Team Intelligence · AFC North · 2026 preseason

Baltimore Is a Good Offense at a Price the Model Won't Pay.

The model forecasts a top-10 scoring offense — 27.2 points a game, 4th — with its best fantasy real estate at running back (1st), and the market is already paying for the 14th offense to own, 17 places ahead of where the model has it. Comparable offenses have supported 3.2 fantasy starters.

ADY
Auto Draft Years
17 August 2026 · 9 min read
27.2
proj points/game (4th)
3.2
expected fantasy starters
RB 1st
relative strength
-17
market vs model, in places

The short version

  • 2026 forecast: 27.2 points a game (4th), moves +2.3 points a game against 2025.
  • Relative strength running back (1st); relative weakness quarterback (13th).
  • Comparable offenses supported 3.2 fantasy starters (bear 3, bull 4).
  • Market vs model: expensive — 17 places apart.
  • No player on this roster clears the bar as a buy. Fade Lamar Jackson and Mark Andrews.

Baltimore Ravens scored 24.9 points a game in 2025, 10th in the league. The model forecasts 27.2 for 2026, 4th. Every page in this series then asks the same two questions of that forecast — how many fantasy starters does an offense like this actually support, and is the market charging the right price for them — and answers both from the data rather than from the shape of the template. So the question for Baltimore is a pricing question: the model and the market disagree about this whole offense by 17 league places, and someone is wrong.

Who this offense actually is

Over 2021–2025 this offense scored 22.8/20.4/27.7/30.1/24.9 points a game and threw on 54.1/47.9/48.0/45.2/45.4 percent of its snaps. Two separate readings come out of that. Its level: 24.9 in 2025, level with its own five-year mean of 25.2. Its trend: a five-year slope of +1.4 points a season, which is genuinely rising.

Across the same window it has leaned further into the run (-2 points of pass rate a season). In 2025 it ran 54.6 snaps from scrimmage a game, 29th in the league. That is play volume, not pace: it counts snaps, and snaps are driven as much by first downs, turnovers and game script as by how fast a team chooses to play. Genuine situation-neutral pace is not in this dataset, so this series does not claim it.

Five-year trajectory
Baltimore Ravens: scoring, pass rate and volume, 2021–2026
Solid line is points per game against the left axis; dashed lines are pass rate (right axis) and snaps from scrimmage.
The 2026 point on each line is the model's forecast, not an actual.

What changed, and why

Quarterback, running back, receiver and tight end stay where they were. The model's scoring forecast moves +2.3 points a game against 2025, with pass rate +4.8 points and snaps +7.8 a game. The forecast delta is the result of those changes; the job changes above are the cause.

The roster moves behind it: Isaiah Likely leaves to NYG (62 PPR points).

Coordinator, scheme and offensive-line movement are not in this dataset and are not recorded for this team. They are left blank rather than guessed at.

2025 to 2026
Where the forecast moves
Percentage change against last season's actuals.
Bars are the forecast's own movement; the roster changes above are what the model is responding to.

Where the fantasy points go

For 2026 the model grades this offense QB 13th, RB 1st, WR 13th, TE 9th. Its relative strength is running back — 1st, a top-5 environment. Its relative weakness is quarterback — 13th, an above-average environment. The gap between them — 1st against 13th — is how much the environment should move a close call between two players you rate similarly.

Position environment
Baltimore Ravens 2026 grades by position
Bars are inverted league rank, so taller is better. Green is top-10, red is bottom-10.
An environment grade is a thumb on the scale for a close call, not a ranking of the players in it.
Offensive pie against opportunity concentration
Baltimore — large pie, concentrated
Horizontal: how many fantasy points this offense has to give out. Vertical: how tightly its projected points sit on its top two skill players.
Small pie · concentratedLarge pie · concentratedSmall pie · distributedLarge pie · distributedBAL
84% of this offense's projected skill points sit on its top two players, against a league median of 63%. Worth being precise about what this axis does: across 320 historical team-seasons concentration has almost no relationship with how many fantasy starters an offense produces (r = −0.07). The size of the pie decides how many; concentration only decides who.

What the market believes, and whether it is wrong

Every roster in the league is priced twice: once at the market's ranks and once at the model's, both converted to expected fantasy points a game through the empirical price curve — what a player at that rank has actually returned, 2016–2025. Ranks are not linear in value, so summing them would flatter deep rosters and undersell top-heavy ones; points are.

The claim runs the other way here. Priced at market ranks this roster is the 14th most valuable in the league; the model has it 31st. The market is paying 17 places ahead of the model. This offense is expensive.

The biggest individual disagreements on this roster: Mark Andrews (-11), Lamar Jackson (-9) and Derrick Henry (+5).

What offenses like this one have produced

Take the 2026 forecast — 27.2 points, 50.2% pass rate, 62.4 snaps, 3.8 red-zone trips — and find the 30 most similar offenses among all 320 team-seasons from 2016 to 2025. Closest matches: Dallas Cowboys 2016 (26.6 PPG, 3 starters); Buffalo Bills 2025 (28.3 PPG, 2 starters); Minnesota Vikings 2020 (26.9 PPG, 4 starters); Tennessee Titans 2020 (29.6 PPG, 5 starters).

Those offenses produced a top-12 quarterback 67% of the time, two top-24 backs 90%, three top-36 receivers 80%, and a top-12 tight end 43%. That is where the starter count below comes from — it is measured off comparable offenses, not asserted.

3.2
expected fantasy starters
Bear3
Base3
Bull4

Read off the 30 most similar offenses in 2016–2025, not asserted. A starter is a QB1, an RB2, a WR3 or a TE1 — top 12, 24, 36 and 12 at the position. Across all 320 team-seasons the average offense produced 2.6.

The player board

No player on this roster clears the bar as a buy. Lamar Jackson and Mark Andrews clear it as a fade.

PlayerADPMarketModelEdgePPGRoleRiskCall
Derrick HenryRB20RB12RB8+51579LowFAIR PRICE
Zay FlowersWR37WR16WR2001276MediumFAIR PRICE
Lamar JacksonQB51QB2QB20-91366LowFADE
Mark AndrewsTE129TE15TE24-11574MediumFADE
Ja'Kobi LaneWR208WR79WR6650MediumTHIN MARKET
Justice HillRB216RB66RB105546MediumTHIN MARKET

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 7, RB 13, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

Model against market
Disagreement, in position places
Positive means the model ranks him higher than his price implies; negative means the market is paying ahead of the model.
Bars are the de-drifted edge — the same number the calls in the table are made from.

The three decisions

NO BUY
Nobody clears the bar
The closest is Derrick Henry at +5 position places, short of the threshold. Forcing a buy here would be the template writing, not the model.
FAIR PRICE
Zay Flowers
Zay Flowers is priced at pick 37 (WR16); the model has him WR20. What fired: the model and the market land within a few position places of each other and a projected role scoring 76 of 100.
FADE
Mark Andrews
Mark Andrews is priced at pick 129 (TE15); the model has him TE24. What fired: the market pays for 11 position places more than the model gives him. Cutting against it: a 9th-ranked TE environment behind him and a market price outside the top 100.

What would make this page wrong

  • The scoring move doesn't happen. The forecast asks this offense for +2.3 points a game against 2025. If it simply repeats last season, the starter count below falls back toward what a 24.9-point offense supports.
  • The pass-run balance doesn't move. The forecast has pass rate going +4.8 points to 50.2%. That shift is doing real work in the running back grade above.
  • The price gap closes before you draft. The 17-place gap is measured against today's board; ADP moves through August.

The one thing to watch in-season

Watch snaps from scrimmage per game. The forecast has it at 62.4 against 54.6 last season, and it is the input moving furthest from what this offense actually did. If it holds through the first month, the starter count on this page holds with it. If it snaps back, everything downstream of the forecast — the environment grades, the capacity number, the calls — moves with it.

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Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.