The Baltimore Ravens have many areas of need that they need to fill during the 2022 offseason. After an 8-9 finish in 2021 that saw them lose six-straight games, they know that they have to keep up with the rest of the NFL, which is evolving every day.
During his end of season press conference, general manger Eric DeCosta was asked about what priority areas for the team will be as the offseason continues. He touched on multiple different points, but seems to have a plan as to how he wants to approach things.
“We have some work to do in a lot of different areas. I think everything is fixable, and it can be improved and built and strengthened, for sure. The first thing we have to do is look at the salary cap. We spent some time down in the Caribbean last week, I guess it was, and we discussed the salary cap. We discussed contracts. We discussed potential deals, ways of freeing up more money. I think we’ll have enough salary cap room to do everything we need to do, to do responsible, good deals that work for the club but also work for the player. We’ve never been a big, huge free agency team. We’ve dabbled in it a little bit. We’ll continue to look for players that benefit the club in different ways, certainly. Right player, right price, as always. We’ll continue to look at players that we have whose contracts are expiring to try to get some deals done. I’m comfortable with that process. We’re excited. We have nine draft picks at this time in the first four rounds. We’re not sure exactly how that’s going to break down and where those picks will be in the first four rounds, but we know we have nine picks in the first four rounds. For me, as I look at it and as we project and we model and see where those picks will fall … If you think about our list, our master list, if we have 100 players ranked, we feel like all of those nine picks will probably come within our Top 80 players. So, if we do our job correctly, if we stack the board the right way [and] if we’re able to play the combinations correctly – what I mean by that is drafting the players with an eye toward maximizing each pick positionally – I think we have a really good chance to build some serious and quality depth to help this team be the best it can be.”