Believe it or not, the Ravens pass rush hasn’t been special through three weeks against some beat up offensive lines.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

No reason to panic. Not yet.

Nnamdi Madubuike returned Sunday to play 45 snaps in his first game in over a year due to a neck injury. And he can be an absolute difference maker. And the Ravens gave Trey Hendrickson $60M for two years to try to bail them out of a constant problem during general manager Eric DeCosta’s long tenure in charge of this roster (don’t look now but the guy they traded for before getting cold feet, Maxx Crosby, is wrecking stuff for the unbeaten Raiders with ex-Raven center Tyler Linderbaum anchoring the offense). The best should be yet to come, and better be yet to come, but for now the Ravens are in familiar pass rush territory.

Which helps explain why their fourth-quarter defense remains the dregs in the NFL, and why quarterbacks continue to light them up with the game on the line. Suspect fourth-quarter pressure plus zero fourth-quarter interceptions has marred many a recent season in Baltimore. Wouldn’t you know it, the Ravens are 27th in fourth-quarter pressure rate (26.3%) and 24th in fourth-quarter sack rate, which is basically how DeCosta builds his teams.

Rookie head coach Jesse Minter, a proven defensive coordinator, should be able to unlock something more in this group for all they sunk into it, but it might require him breaking tendency and blitzing more to do it, despite the Hendrickson signing and the Calais Campbell signing and Madubuike’s return and drafting Zion Young in the second round.

They are getting shredded for 6.3 yards per play in the fourth quarter and 99 passing yards per fourth quarter and have blown 11-point leads in consecutive games (though quarterback Lamar Jackson bailed them out Sunday in a win).

“We are chasing getting everybody onto the same page,” Minter said Monday. “That starts with me, I would say, and just the plan and our processes of how we get to everything, how we operate … I always look at myself first, and it is my job: I was brought here to help put these guys in a position to play really good defense.

“I do think we have the guys to do it. It is early. We are going through a few pains right now that I think will hopefully help us in the long run.”

Slow Start

The numbers are all too familiar.

The Ravens have six sacks; only 10 teams have less. Hendrickson (whose hand injury perhap is a big factor) has one on 80 pass rush reps and he as three pressures on 30 fourth-quarter reps. That ain’t great; they need him to the “closer” they anointed him when they signed him. They Ravens 5.4% sack rate overall is too close to last year’s 4.6% rate for comfort. More troubling – a 35.6% pressure rate that is just 19th in the NFL (31.7% last year).

Minter doesn’t want to have to deploy extra personnel to influence the quarterback, but he has blitzed a little bit more than he did with the Chargers and it’s been, frankly, quite successful. The Ravens are blitzing 25% of the time and their 51.2% pressure rate when they bring five or more pass rushers is top five in the NFL.

Their sack rate more than doubles when they blitz (11.9%). If Madubuike cannot transform this front against weak opponents in the next few weeks, Minter very well might to embrace the same reality that facilitated the demise of his predecessor, former Ravens linebacker Zach Orr.

DeCosta’s implicit offseason narrative from the moment longtime head coach John Harbaugh was sacked was that the staff was holding back his roster. So far, he looks pretty silly. Ravens hybrid defender Kyle Hamilton said resoundingly Sunday night that the issue is the players (i.e. roster), and he's right. DeCosta is the constant; put the blame and the credit on him.

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