Ravens General Manager interviewed on The Todd McShay Show and shared all things Ravens.
Baltimore Ravens General Manager joined Todd McShay and Steve Muench on The McShay Show: The Decision Maker Series for an interview. Below are some highlights of their conversation:
On the Process and Draft-Night Story of Selecting Lamar Jackson:
“I first think it goes back to just the fall evaluation and we had a couple scouts — Milt Hendrickson being one, Dwaune Jones be the other guy — they went into Louisville that year, came back and basically said [Lamar Jackson] is a special athlete. And this guy can do a lot of things that are unique at our level of football. Now, there’s some things to work on of course like all players but he’s a unique player and so I watched him, Joe Hortiz, our College Director at the time watched him. At some point we brought him to Ozzie [Newsome]. Ozzie looked at him. I would typically bring players to Ozzie to look at. He and I always worked together in the draft for 25 years before I became GM and he became a player that we were very interested in. … That year what I remember most is Lamar did not have an agent. And we wanted to bring him into Baltimore — we’re very secretive in Baltimore, we don’t want to be connected to players. We’ll never really — if you see us connected to a player that probably means we’re not connected to a player. So, I never want to be connected to anybody. So the challenge was how do we get Lamar Jackson to come visit us in Baltimore? We didn’t bring any other quarterbacks in that year. We did like some quarterbacks, we figured they wouldn’t be there when we picked. So, we felt like Lamar might be the one guy that had a chance to be there in the twenties when we picked. … We brought him into Baltimore — the best thing about a player that doesn’t have an agent: there’s no leaks. No one knew that Lamar Jackson spent a day and a half with us in Baltimore. … At some point then as we got closer to the draft, the idea was to get as many picks as we could to trade back as many times as we could — either take Lamar or draft another player, but have a backup plan and we might get back in and [Philadelphia Eagles General Manager] Howie Roseman — a guy that always makes trades … I learned from the Joe Flacco trade that the eighth pick we went back to 26, we went back up to 22, we got Flacco, that if you assess league value, you can go back and still get your quarterback. And so the idea was we were going to do the same thing with Lamar as we did with Joe. … We end up drafting Hayden Hurst at 25, Kevin Byrne our PR guy wanted us to go downstairs to the press conference and [we say], ‘Kevin, let’s just hold off.’ The scouts and coaches, they thought the draft, they thought we were done. So, Ozzie and I, who always sits at the head of the table, still does, I sit to his right, [Owner] Steve Bisciotti sits across the way talking to [Head Coach] John [Harbaugh], they’re high-fiving, they’re happy, whatever, I looked at Ozzie and I go, ‘Let’s call Howie,’ and he said, ‘You want to,’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I call Howie, Howie says, ‘I want to do it.’ So, I looked at Ozzie, I said, ‘get Lamar on the phone.’ Ozzie called Lamar, I’m on the phone with Howie, we did the trade, we turned it in. No one even in the room knew that we were doing it. No one is paying attention. And all of a sudden I go, ‘hey guys, we just got Lamar Jackson.’ And the room just went crazy.”
On Building a Team Around Lamar Jackson as a General Manager:
“So, you try to figure out what he does best and then what kinds of players he likes to throw the ball to. And so in his case, it’s actually coincidental but also we were lucky that he loves to throw the ball to tight ends. So, we had drafted Hayden Hurst — ended up trading Hayden — but Hayden and Mark Andrews, so he had these like, really comfort pieces for him. And then offensive line wise, we drafted Mark Andrews and we drafted Orlando Brown. We had Ronnie Stanley and Kevin Zeitler. We built an offensive line around him that suited what we do which is run the football. We believe in having good backs so we added backs … and we always try to add speed to the field. We feel like Lamar being the type of player he is, he presents so many challenges for linebackers and the front, getting guys outside, we drafted Hollywood, we drafted Zay, we drafted ‘Bate,’ we’ve allocated a lot of resources. We don’t have that, the one piece we probably missed on is that big X presence. We’ve never really had that. We tried to find that guy, that guy doesn’t grow on trees. Hard to find those guys, right? That’s probably the one thing, but for us it’s always been, okay, offensive line first and foremost, keep it strong. … Running backs, tight ends, and receivers, but then also I think on defense, we’ve always been a stingy defense in terms of preventing the run. We’re a ball control team. We like to control the ball, four-minute, six-minute, whatever it is. We want to make sure if we get into the fourth quarter of a game and we have the lead, we’re tough to play against. We want to choke the other team out, basically. … So, part of that is not letting the other team control the ball. … But what we saw this year with Lamar and the growth with Lamar is we became a team this year that could come back from double-digit deficits. Which was never really been — we’ve morphed under Todd Monken and all the different things that we do offensively. Lamar has improved every year as a passer. … And we went from being a very run-centric offense to being a very balanced team this year that can score in many different ways.”
Toughest Lesson Learned from Ozzie Newsome:
“I would say you sometimes do what’s right for the organization even though you know it’s the wrong thing to do. And what I mean by that is like we had a player that historically was just one of the great Ravens of all time, Anquan Boldin, we traded for Anquan, he was a total stud as a person, on the field of the field, just epitomized what it meant to be a Raven. Like a guy that when you went into Pittsburgh you wanted Anquan. And the reality of it is we were in a bad cap situation and we had to trade him and we didn’t get much for him. And it was a horrible football decision. But we had to do it. It was hard and I think sometimes you have to just accept that you have to make the hard decision. We might have made it work, we could have probably finagled some contracts, done some cap deals, we probably would have put ourselves in a worse position in future years had we done that and Ozzie just has this way of when the time comes we got to do it. So my first year as GM, 2019, I had just taken over, January 19 I took over and got to the first day of the new league year and we lost Za’Darius Smith, Terrell Suggs, Eric Weddle, and C.J. Mosley. Four legit Pro Bowl players. We couldn’t sign them back. I tried to sign C.J., we couldn’t, Za’Darius went as a free agent, I had to cut Eric Weddle, and Terrell Suggs signed with Arizona because he wanted to go back to Arizona. And I was just getting crushed. New on the job, ‘what the hell is this guy doing?’ It was hard. And I could have finagled a way to keep those guys, some of those guys on the team, probably, I could have overpaid C.J., I could have probably kept Weddle for another year who I was very close with, we might have overpaid Suggs, but it wasn’t the right thing to do at that moment for the club. And so I had to just eat it. I had to do it because it was the right thing to do. It was very hard. And I learned that from Ozzie.”
On Reportedly Claiming WR Diontae Johnson After Cutting Him:
“People were like, ‘What the hell are the Ravens doing? They cut the guy. He goes to Houston and gets cut, and the Ravens claim him. He can’t play for anybody now.’ Well, we did that because there’s a small chance that he signs a contract for more than $2.5 million, and if he does that, he qualifies for a comp pick. So those are the things that really motivate me. How do we gain a small advantage? How do we gain a big advantage? You can go get Derrick Henry, you get a huge advantage. For me, part of the excitement is, how do we just keep getting all these small advantages that roll into something big?”