Baltimore Ravens Look to Adjust Conditioning Program to Help Ease Injury List

While it’s true that every NFL team will have its fair share of injury issues over the course of a season, it is, after all, a rough and tumble sport, and the regular season has been extended, it would be fair to say that the Baltimore Ravens appear to have more concerns than most of their fellow franchisees.

Last season John Harbaugh’s side saw 25 players placed on injury reserve, which is quite astonishing, and that can’t have helped their push to make it to the post-season, with the M&T Bank Stadium team falling to an 8-9 record that brought an end to a run of four successive winning seasons (three of which led to playoff action).

When it comes to the Baltimore Ravens NFL betting odds, the sportsbooks don’t have a great deal of hope for Harbaugh’s team. They currently sit at (+2000) to clinch an unlikely Super Bowl in the NFL Futures market, and injury issues, if repeated and expansive as last time around, would pretty much make those odds something of a fallacy.

Now the Ravens are looking to change up their off-season conditioning program in the hope it will strengthen their team and prevent a repeat of last season. The head of the Ravens’ strength and conditioning coach, Steve Saunders, is keen to make changes;

“Philosophically, the program still stands on its own merits, but you just make little tweaks,”

“We’re going to say, ‘OK, we don’t know what these guys have been doing. Let’s take a little step back and maybe spend a little more time in the evaluation process, add some other things to the program.'”

Last season was the first of Harbaugh’s length tenure, 14 and a half years, that the Ravens have finished last in the AFC North, and it’s not something he wants to repeat and having his best players available to him for the lion’s share of the season is crucial to that hope.

It’s something the Ravens players are keen to see change around, with fullback Patrick Ricard commenting;

“[The coaches and organization] are conscious of the injuries we’ve had. In my opinion, you can’t do the same things over and over again and get a different result. You’re just going to be insane,”

“I think it means you can believe in the process more because you know that the coaches and the organization are trying their best to take care of us.”

An NFL season is an arduous one, especially if you are fighting for a shot at going long into the season, but any team that can keep injuries to a minimum, especially to key personnel, is giving themselves a real fighting chance, whereas as a team that elects to muddle along and hope to luck is really just asking for trouble

By all accounts, though it is early days, it’s been reported that the Baltimore Ravens team has taken to the changes in a positive manner.