Baltimore Ravens left tackle Ronnie Stanley missed four games last season, and even in his return, he said he didn't feel 100% all season. The last four seasons, he has been plagued by injury, playing just six games in 2020, one game in 2021, 11 games in 2022 and 13 games last year.
The knee, ankle and shoulder injuries that kept him off the field for parts of the last four years resulted in him taking a pay cut, saying he wanted to stay in Baltimore to prove himself while healthy. His base salary went from $11 million to $3 million, and he will be a free agent one year earlier after making 2025 a void year.
Even when he was on the field, the issues that lingered from the injuries impact his play, and he was not ready to leave the Ravens while "not playing to [his] capability."
Heading into the 2024 season, he says he's "been feeling more like myself than I have in previous years."
"For the most part, just to be able to feel like myself physically has made me a lot happier," Stanley said, via the New York Times. "I guess being in that state when I was younger, it wasn't as savory as a moment or savory as a time, just knowing that, 'OK, your career could have been over after one play' and not knowing if I was ever going to feel like that again physically or athletically. To truly feel like that and be out there and just notice myself getting better every day and feeling more like my old self every day, it definitely makes me happy."
While Stanley said he tried not to let the on-field struggles linger off the field, he admitted that his game day performance sticks with him even when the clock hits all zeroes.
"To be able to perform at the standard I know I can perform at, it just makes me feel more at ease and confident in what I'm doing and that I'm going in the right direction," Stanley said, which is something he is hopeful he can do this year.
The 30-year-old said he is finally at the point where he feels he can identify where he needs to improve, and while it may be small, he is experiencing "growth" each day, something he says he hasn't felt like since 2020. He called last year a "guessing game," saying it was difficult to pinpoint how he would recover.
Stanley admitted that pushing himself to play last year may not have been the smartest move and "definitely caused more challenges," but he was done missing time. The veteran "definitely" didn't feel like himself last year, and getting that feeling back was not an overnight process that he really noticed once football activities resumed.
"It's more of a gradual thing. I think in the offseason, I definitely felt that, where it was like, "Oh, yeah, I feel really good athletically. I feel like I'm doing these drills on the field really well. I feel like I'm making sharp cuts, being able to get low and be flexible," he said. "But it's all different when you have to translate it to football. Not until I came back here, really through OTAs and just getting back into football stuff, is really when I started to feel more confident about all of that training and that rolling over to actual production."
Now the former first rounder is aiming for a full season of production, where he can help the Ravens offensive line that saw changes this offseason.
