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2. With respect to Willis McGahee, it's time for Ray Rice to get more goal-line carries.
A year ago, when Rice essentially became the Ravens starter, the team managed to keep McGahee happy and engaged by giving him the bulk of the carries in the red zone. Rice would do much of the heavy lifting, zigging and zagging his way down the field, and then McGahee would come in and plow the final few feet (typically the hardest yards on the field to pick up) for the score. Unless you owned Rice in fantasy football, it was an arrangement that worked well for everyone involved.
I'm not sure it's the right strategy this year, however.
When he's healthy, Rice is simply a better runner than McGahee. He has better vision, better balance, and he rarely absorbs significant contact. There seems to be this belief that he can't get those tough yards because he's not very big, but I'm not sure I buy that anymore. He's quick enough that he gets through holes quicker than McGahee, and he rarely tiptoes in the backfield. He's not a dancer, he's a bowling ball, and his feet don't stop churning.
"Ray has proven he can run between the tackles," John Harbaugh said. "He does some flashy things when he gets in space, but he ran between the tackles and we were grinding out yards."
McGahee might be better in the kind of packages and formations you typically see on the goal line (two tight ends, crazy plays where Haloti Ngata goes out for a pass) but those plays have been somewhat ineffective for the Ravens anyway the past two years. They're not a great red-zone team, which is why the answer might be giving Rice the ball, just in different formations.
"It's hard to score touchdowns in the NFL, especially running the ball," Rice said. "The goal line is physical. Those touchdown balls, I like to collect. I like to share them with my offensive line when I get them."
On his second touchdown of the the game, the Ravens used Rice exactly the way I think they should use him more often in the red zone. They spread the field, created some space, and let him find a seam. He dashed through it, right into the end zone. That's the kind of creativity where Cameron excels, not plays where Ngata is the primary target on fourth-and-1.
(In the wake of such an impressive victory, we'll mostly forget about the crazy play call from the 1-yard line on the opening drive, other than to say if Ngata had seriously been hurt, it would have been an epic disaster and Cameron would have needed to wear a Zorro mask around town for a week.)
this guy is 100% correct