With Harbaugh Bowl ~48 hours away, its a quick week here at By The Numbers. Lets jump into the bullets:
- Torrey Smith continues to be an excellent deep threat for the Ravens. Smith converted two third downs on the day, and finished with four catches for 20 yards or more. His effort ranked him as the 3rd most valuable WR of the week (behind Jordy Nelson and Vincent Jackson) by Football Outsiders. This ranking is in large part due to his 48 yard catch that took the ball down to the CIN 4 in the 2nd Quarter.
- The Ravens struggled with the screen pass on Sunday. Flacco threw six passes behind the line of scrimmage, the second most in the NFL in Week 11. Flacco went 4-of-6 for 25 yards, resulting in ~ 4 yards per attempt.
- Marshal Yanda is undoubtedly one of the best guards in the league. However, despite his success CIN defensive tackle Geno Atkins destroyed him on a couple plays. The most notable came in the middle of the third quarter when Atkins drove Yanda into Ricky Williams, then shed Yanda’s block to make the tackle. It will be interesting to watch Atkins match up against Yanda in the final week of the regular season when the Ravens matchup against the Bengals again.
- The WPA chart for the game is below. Per usual the chart is courtesy of NFL advanced stats and the annotations are our own. The Ravens drive in the second quarter consisting of two Torrey Smith catches that was capped off by a short Rice TD run really was the difference in Week 11. Recall our Reader’s Guide to reading WPA Charts can be found here.
