A cigar dangling in his left hand, Steve Bisciotti considered the question and looked toward the horizon. Amid the serenity of a postcard-perfect day in Palm Beach, Florida, the late-afternoon sun bouncing off the sky blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean, came a nervous excitement. Someone had just asked about trading draft picks.
“I drive Eric crazy,” the Ravens owner said at the NFL owners meetings last month. The trade machine in his own head started to whir, calculations Bisciotti had learned from watching general manager Eric DeCosta, the architect of the strength-in-numbers strategy that has come to define Ravens drafts.
“I can tell you what I could turn that 14th pick into right now in a million different scenarios,” Bisciotti said, and he replayed a typical conversation with DeCosta: What if the Ravens traded down nine spots in Thursday’s first round to get another second-round pick, somewhere in the 50s? Then what if they traded out of the first round altogether, dealing No. 23 overall for No. 39 and an early-third-round pick? Wouldn’t that be something, trading away the team’s highest pick in six years for three more top-70 selections?
“You know, the phone has to ring,” Bisciotti recalled DeCosta telling him. “I said, ‘Oh, I understand that. This is a game that you can’t play by yourself. You actually need somebody to call you, right?'”
As the Ravens prepare for a draft that could stabilize a franchise reeling from a losing season — their first since 2015 — and grappling with the uncertainty of quarterback Lamar Jackson’s financial future in Baltimore, there are limits on what team officials know. They don’t know who will be available at No. 14 overall, though they have a pretty good idea. They don’t know who might call Thursday, Friday or Saturday or what they might offer. They don’t know who might listen when they call with their own proposals.
But the Ravens, maybe more than any NFL front office, see opportunity in the unknown. The draft, DeCosta said last year, is a “luck-driven process” that rewards teams that collect picks like lottery tickets. The Ravens have 10 selections in this year’s draft, including four in the top 100, and DeCosta has said that the team’s goal is to have nine to 12 overall every year. To experts around the league and even outside it, the Ravens’ conservative approach is an honest reckoning with the realities of team building and the uncertainties of the draft.
“I think there’s a lot of truth to it,” NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah, a former Ravens scout, said in a conference call last week. “I do think that every draft has some players that come in clear packaging, where I feel like you know exactly what you’re getting. There’s not a lot of them. …
“Outside of that, the vast majority of these players, it’s going to be largely dependent on where they go, how they’re used, how they’re coached, who they’re with. I think there is a lot of logic behind trying to get as many bites at the apple as you can, or using those resources to try and find those clear-packaging players. … I think the moral of the story is when you have all these picks, you give yourself a lot more options. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.”
Since DeCosta’s promotion to assistant general manager in 2012, the Ravens have drafted at least nine players in all but four years. Compensatory picks have helped them build their stockpiles; by passing on expensive homegrown free agents, the Ravens have been awarded mid-round selections that they’ve used to draft standouts like fullback Kyle Juszczyk, center Ryan Jensen and tight end Nick Boyle. The team has three of the top 13 compensatory picks in this year’s draft alone.
The Ravens have been just as willing to trade away their most precious picks. Since 2010, they’ve traded down in the first round in four drafts, down in the second round in two drafts and down in the third round in one draft. Their biggest gamble — moving into the end of the first round in 2018 to take Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson — came after moving back from No. 16 and again from No. 22. The Ravens’ 12-player class that year included three future All-Pros: Jackson, tight end Mark Andrews and offensive tackle Orlando Brown Jr.
Overall, only the Minnesota Vikings (46 picks) have drafted more players than the Ravens since 2018, according to a team spokesman. The Cincinnati Bengals are tied for second with 38. Just behind them, with 37, are the Green Bay Packers, Indianapolis Colts, Los Angeles Rams, New England Patriots and Washington Commanders. Only the Commanders haven’t won a playoff game in that period.
“If you have 10 or 12 draft picks in any given year, even if you suck at drafting, you’re probably going to hit on five or six picks,” DeCosta told former Atlanta Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff recently on his podcast, “The GM Journey.”
“Now, if you’re good at drafting, which we aspire to be, maybe you hit on nine out of 12 draft picks, which is a pretty good percentage. Now you have nine young players on your roster [as] you’re churning your roster every single year. … Once you do it a couple of times and you can get 15, 20, 25 good, young, ascending players, it’s easier to let veteran players leave.”
An academic study shaped the Ravens’ approach to the draft. In 2005, professors Cade Massey and Richard Thayer first published “The Loser’s Curse: Decision Making and Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft,” which DeCosta called a “seminal” document. In evaluating NFL draft decisions, Massey and Thayer found that traded-for players performed no better than would be expected for their draft position. And for nearly three-quarters of the trades that were evaluated, a team would have acquired more starts by trading down than by using its pick.
“In paying a steep price to trade up, teams are paying a lot to acquire a pick that is worth less than the ones they are giving up,” they wrote.
Trading down, Massey said in an interview last week, became “the No. 1 prescription that came out of that research.” He noted that attempts to replicate the study have drawn similar conclusions.
“When you’re playing the lottery, you want as many draws as possible,” said Massey, a University of Pennsylvania professor who works in the Wharton business school’s operations, information and decisions department. “You want as many tickets as possible. And it’s not all lottery, by any means, but there’s a lottery aspect of it. And it’s a lot more lottery than we often like to admit. And certainly more often than an expert wants to admit.”
About a decade ago, Massey said an NFL team asked him to determine which front office to emulate in the draft. In his research, he found little to distinguish one from another. “They were all equally good at the draft,” Massey said; the success of one draft was “almost completely unrelated” to the team’s success in the next year’s draft.
Massey referenced a concept introduced by investment strategist and professor Michael J. Mauboussin: the “paradox of skill” — the idea that in fields combining luck and skill, luck becomes increasingly important to determining success, even as skill levels rise.
The variance in NFL draft results, Massey said, is “the hallmark of a chance-driven process. And it’s chance-driven not because the scouts and the general managers don’t have skill. It’s that none of them have markedly more skill than the others. And that’s the paradox of skill. Whenever all competitors have the same degree of skill, then the outcomes are a product of chance.”
Massey, a Ravens fan who called the analytically minded organization “as sharp as there is in the NFL,” said teams seeking an edge in the draft have to look for “a different signal” amid the noise. The Ravens, along with others, have turned in recent years to GPS tracking data from companies like Catapult to better measure prospects’ top speed, acceleration, deceleration and more. Team officials have also touted their relationships at schools with coaches and support staffers, confident that their conversations produce more well-rounded player evaluations.
But until teams find new ways of considering the draft, Massey said, his best advice is to trade back. Not that Bisciotti would need any convincing. Over his three-plus-minute response to the question of trading picks last month, he joked that he studied the so-called Jimmy Johnson draft pick value chart “more than I ever studied in school.” He talked about standard deviations. He threw out numbers like he was a Wall Street floor trader.
Bisciotti’s hope, as he explained it, was that the Ravens could draft their fourth-, fifth- or sixth-ranked prospect at No. 14 overall. Giving up the pick would likely mean losing a potential top-10 prospect from their haul of three potential top-50 prospects. But if they traded well enough, Bisciotti said, they could end up with five top-50 prospects anyway.
“I hope the phone rings,” he said. “I hope the phone rings.”
