Baltimore Ravens: Orlando Brown Jr. the most shocking rookie in 2018?

After one of the worst pre-draft workouts anyone has ever seen, is Baltimore Ravens rookie tackle Orlando Brown Jr. the most shocking 2018 rookie?

Watching Orlando Brown Jr.’s tape from his time at Oklahoma, you would have never guessed how badly he would perform at the 2018 NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.

While Baker Mayfield — his teammate at Oklahoma who he spent the past few years protecting — was ascending to the number one overall spot in the Draft, Brown’s Combine sent him plummeting down draft boards and left some wondering if he would even be drafted at all.

Brown ran a 5.85-second 40-yard dash, which isn’t really that important considering he plays offensive line and won’t find himself sprinting 40-yards downfield in a straight line very often, but it was his 19.5-inch vertical jump and 6’10” broad jump that had everyone wondering whether or not he cared about his conditioning and training at all.

After an historically bad Combine performance, Brown went from being a player considered a first-round tackle to potential undrafted free agent candidate. At 6-foot-8, 345 pounds, who would take a chance on a guy with absolutely no athleticism to go up against some of the best pass rushers in the NFL?

Thankfully for both Brown and the Baltimore Ravens, the college tape was trustworthy.

Brown’s father, the late Orlando Brown, was an undrafted free agent of the Cleveland Browns in 1993 and stayed with the team during the first years of them transforming into the Baltimore Ravens. A 6-foot-7, 360 pound tackle, Brown certainly took after his father in terms of his size and looked like he would carry the mantle as another great NFL linemen.

As fate would have it, the Baltimore Ravens were armed with a ton of draft picks in 2018 and had the chance to use a third-round choice on a legacy player, a young tackle whose father meant so much to the franchise in the transition years.

It probably means more to Brown to play for the Ravens than any of us know, and to be selected in the third-round was probably a bit of a shock, even for him after the Combine he had.

As a third-round pick and with the Combine he had, the expectations for Brown this season were not overly high. At least, they weren’t high from the outsider’s perspective anyway.

Brown has really done a great job for the Ravens this season, not allowing a single sack in 534 snaps and allowing just one hit on the quarterback overall.

Playing the right tackle position, Brown looks like he’s picking up right where he left off at Oklahoma, where he was stonewalling pass rushers on their way to the Heisman trophy-winning Mayfield.

This is an important exercise in trusting the tape. Brown was a very good-looking prospect at Oklahoma and a poor workout obviously scared teams off. Not the Ravens.

The Ravens invested more in Brown than perhaps any other team would have been willing to. They had the luxury of a number of additional draft choices early on, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t stick their necks out there a bit for Brown, who was getting yelled at for ‘loafing’ between drills at the Combine.

It’s hard to blame him for that, if he was feeling discouraged by the rest of his workout.

It looks like the Ravens got the player everyone thought Brown could be, and then some. It’s not easy to play tackle as a rookie in the NFL, much less moving from the left side to the right side where you often face a team’s best rusher.

Brown has stepped up in a big way ad, in my estimation, is one of the most shocking rookies of the 2018 season.