Ravens safety Ar’Darius Washington has suffered a torn Achilles during offseason conditioning and will miss the entire 2025 season according to a report from NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport.
The Ravens have made no official announcement, but according to Rapoport, the injury was confirmed via an MRI. The team had begun its offseason program last month. The Ravens will hold the first of their 10 on-field voluntary OTA workouts on May 27, and head coach John Harbaugh is next scheduled to meet with the media after the May 28 workout.
Washington shared the following post to Instagram May 14:
Washington, 25, signed a restricted free-agent tender this offseason and was expected to have a significant role in the secondary even after the team selected Georgia safety Malaki Starks with its first pick in the draft last month.
Washington was largely credited with stabilizing the Ravens’ secondary this past season when he supplanted veteran Marcus Williams as a starter alongside Kyle Hamilton. Washington finished the season with 62 tackles, two interceptions and eight passes defensed in by far the most extensive action of his career. Pro Football Focus ranked Washington eighth among 98 safeties in 2024.
After the move to Washington, the Ravens went from the league’s worst pass defense in the first half of the season to one of the best in the second half of the season.
The Ravens finished 12-5 and won the AFC North for the second straight season before losing to the Buffalo Bills in the divisional round of the playoffs.
Just 5-foot-8 and 180 pounds, Washington is nonetheless a physical thumper, and his goal-line hit on Houston’s Joe Mixon on fourth down set the tone for what proved to be 31-2 Ravens rout on Christmas Day. A week earlier, Washington had upended Pittsburgh quarterback Russell Wilson near the goal line to force a critical fumble in what became a 34-17 Ravens win.
Plays such as those were why defensive coordinator Zach Orr was expected to utilize Washington in multiple ways even after the Ravens drafted Starks. Washington could play as a slot defender in nickel packages, or he could play deeper and let the versatile Hamilton or Starks float all over the defense, with one or the other possibly lining up as a dime linebacker.
Behind Washington, the Ravens are thin at safety; Sanoussi Kane, a seventh-round draft pick out of Purdue a year ago, and Beau Brade, who made the 2024 team as an undrafted rookie out of Maryland, each saw just a handful of snaps on defense as rookies. It seems likely that general manager Eric DeCosta will look to bolster the position with a veteran free agent.
The Ravens had several safety tryout candidates at their rookie minicamp last week but did not sign any.
One name to watch could be Chuck Clark, who spent six seasons with the Ravens. He is a free agent again after spending two seasons with the New York Jets, though he missed the entire 2023 season with a knee injury.
The injury is a particularly tough blow for Washington, who had earned a well-deserved raise to roughly $3.26 million, the price tag for the right-of-first-refusal tender assigned by the Ravens. Washington is set to become an unrestricted free agent next season and now will miss his entire contract year.
Initially signed by the Ravens as an undrafted rookie free agent out of TCU in 2021, Washington has endured injuries throughout his career. He was expected to have a major role on the Ravens’ 2023 team but played just two games before being shut down with a chest injury that sidelined him the rest of the regular season. (He returned to play briefly in both playoff games that season.) As a rookie, he missed much of the year with a foot injury.
Before this past season, Washington had played in just eight of 51 regular-season games across three seasons. Harbaugh had frequently stressed that if healthy, Washington could make an impact, and he finally got the chance in 2024.
“He’s always been one of those guys that, ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,'” Harbaugh had said late last season. “He’s always had that fight. Really, it’s been injuries that [have] set him back over the years. For him to be healthy now, and to get a chance to get in there and show what he can do, it’s been great to see.”
Unfortunately for Washington and the Ravens, another injury has set him back yet again.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox