Ravens Center Danny Pinter Carted Off With Leg Injury Amid Unresolved Battle to Replace Tyler Linderbaum
Ravens center Danny Pinter was carted off with a right leg injury during joint practice with the Vikings, throwing Baltimore's unsettled center competition into further doubt just before Week 1.
Baltimore’s already muddled center competition just absorbed a gut-punch. Ravens center Danny Pinter was carted off the field with a right leg injury during Wednesday’s joint practice with the Minnesota Vikings at TCO Performance Center in Eagan, Minnesota, leaving a brace visible on his leg as teammates took a knee around him. The severity isn’t yet known, but the timing — 10 days before Baltimore opens the regular season — could not be worse for an offensive line still trying to sort out who replaces Tyler Linderbaum in the middle.
Pinter had been squarely in the mix for the starting job alongside Ethan Pocic and Jovaughn Gwyn, part of a three-man scramble the Ravens built from scratch after Linderbaum left in free agency for a record-setting deal with the Las Vegas Raiders. Wednesday’s session was, by most accounts, going well for him — Pinter had just sprung a lane for Derrick Henry against Minnesota’s starting defense in the same practice before he appeared to get rolled up on and needed help getting onto the cart.
Minter Has No Timeline, and History Adds to the Worry
First-year head coach Jesse Minter went to check on Pinter personally when the injury happened, but offered nothing concrete afterward. “I don’t have any updates yet,” Minter told reporters following practice. “We’ll probably, hopefully as he gets some things done, gets some tests done, and we’ll see how that shakes out.” The Athletic’s Jeff Zrebiec reported Pinter left wearing a brace on his right leg and appeared headed for further testing, with the injury believed to possibly involve the knee, though that has not been confirmed.
The uncertainty is compounded by Pinter’s medical history. The seventh-year veteran missed the entire 2023 season after fracturing his ankle in a preseason game with the Indianapolis Colts, an injury serious enough to land him on injured reserve for the full year. He returned to appear in all 17 games last season, but the new injury — on the same side of a career already interrupted once by a lower-leg fracture — is exactly the kind of red flag that makes an accurate near-term prognosis hard to give this early. Across parts of six seasons in Indianapolis, Pinter has made just 10 starts in 77 regular-season appearances, working mostly as versatile interior depth before Baltimore brought him in this offseason to compete for a starting job outright.
That leaves Pocic, a 10-year veteran who signed a one-year deal after recovering from a torn Achilles and carries 97 career starts, and Gwyn, a younger option with no NFL starts but a long-standing relationship with Ravens offensive line coach Dwayne Ledford, as the two healthy names left standing in the competition with the season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs bearing down.
What It Means for Baltimore’s Betting Markets
The Ravens have been priced as one of the AFC’s steadiest bets all offseason, and the numbers reflect a team built to win now around a healthy Lamar Jackson and Henry in the backfield. Baltimore opened as roughly a -112 favorite to win the AFC North, sits at +500 to win the AFC, and carries Super Bowl odds in the +1000 to +1100 range as of this week, with the season win total set at 11.5. None of those figures have moved as a direct result of Pinter’s injury yet, and a single practice-field injury to a non-entrenched starter competing for a job — as opposed to an established one — is unlikely to trigger real futures movement on its own.
Still, the center spot sits directly in front of Jackson on every snap, and any further attrition at the position bears watching over the next several days for bettors tracking Baltimore’s win total and division-race pricing. If Pocic wins the job cleanly and stays healthy, the impact of Wednesday’s scare likely fades into a camp footnote. If instead Baltimore is forced into September to lean on its least experienced center option, that is the kind of offensive-line uncertainty that sportsbooks and sharp bettors alike watch closely in the days before Week 1, since interior line instability in front of a mobile, high-value quarterback like Jackson is one of the more reliable line-movement triggers in the preseason market. For now, the Ravens’ outlook holds, but Pinter’s cart ride off the practice field in Eagan adds one more variable to monitor before Baltimore’s regular-season lines firm up.