Bombs Away!

Or So We Hope!

The Ravens lost Jordan Stout to free agency, following John Harbaugh to The Big Apple. The move was a bit surprising since the Ravens burned a 4th round pick on Stout back in 2022, selected nine slots ahead of Isaiah Likely. Conventional thinking led most to believe Stout would return after his best season by far in Baltimore. Convention was given the Dikembe Mutombo treatment.

It was back to the drawing board – check that, the draft board, to fill the punter position.

So with the 211th pick of the 2026 NFL Draft, the Ravens turned in the card for Michigan State punter Ryan Eckley.

Naturally Eckley will be compared to Stout. That’s just how it goes. But it would be naïve to think that there won’t be growing pains with Eckley. It would also be unfair to compare the rookie to a four-year vet who finally put a solid full season together on his way to a an All Pro nomination. A fairer comparison would be Stout’s rookie campaign

Stout was a below-average NFL punter in raw distance as a rookie, but a genuinely good one at placement. Here’s his 2022 line from Pro Football Reference, with rankings computed against the 32 punters who handled at least 37 punts that season.

For rookie-class context, 2022 was a loaded punter draft and Stout came out of it last among the five first-year punters who played full seasons. Ryan Stonehouse, an undrafted rookie in Tennessee, averaged 53.1 and made second-team All-Pro; Camarda went 48.8, Minnesota’s Ryan Wright 47.4, Chicago’s Trenton Gill 46.0, then Stout at 45.9. Stout was the first punter taken in that draft and finished behind all of the other rookie punters in distance, though his inside-20 rate beat every one of them.

So recency bias and the 2025 All Pro season aside, let’s keep Stout’s rookie season in its proper perspective. That said, we can compare Eckley and Stout through three preseason games.

Head-to-head this preseason: both punted exactly 11 times. Stout edges Eckley by 1.6 yards gross (50.4 to 48.8), 0.9 net (45.4 to 44.5), and one extra punt inside the 20 (6 to 5). Stout’s 81-yarder at MetLife was the longest punt in the league this preseason, though it went for a touchback — his only one of the summer, versus zero for Eckley. Stout’s Week 2 in Miami was his flattest outing at 41.0, but all three of those punts were pinned inside the 20, which is the trade-off he’s built his game on.

There may be some rookie growing pains with Eckley, just as there was with Stout. The hope here is that it doesn’t take Eckley three seasons to justify his draft status the way it did for Stout.

Diamonds in the Rough

Every summer in Owings Mills produces its share of hype. Sorting the real from the résumé padding is the trick. Two players sit right on that line heading into Jesse Minter’s first season: Malaki Starks and Trenton Simpson.

Start with the safety, because the Ravens’ ceiling might live there.

Starks graded his own rookie year like a kid hiding a report card — he told The Athletic’s Jeff Zrebiec he’d give himself a “C-plus, B-minus”. Honest, and roughly right. Through Week 9 he ranked 46th of 68 qualifying safeties per PFF, with problems as a run defender, as a center fielder and near the goal line. Then the light came on. From Week 10 on, he climbed to 15th, and allowed exactly one completion of 15-plus air yards the rest of the way. That’s not a fluke. That’s a rookie learning the job in real time while leading the team in snaps.

This offseason, Starks aimed to improve his body. He added weight after playing at 202 pounds, folded pilates into his training, and went to Jon Gruden to pick his brain. He isn’t hedging about what comes next, either: “I know I’m going to play closer to what I expect.”

The people who watch him daily agree. Former Ravens coach Chuck Pagano says Starks is going to be an absolute star. Anthony Weaver‘s version is more granular — the physical stuff is there, the missing piece is confidence in the coverage rules. And this is the part Ravens’ fans should circle: a summer under Minter and secondary coach Mike Mickens is exactly the tutelage a young safety needs. Nobody at 1 Winning Drive profits more from a defensive head coach than Starks.

Simpson’s story is grittier, and the clock is louder.

He’s a fourth-year linebacker in a contract year who has already been benched once in his career, watched a rookie leapfrog him, and kept showing up. He opened 2025 as the Week 1 starter before Teddye Buchanan overtook him early. Then Buchanan’s December knee injury opened the door, and by the team’s own account Simpson played his best football after it. He finished with 66 tackles and a career-high 2.5 sacks on 213 fewer snaps than the year before. More production, less playing time. That’s a player who improved.

The Ravens frame the fall competition plainly: Simpson has the experience edge and the contract-year motivation, Buchanan wants his job back, and both are learning a scheme from a coach with a track record of squeezing production out of young defenders. Buchanan sat out team drills and the preseason while rehabbing, which means Simpson gets September to prove the second half of last year wasn’t a cameo.

The outlook? Starks is the likelier Pro Bowler. Simpson is the likelier bargain. Both need to hit for this defense to look like a Baltimore defense again.

The Corner Gamble Minter Inherited

Let’s not dance around it.

The Ravens are opening a new era with a 30-year-old corner coming off the worst season of his career and a 31-year-old corner who’s rarely available in December. That’s the hand Jesse Minter was dealt, and he’s playing it.

Start with Marlon Humphrey, because the numbers are ugly and pretending otherwise insults your intelligence. PFF graded him 50.1 overall in 2025 — 105th of 114 qualified corners. His 43.8 coverage grade ranked 112th. He surrendered 67 catches and a 90.9 passer rating when targeted. This from a player PFF slotted seventh at the position entering last season on the strength of an 81.0 coverage grade in 2024.

One year. Thirty-seven points of coverage grade. Gone. Oh, and at $26.3M, Humphrey carries the team’s 4th biggest cap number and the NFL’s biggest cap number among cornerbacks.

And then there’s Chidobe Awuzie, the “safe” veteran. He played 14 games with five starts, broke up seven passes and was at times Baltimore’s best corner. Chidobe enters his 10th season, 2nd in Baltimore. Out of a possible 149 regular season games, Awuzie has dressed for just 108. In other words, he’s missed almost 28% of games. Availability is the key ability, and Awuzie’s has been intermittent.

So is it a big risk? Some of it is. Some of it is the wrong question.

Here’s what saves this: the Ravens aren’t actually counting on those two. They’re counting on Wiggins. Humphrey and Awuzie are the insulation. The Banner’s Jonas Shaffer noted Wiggins’ camp improved after an uneven start, and that Humphrey was one of Baltimore’s top performers in the joint practices against Minnesota. The Athletic’s Jeff Zrebiec reported Humphrey broke up two passes on Justin Jefferson in that session — his best practice of the summer.

The other options? They exist and they’re young. Zrebiec: “The Ravens have gotten trade calls on Tampa over the past 10 months, but they are reluctant to move him because they view the 2024 fourth-round pick as a capable starter.” Weaver called Tampa’s camp “tremendous.” Keyon Martin, Chandler Rivers and Tampa all took a step forward this summer, with Martin possibly earning the dime role — though Bilhal Kone opens on IR for at least four games.

Can Minter manage it? He’s got the résumé. He coached in this building from 2017 to 2020 — the defensive backs in 2020, when Baltimore finished third in yards per pass attempt. Observers expect Minter to lean on three-safety looks with Kyle Hamilton in the slot, which is the tell: scheme the corners into help rather than islands.

Humphrey’s coverage cratered. His run-defense grade was 78.9 — ninth in the league. That’s not a finished player. That’s a misused one.

Minter’s job isn’t fixing Humphrey. It’s building a defense that doesn’t need him fixed.

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2026/09/07/tltakes/eckley-seeks-to-fill-big-shoes/