GM DeCosta on transparency with Jackson, trading Brown, draft grades and more
With the NFL draft behind him and an offensive tackle finally signed, Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta has had some time to talk this week.
On Tuesday, as news spread that Alejandro Villanueva had agreed to a two-year deal, DeCosta was appearing on Mad Dog Sports Radio’s “Schein on Sports.” On Thursday, he sat down for an extensive virtual interview with Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio.
They talked about everything from DeCosta’s two-plus decades in Baltimore to the unpredictability of draft classes to contract negotiations with quarterback Lamar Jackson. Here are a few highlights.
Here’s the deal
In March, DeCosta was asked whether he expected Jackson’s mother, who manages his career, to represent Jackson in contract negotiations. DeCosta declined to comment and deferred to Jackson, who is signed through 2022. (Jackson has not been made available to reporters since before the Ravens’ season ended.)
Asked Thursday how Jackson’s nontraditional representation would “complicate things” for the Ravens, DeCosta said he wasn’t sure it was complicating. He also couldn’t say it was simplifying. DeCosta has served as general manager for less than three years, and a contract extension for Jackson, the 2019 NFL Most Valuable Player, would amount to by far the biggest deal in franchise history.
“I think that the biggest thing is communication, for me and Lamar to communicate,” he said. “We’ve already done a deal with Lamar. We did a rookie deal with Lamar. Now, obviously, it wasn’t the same, what we did. We understand some of the complications because we did that prior deal. This is a much different deal with a much different structure.”
Without a third party in the negotiations, DeCosta said transparency becomes even more important. He acknowledged the difficulty in having to tell players why the Ravens might not
value them at a particular level, but said having direct contact “really does improve communication.”
“I hope that if Lamar has questions, he can get the answers,” DeCosta said. “I know he has people that he trusts and respects that can help him and advise him, because this is a big deal. And we want to do it right. We want to do something he feels really good about, and we want to do something that we feel really good about as well.”
DeCosta also said the Ravens never considered taking a young quarterback early in last week’s draft, which would’ve allowed them to move on from Jackson before committing to a megadeal.
“We’ve got some good young quarterbacks that we like in Trace McSorley and [Tyler] Huntley, and obviously, Lamar, we look at him as really a tremendous person and a great talent and just a guy that we know we can build this team around,” he said. “So we’re very excited about the future. It’s just really great to have a bunch of guys working together on offense that really care, and we’re a different offense. We like that. “
Draft grades
How highly does DeCosta think of the Ravens’ eight-player draft class? “I’d probably give ‘em a C-plus, B,” he said.
It wasn’t entirely clear that he was joking. What was clear: it didn’t really matter what he thought of the group only a week after the draft. An appraisal this early doesn’t mean much.
“I mean, nobody really knows,” he said. “You know, some of the best drafts I thought we ever had ended up probably being some of the worst drafts we ever had. And then on the flip side of that, you’ll have a draft that looks average on paper, but then as you go back and look at it four, five years down the road, you just can’t believe how luck you got.
“So there’s so many factors that go into a draft. One of the biggest things is just players staying healthy and getting a chance to play. Durability is a critical thing for players. Guys that stay healthy and play usually end up playing pretty well and contributing. And then sometimes you take a guy … pretty high, and the first thing that happens to him in training camp is, he gets hurt. And that doesn’t bode well for your draft class.”
It might be hard to project how a pick will turn out. But it’s pretty easy, DeCosta joked, to tell how the draft’s treated him. He said there are typically three types of you’ve-just-been-picked conversations: the call to the player who expected to be selected, the call to the player who’s overcome with emotion, and the call to the “pissed off ” player.
Compensatory considerations
No NFL franchise has been more aggressive in pursuing compensatory draft picks than the Ravens. It’s why DeCosta was happy to sign guard Kevin Zeitler to a threeyear deal just days after the New York Giants released him; only unrestricted free agents count in the NFL’s compensatory accounting. It’s also why DeCosta waited until after the draft to pursue a tackle like Villanueva, who, had he signed earlier, might’ve cost the Ravens a projected pick in next year’s draft.
DeCosta said Thursday that he didn’t want to dive too deep into the subject. He did anyway.
“What we try to do, No. 1, is we look at the surplus or we look at the deficit — so how many players have we signed? How many players have we lost?” he explained.