McLaurin, Gibson Shine Bright As Baltimore Dims the Lights

First and foremost, good news everybody.. The Ravens took care of business and I do not need to shave my head live on the podcast.

Yea, I know.. I bet against my team..Not the first time I've taken 'blood money' on a DC sports bet. SORRY, a pissed off Ravens team coming off a rough loss vs the Chiefs was all I needed to know.

Leading up to the game Sunday, reports out of Ashburn suggested the coaching staff alerted Dwayne Haskins that he needs to improve his play or risk being benched. Sunday was a slight improvement, but there are still things to be concerned about.

Let's take a look at Dwayne's Week 4 Passing Chart, courtesy of Nextgenstats.NFL.com:

As you can probably tell, there aren't a lot of completions downfield. There was a connection with Terry McLaurin for 39 yards in the 4th quarter, but besides that there wasn't much stretching of the field going on. To be fair, the biggest knock on DH so far has been Completion %, and Haskins did well in that regard Sunday.

32/45 or 71%, is much better than his season average of 61%. That is improvement. That is what we like to see.

What we DON'T like to see is a completion on 4th down that has no chance of converting.

29/32 completions were 10 yards or less.

Here we see Dwayne throw an out route to a receiver that has no chance to score on a 4th & Goal. This is an example of why COMP% can be misleading.

There has to be a thought of "He probably won't score here" but it is thrown anyways. Gotta throw it up to the end zone here and give your team a chance to score, especially on 4th down.

It was nice to see him raise the COMP%, but hopefully Dwayne can find a happy medium of taking chances and being safe. 29 completions inside 10 yards isn't going to win games offensively.

Antonio Gibson FINALLY got more than our magic number of 15 touches and he delivered.

13 rushes for 46 yards and a rushing touchdown to go along with 4 catches for 82 yards.

Not to jump the gun here, but Gibson is quickly solidifying himself as one of the most dynamic offensive weapons in the league. We'll see if they can get his touches closer to 20 touches/game. If so, we believe Gibson (6'2 220 lbs, 4.4 speed) can produce at a star level.

As for the wide receiver position, Terry McLaurin keeps reminding us he is a top 10 receiver. Like Gibson, he was relied upon in both usage rate and production Sunday.

14 Targets - 10 Receptions - 118 Yards

So what I'm trying to say is pretty simple. Do whatever you can to give McLaurin and Gibson the ball. Find a way! These two are special. As the season goes along, I think we can all agree Washington would like to find cornerstones for this franchise moving forward. QB may be a question mark at the moment, but they have found 2 players to build the offense around.

The LA Rams come to town next week. Should be fun. Stay tuned.

Photo Cred- Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images