Lamar Jackson took the NFL by storm last year, winning the MVP in his first full year as the starter in Baltimore. It's hard to follow up such an incredible year, much less improve upon it, but Jackson still has a lot of growing left to do in order to take the Ravens back to the Super Bowl.

On the daily Locked On Ravens podcast, host Kevin Oestreicher is joined by James Rapien (Locked On Bengals Podcast) to discuss the Ravens matchup with the Bengals and the one area where Lamar Jackson still needs to improve.

Article Continues Below

Kevin Oestreicher: If there was one thing that Lamar Jackson knew he had to improve on in the offseason, it was definitely the deep-ball accuracy. It was something he kind of lacked throughout his first two years in the league and we've seen some good and we've seen some not so good, specifically against Washington last week. We saw him miss a wide-open Marquise Brown on a play where he burned his defender. We saw that again the next play where he missed Miles Boykin who would burn his defender. Even if you were watching the Primetime game against the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football he missed again a wide-open Marquise Brown where he burned his defender and then Marquise Brown did it again later in the game and actually he underthrew him. So if Lamar Jackson is hitting those deep balls, this Ravens offense skyrockets in efficiency.

I think a lot of people expected Lamar Jackson and the Ravens offense to have a downtick in efficiency, and not necessarily total offensive efficiency, but stat efficiency. Nobody expected Lamar Jackson to put up 36 touchdowns through the air again. It was just a historical season. He had 43 total touchdowns and it was an amazing year.

What I expected from this offense was to be more efficient as a unit, to go down the field score the football. That's what they've been doing. They've been outscoring opponents. They've been beating teams when they're supposed to the offense as a whole the run game isn't there yet… So as a whole, the offense hasn't been as flashy, there haven't been as many big plays, but they're still getting the job done.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0S2Wc69EnNEYJ3tmcfNbMs?si=TzZKRsDNS06EDIZNPEvTdw