The Baltimore Ravens player with the most to prove this season isn’t a quarterback or a first-round pick. In The Athletic’s July 20 league-wide look at the player with the most on the line for all 32 teams, Jeff Zrebiec named Roquan Smith — the two-time first-team All-Pro who has anchored Baltimore’s defense since 2022.
The case is built on an uncomfortable set of numbers. Smith finished 2025 with 130 tackles but no sacks and no interceptions, the first season of his career without either. That tackle total was his lowest since 2019, when he played only 12 games. “He’s coming off a season where the defense he leads struggled mightily and he finished without a sack or interception for the first time in his career,” Zrebiec wrote. “Smith turns 30 in April. Cutting him next offseason would create $20 million in salary-cap savings. He needs a big year to silence the talk that he’s on the decline.” Smith signed a five-year, $100 million extension before the 2023 season; that cap math means 2026 is effectively a referendum on the rest of the deal.
The league’s evaluators aren’t ready to write him off. ESPN’s annual survey of executives, coaches and scouts ranked Smith the No. 2 off-ball linebacker for the second straight year, behind only San Francisco’s Fred Warner. “He knows what’s coming before the play and plays with reckless abandonment,” one AFC coach told ESPN. Smith and Bobby Wagner are the only players in football with at least 130 tackles in each of the last six seasons.
What separates a good season from a championship-level one here is the splash plays, and Baltimore is betting Smith rediscovers them without help. The front office used none of its 11 draft picks on an inside linebacker and made no move at the position in free agency, leaving second-year man Teddye Buchanan — 93 tackles in 14 games as a fourth-round rookie before a late-season ACL tear — penciled in next to Smith. A defense that struggled through 2025 opens camp with its veterans reporting July 28, and its identity still runs through No. 0. Volume tackling keeps a linebacker employed; the takeaways and negative plays Smith produced from 2020 through 2024 are what made Baltimore’s defense feared. That’s the version this roster was built around.
For fantasy purposes, Smith’s 130-tackle floor kept him in the IDP LB1 conversation even in a down year, and the zero-sack, zero-interception line is more likely regression bait than a new normal for a player peers still rank No. 2 at the position. The swing factor is Buchanan: if he returns fully from the ACL tear and grows into a larger role, he could siphon tackle volume, which makes him one of the better late-round IDP stashes in the division.
