In 2020, the AFC North was the only division in the NFL to send three teams to the postseason. In 2021, the race to win the league's best division has only gotten tougher. The emergence of the Bengals as a legitimate contender has led to a four-way race for the division title through eight weeks. These four teams could realistically finish in any order by the time the season ends.
Let's run through these four teams -- Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Pittsburgh -- and evaluate their seasons so far to try to figure out what's next. In many ways, they're not playing how we might have expected heading into 2021. In others, we could have seen some of their successes (and struggles) coming from a mile away.
What happens over the next nine weeks is for grabs, but here's where the North stands near the midway point of the season. I'll use the ESPN Football Power Index (FPI) projections as a guide for chances to win the division:
Jump to a team:
Bengals | Browns
Ravens | Steelers
Baltimore Ravens (5-2)
Chances of winning the AFC North: 47.4%
When we last saw the Ravens before their Week 8 bye, they were getting run off the field at home by the Bengals in the most lopsided loss of the Lamar Jackson era. This was new territory for both teams, given that Baltimore had beaten Cincinnati five straight times with Jackson at the helm, outscoring its division rivals by a combined score of 161-57. Just as the Browns beating the Steelers in consecutive weeks to get into the playoffs and then advance to the next round last season told us that the traditional order of things in the AFC North was being upended, the Bengals blowing out their tormentors tells us that everything is up for grabs in the division.
Even before the Bengals game, though, it was clear that the 2021 Ravens were a little different from our prior perceptions. The offense isn't the same, and that might be for the better. For them to stay atop the North and make a deep playoff run, though, it's the changes on the other side of the ball that might be more important.
For more than two decades, one of the few things you could count on in the unreliable, inconsistent world of the NFL is that Baltimore would have a great defense. From 1999 through 2020, it fielded a top-10 defense by DVOA 20 times in 22 tries. One of the two exceptions, surprisingly enough, came in 2012, when the team was beset by injuries and finished 19th in defensive DVOA. Stars such as Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs made it back for the postseason, and the Ravens promptly won Super Bowl XLVII, buoyed by an improbable run from Joe Flacco.
Now, this season the Ravens rank 20th in defensive DVOA through their first seven games. That ranking doesn't mean they're out of the title race -- the Chiefs ranked 22nd in defensive DVOA a year ago and went 14-2 -- but it's out of character for Baltimore. A brutal fourth quarter against the Bengals dropped the defense down the charts, but Don Martindale's unit also allowed 25 points to the Colts, 33 points to the Raiders and 35 points to the Chiefs. It also let the Lions score 10 points on two fourth-quarter drives to take the lead before Justin Tucker bailed Baltimore out with the longest field goal in NFL history.
The biggest problem for the Ravens is also something unfamiliar: They can't tackle. Outside of the Texans, the Ravens might be the league's worst-tackling team so far. Pro Football Reference's advanced metrics suggest that they are whiffing on 8.3 tackles per game, the most of any team this season. Opposing runners are averaging 2.2 yards after first contact with a Baltimore defender, which ranks 31st.
The Ravens are also allowing an average of 7.1 yards after catch, which is the worst mark in football and more than 1.5 yards per catch worse than any other of their defenses over the past decade. They can allow big plays with and without physical whiffs on tackles. Jonathan Taylor's long touchdown came on a third-and-15 screen in which he lured Jimmy Smith into a blocker and then accelerated past nonexistent backside pursuit, while Ja'Marr Chase broke three tackles en route to his 82-yard score. Travis Kelce is a great player, but there's no way he should have been able to take this pass 46 yards to the house.
Play-action has also been a nightmare for the Ravens. Their 80.1 QBR against teams using a play-fake ranks 31st in the NFL, with only the Chiefs worse. Opposing teams are 43-of-60 passing for 629 yards with five touchdowns and no picks on play-action. The Ravens are an aggressive team and can gamble at times to try to create big plays, but they were the sixth-best defense in the league against play-action between 2019 and 2020, so this is a new problem.
Other issues we would expect to be strengths aren't in 2021. After losing players such as Za'Darius Smith and Matthew Judon in recent years, the Ravens have the ninth-worst sack rate in football. They rank better by pass rush win rate (10th) -- and they're creating pressures at close to a league-average rate -- but they're not typically an average pass rush.
They've also created seven takeaways in seven games, with just one multi-takeaway game so far, the win over the Chiefs in Week 2. They typically force turnovers in clumps; this is a defense that has averaged more than seven two-plus takeaway games per season over the past five years. Losing Marcus Peters for the season due to a torn ACL cost them a key contributor, but after averaging 25.2 takeaways per 16 games over the prior five seasons, they are on pace for 17 in 17.
With Tuesday's trade deadline coming and going without an addition, the Ravens have to hope their young players continue to develop. They've recently made one major change. Patrick Queen, a 2020 first-round pick, had been a notable disappointment at middle linebacker, leading them to move him to the weak side two weeks ago while making him a part-time player. Journeyman linebacker Josh Bynes doesn't have Queen's range and upside, but if he can tackle, he's going to play.
The Ravens have also made a subtle-but-significant shift on the other side of the ball. Ben Baldwin's RBSDM site tracks how frequently a team throws in neutral-script situations on first and second down. Here's how frequently the Ravens have passed in those situations since Jackson took over midway through the 2018 season, and where that ranks among NFL teams:
2018: 35.4% neutral pass rate (32nd in NFL)
2019: 42.6% (32nd)
2020: 43.9% (30th)
2021: 54.9% (14th)
That's a jump! The Ravens haven't morphed into the Chiefs or Bills, but their offense is suddenly throwing the ball more frequently than ever before.
So far, Jackson has been up to the challenge. While he hasn't been as good as he was during his 2019 MVP season, his passing numbers are better than what we saw in 2020, which is promising given the rise in volume. Jackson's completion percentage and interception rate are right around league average, but where he stands out is by averaging 8.6 yards per attempt, the fifth-highest mark in the league so far. His average pass travels more than 10.5 yards in the air, a full yard ahead of the rest of the league.
By net yards per attempt, Jackson is a top-10 passer this season independent of the (significant) value he adds with his legs. His numbers would look even better if it weren't for a series of drops by the Ravens' receivers on deep passes; 13% of his throws 25 yards or more downfield have been dropped, the second-highest rate. Marquise Brown has made some spectacular catches, but he has also dropped a handful of long touchdowns. Jackson is one of the outside candidates in a murky MVP race.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Ravens kept passing around this rate in neutral situations. They are going to integrate first-round pick Rashod Bateman into the lineup and should get back Sammy Watkins in the weeks to come. Star blocking tight end Nick Boyle is also practicing for the first time since suffering a serious knee injury last November, so they should have more formational flexibility than they've had in years past.
Of course, injuries still loom as the biggest problem for this team. Baltimore has already lost Peters, Ronnie Stanley, J.K. Dobbins, Gus Edwards and L.J. Fort for the season. While the Ravens are typically one of the NFL's deepest teams, they can't afford to lose many more key contributors. Given how good this defense has been for so long, the safe money is on them figuring things out on that side of the ball after the bye. Games against the Dolphins and Bears in the weeks to come will help.
Cincinnati Bengals (5-3)
Chances of winning the AFC North: 27.3%
I wrote about the Bengals at length a couple of weeks ago, so I won't add much more to what I wrote then. Since that column, we saw the Bengals enjoy the high of blowing out the rival Ravens and the low of somehow losing to the Jets.
When a team loses unexpectedly, there's usually some sort of one-game outlier explanation for what happened. Every one of those easy explanations doesn't apply here. The Bengals won the turnover battle 3-1 and recovered both of the game's fumbles. The Jets were better on third down, but the Bengals still converted 40% of the time. Both teams were 4-for-6 in the red zone. Cincinnati had much better average starting field position, beginning its drives with an average of 60 yards to go for a touchdown.
The differences were subtler. The Bengals scored four touchdowns in six red zone trips, but one of their failures saw them come away with no points despite starting with first-and-goal from the 1-yard line. The Jets scored on every one of their trips to the red zone. New York held the ball for nearly 40 minutes and ran 78 plays with Mike White at quarterback, gassing out the Bengals' pass rush; their pressure rate fell from 30% in the first three quarters of the game to 18.2% in the fourth. And while the Jets were penalized more frequently, the Bengals were denied an opportunity to get the ball back at the two-minute warning by an inexplicable, unnecessary roughness call against Mike Hilton.
I'm not sure there's a formula or some fatal flaw revealed by this loss. The reality is that we've seen a wide range of performances for the Bengals this season, independent of their record. They blew out the Ravens, manhandled the Steelers and gave the Packers a real scare. They also went down 14-0 against the Jaguars before coming back in the second half, turned the ball over four times in a loss to the Bears and just followed up the biggest win of the Zac Taylor era with a loss to the Jets.
As tempting as it is to write off the Jets game as an aberration and pretend that the "real" Bengals are the ones who blew out the Ravens, we can't just pick and choose the games we want as proof that they're a great team. We know they're capable of looking like one of the league's best, because we've seen that multiple times in 2021, and we also know that they're capable of laying an egg against an opponent that looks inferior on paper. Their average performance is way higher this season than it has been in seasons past, but with the fifth-highest variance in the league so far, the Bengals need to find some level of consistency.
Pittsburgh Steelers (4-3)
Chances of winning the AFC North: 14.1%
Every Steelers game, on the other hand, feels the same. Each team scores about 20 points. The Steelers run the ball for roughly 3.5 yards per carry, have a handful of plays in which their receivers don't appear to be on the same page with a frustrated Ben Roethlisberger and then suddenly explode for one successful downfield shot. T.J. Watt makes a big play, the game gets decided by a possession in the fourth quarter, and the whole cycle repeats the following week.
I'll admit that's a little simplistic, but Pittsburgh is simultaneously good enough to compete with any team and not good enough to distance itself from any team. Sunday's win over the Browns added a rare new flavor to the mix when the Steelers called for a fake field goal at the end of the first half, only for Chris Boswell -- one of the team's best players this season -- to suffer a concussion on an uncalled roughing the passer penalty. It seemed like the sort of decision that inevitably comes back to bite a team in a close game, but they managed to survive their missing kicker for a half and held on for a 15-10 victory.
By traditional measures, Roethlisberger's season looks virtually identical to what we saw from the future Hall of Famer a year ago. His completion percentage in 2020 was 65.6%. It's 65.1% this season. He averaged 6.3 yards per attempt last season and is now up to 6.6. His interception rate has moved all the way from 1.6% to ... 1.5%. After averaging 253.5 passing yards per game a year ago, he's at 254.4 this season.
QBR, though, sees a diminished player. Roethlisberger's 52.5 QBR ranked 22nd in the league a year ago, but the 39-year-old is down to 41.4 this season, which ranks 28th. What gives? It's the non-pass plays giving QBR pause. He has already taken more sacks in 2021 (14) than he did through the entirety of 2020 (13). He has also fumbled five times, which matches his 2020 total. When the offense is as low-reward as the Steelers are for most of their drives, Roethlisberger can't afford to take sacks or lose the football. Pittsburgh doesn't typically have the ability to get right once it gets off schedule.
The preseason insistence that the offensive line would undergo addition by subtraction and improve by shedding four of its five starters from 2021 has not held up. Roethlisberger's sack rate has doubled despite getting the ball out after an average of just 2.37 seconds, the quickest rate in all of football. The Steelers as a whole rank 30th in pass block win rate, down from 28th a year ago. First-round pick Najee Harris has averaged 2.03 yards before first contact, which ranks 37th out of the 50 backs with 50 carries or more this season. The line is certainly cheaper, which was hugely important for a team in dire cap straits, but it still hasn't been good.
The offense is about what we would have expected heading into the season. The defense, on the other hand, isn't doing the things we would have put down on paper. It's certainly not bad. Watt and Cameron Heyward have been excellent, and Alex Highsmith is coming into his own as Bud Dupree's replacement. The Steelers rank sixth in scoring defense and 10th in defensive DVOA; the expectations in Pittsburgh on defense are always going to be high, but they haven't struggled in the way that the Ravens have on defense this season.
The two things I think about when it comes to the Steelers' defense, though, haven't really been there. One is takeaways. They came up with a crucial fumble when Joe Schobert stripped Jarvis Landry of the football in the fourth quarter against the Browns, but that was just the sixth turnover for Minkah Fitzpatrick & Co. in seven games. They racked up 27 takeaways in 2020 and turned over opposing offenses a whopping 38 times in 2019.
Mike Tomlin's team had two or more turnovers 13 times in 16 games that season; the Steelers haven't pulled that off once this season despite playing quarterbacks Geno Smith and Teddy Bridgewater. They get Justin Fields and Jared Goff over the next two weeks, which should help their chances of breaking that streak. They can be good without forcing a high number of takeaways, but it's hard to be great.
Those missing takeaways are what helped bring down the Steelers from their 11-0 start a year ago. Over those first 11 games, they created 23 turnovers. From that point forward, they forced four takeaways in their six remaining games and went 1-5. When your offense isn't good enough to reliably march the ball down the field for 70-plus-yard scores, the onus falls on the defense to create short fields and defensive scores.
The other missing element has been pressure. The Steelers posted the league's top pressure rate (36.7%) in 2020. This season, though, they have pressured quarterbacks only 26.6% of the time, which ranks 27th in the league. It seems weird to suggest this when Watt already has 8.5 sacks, but we've seen a philosophical shift from them on defense.
In 2020, alongside that sack rate, the Steelers blitzed on 40.5% of their dropbacks, the league's highest rat. They have cut their blitz rate in half this season and sent an extra man on just 20.2% of their rushes. They are the second-best team in the league at turning pressures into sacks, which explains why Watt has been able to remain near the league leaders in takedowns, but they have gone in a different direction when it comes to pressure so far .
For Pittsburgh to make a deep playoff run, something in this formula has to change. We saw the 2015 Broncos win a Super Bowl with a more limited quarterback in the then-39-year-old Peyton Manning, but their defense forced 27 takeaways in the regular season and delivered one of the most impressive postseason performances in recent memory, generating seven takeaways and knocking down Roethlisberger, Tom Brady and Cam Newton a combined 33 times. Those Broncos also had home-field advantage throughout the postseason and got to play an injured Roethlisberger. To win with a marginal quarterback, just about everything has to go right.
We know the Steelers have that sort of performance in their range of outcomes if they can make it to January, although they have just a 1.7% chance of coming away with the top seed in the conference, per FPI. Given that the offense has shown few signs of explosiveness or looking much different than the moribund slog we saw for most of 2020, the Steelers are going to go as far as Watt & Co. can take them.
Cleveland Browns (4-4)
Chances of winning the AFC North: 11.1%
This wasn't the plan for the Browns, who were supposed to be building on last season's hot finish by ascending to the top of the AFC. They started 3-1, and even that lone loss was a game in which they outplayed the Chiefs for most of the contest before a dropped punt flipped the field and turned things around for Kansas City. After four games, the Browns mostly looked on track as one of the best teams in football.
Four games later, they look adrift. They're in last place in the AFC North after losing three of four, with their only win coming by three points over the Broncos. One of those losses was a heartbreaker against the Chargers, but Kevin Stefanski's team was blown out by the Cardinals and repeatedly frustrated by the Steelers, limiting it to one win from its three-game homestand. Three of the Browns' next four games now come on the road before their Week 13 bye, including divisional matchups against the Bengals and Ravens.
What's gone wrong shouldn't necessarily be a surprise. Before the year, I mentioned that they were one of the teams in the league most likely to decline from their 2020 record in 2021. The jury's still out, given that they went 11-5 a year ago and could go 8-1 or better the rest of the way, but some of the factors we saw as possible problems for them are popping up already. Let's run through the issues:
The Browns were lucky in close games. The 2020 team was 7-2 in games decided by seven points or fewer, something that is awfully difficult for teams to repeat year after year. Some of those games weren't as close as the final score indicated, but the Browns were certainly winning a disproportionately high percentage of the games that came down to one possession or one play. This year's team is 3-3 in those same games. Of course, just about every one of those games could have gone either way; the only one that wasn't as close as it seemed was the win over the Broncos.
The Browns were great on offense in the red zone. They scored touchdowns on 73.6% of their trips inside the 20 last season, the third-best mark in the league. It's tough to be that effective in the red zone from year to year, and in 2021, they have converted just 55.6% of their red zone possessions into touchdowns. They rank 23rd in the league in that same category.
Cleveland's offensive line was extremely healthy. One of the biggest reasons this team took a leap forward in 2020 was a much-improved offensive line, owing to the arrival of coach Bill Callahan, new starters at both tackle spots and a relatively healthy campaign. Its five starters up front missed a total of seven games all season. It was reasonable to expect the line to play well in 2021, but counting on Jack Conklin to be healthy for the vast majority of the season was a big ask.
The five starting linemen have combined to miss four games so far, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Left tackle Jedrick Wills Jr. has played more than 75% of the snaps twice. Conklin, the right tackle, missed two games and was forced out of his return against the Steelers after 21 snaps with a dislocated elbow, which is expected to keep him out for several weeks. Swing tackle Chris Hubbard, who would be the first tackle off the bench to replace Wills or Conklin, is out for the year with a triceps injury.
In reality, the injury bug has attacked the entire offense with impunity. After ranking 11th in Adjusted Games Lost on offense last season, per the Football Outsiders Almanac, the Browns have one of the league's most injured offenses. Star running backs Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt have each missed time with injuries, with Hunt currently on injured reserve. Wideout Jarvis Landry also made it to injured reserve with a sprained MCL, while Odell Beckham Jr. was out early while recovering from his torn ACL before coming in and out of games over the past month with a shoulder injury.
Quarterback Baker Mayfield s battled his own shoulder injury, one which caused him to miss the win over the Broncos in Week 7. He will need to undergo shoulder surgery to heal the injury, but the fourth-year passer is naturally hoping to put the surgery off until after the season. It's impossible to say how much the injury is affecting his performance, but that was also a concern ...
Mayfield wouldn't be as effective without all those great linemen on the field. In 2019, when he was playing behind one of the league's worst offensive lines, the 2018 No. 1 overall pick lost his confidence and comfort in the pocket and developed bad habits. The concern was that he would struggle if opposing teams pressured him more frequently in 2021.
I don't think Mayfield has really been pressured much more often in 2021 -- he's at 26.1%, just up slightly from 25.9% in 2020 -- but his numbers when under pressure have collapsed. Last season, he posted a 28.0 QBR when under duress, which was the 11th-best mark in football. This season, his QBR under pressure is all the way down to 5.1, which ranks 30th. His traditional numbers are up across the board, as his completion percentage, yards per attempt and interception rate are all improved from what we saw in 2020, but he has gone from averaging 0.17 EPA per play last season to 0.06 EPA per play this season.
The play-action game Stefanski brought to Cleveland that helped unlock Mayfield a year ago also hasn't been as productive. In 2020, Mayfield posted a 90.7 QBR using play-action, which ranked second in the NFL. He averaged 9.5 yards per attempt and threw 13 touchdown passes against just one pick. Mayfield's 42.4 QBR on play-action this season ranks 25th.
One thing that certainly wasn't clear before the season has now become obvious: Beckham's future lies elsewhere. There was speculation that the Browns would try to deal him at the trade deadline, but with $8 million in prorated salary attached for his contract, there weren't any takers. Beckham's father then took to Instagram to criticize Mayfield. On Wednesday, the Browns excused Beckham from practice amid reports that the front office was meeting with Beckham's agent.
It's clear that the Beckham move, as obvious as it seemed when the trade was made with the Giants in 2019, hasn't worked out. Mayfield's numbers have continued to be better with his top wideout off the field than they've been with him in the lineup. Beckham is averaging a career-low 6.8 yards per target, and we're now five years removed from the brilliant three-season opening to his career. At this point, a clean break is probably best for both sides, and it could come as early as Thursday.
There's one other thing I suggested in my preseason column before the season that applies here:
The Browns will be a better team, but worse luck will lead to a less impressive record. By most advanced measures I can find, they are playing better on a snap-by-snap basis this season. The 2020 Browns were outscored by 11 points. The 2021 Browns have outscored their opponents by three points. The 2020 Browns ranked 18th in DVOA, with their minus-5.7% mark placing them behind teams such as the Falcons and 49ers. The 2021 team ranks sixth in DVOA, ahead of the Packers and Titans.
In the big picture, the Browns are on the right path, even if injuries and a regression toward the mean in close games is threatening their chances of living up to lofty expectations in 2021. Stefanski and general manager Andrew Berry are building one of the league's best young cores, and the Browns are going to be competitive with anyone they play this season. Unless they suddenly get healthy or start pulling out 78% of their close games again over the remainder of the season, they might have to target 2022 for their first division title since the Bernie Kosar era.