tests produced a lower injury rate for mobile quarterbacks. The gap, though, is small enough that a statistician would call it zero.

Of course, the lack of injury risk is often connected to a quarterback’s ability and willingness to avoid hits by sliding and/or going out of bounds when a hit might be coming. Jackson will have to master that art in order to stay healthy, but in order to become the most effective quarterback he can be, he’ll also have to show some growth as a passer. Too often last season he did not do enough when throwing the ball, whether from inside the pocket or when he broke containment to the outside. The talent is there for Jackson to be a high-level player, but he and Roman will have to find the best ways to tap into it.