Ravens Looking to End Penalty Issues

While the Baltimore Ravens were one of the NFL's elite teams in many aspects last season, they were also their own worst enemy at many times. They shot themselves in the foot in many ways, penalties being chief among them. They had 132 penalties for 1,120 yards in the regular season, the second-most in the league for both categories.

Understandably, John Harbaugh and co. want to clean up the penalties ahead of the regular season, and they're pulling out all the stops to do so.

According to the team's website, the Ravens have hired former NFL referee Tony Michalek to help them reduce their penalties throughout training camp. Michalek, who refereed from 2002-24, can help with "interpreting the rules, penalty explanations, and prevention."

The Ravens aren't the first NFL team to take this approach. Last year, the Buffalo Bills hired longtime NFL referee John Parry as an officiating specialist, and they did cut down on penalties by a decent bit in 2024 compared to 2023.

Going even deeper, the Ravens specifically want to eliminate the pre-snap penalties that plagued them so often last season. Offensive coordinator Todd Monken noted how those penalties are still an issue, but they're going to continue moving in the right direction.

"Well, you're right, there is a common thread, and that is that we're going to continue to stress it and use cadence in practice," Monken told reporters Wednesday. "I've said this before, it's real easy to get frustrated, which I do. I'm the king of overreacting. But if you do that, then you'll just go on one all the time, and that doesn't help you either. So where is that sweet spot? Now is the time to do that.

"We're practicing some other things in the throw game and the run game to obviously try like heck to be on point when we play the first game. But obviously, we have a lot of work to do, but that's not the only thing, that's the only thing that's obvious to the naked eye, right? [That's the only thing where] you feel like, 'OK, we can see that,' [because the] play stops, there's a yellow hanky [penalty flag]. Okay, that's not very good. Well, there are a lot of things we need to work at, that just happens to be one of them that we'll continue to fight our rear ends off to be elite at it."