Baltimore and the first round trade back – we don’t do it anymore (the emotional response)
I don’t know about you but I greatly anticipate the Ravens first round pick every year. Watching film on players all year leads me to wait with baited breath for draft day and our pick to roll around – not actually with baited breath, I’m pretty impatient for the next draft the minute Mr Irrelevant’s card is turned in, but I’m pretty excited.
As a fan from the other side of the Atlantic I was also, always grateful that the draft was one of the few big calendar NFL events that didn’t require a day off work the following day. All that changed in 2010 when the NFL decided to move the draft to primetime – cue the most egregious overuse of the word primetime in television history. When I wrote the word I think even said it in my head with the kind of gusto usually reserved for Brent Musberger and the words “looking live”.
Irked, I booked the day off work on the Friday following the first round and waited up for the 2010 NFL Draft to kick off. If editions of the draft had Friends episode style titles it would be named “The one with Tim Tebow” and there was much talk and build-up based around the Florida superstar – a little too much for somebody I thought was a winner but a very unlikely NFL quarterback. I was glad we had Flacco and wouldn’t be drafting him. I didn’t realise that Tim Tebow would still ruin my draft night anyway.
As our pick rolled around, Tebow was still on the board, and then I saw it - through my bleary eyes at 4am, the yellow and the word TRADE flashed up on my screen. We had moved the pick. I had waited all day and all night just to see us trade out of the first round altogether. And more than that – all the way back to the middle of the second round, which I would also have to stay up for the next night. And then the football world went mad for Josh McDaniels and Tim Tebow.
The next year I was up again, as I have been for every draft I might add, but I’m telling a story here. That year, we had “the one where our time expired” and I was worried I might not see another Ravens first round selection, thankfully though we did turn in Jimmy Smith’s card. But in 2012 it did happen again. I waited up all night only to see us trade back from 29, this time only to 35 but still out of the first round and with no pick on the best night of the year.
It is these experiences that have left me scarred, like a jibbering wreck of nerves as our pick comes around on the first night of the draft, not because of who we might pick but if we will pick at all. Okay, I exaggerate quite a lot but I do go into draft night expecting a trade back and sometimes to see us not pick at all – it was why I rejoiced in 2018 when we were the ones doing the 1st round pick sniping and to pick one of my red stars too in Lamar. So I was ecstatic even before I knew what was to come.
I recently saw a lot of people on Twitter and draft experts speculating that we might move back again this year and it got me thinking – I haven’t actually been as frustrated as I was in 2010 and 2012 since. There is a sort of Ravens Flock groupthink that we trade back a lot but we haven’t actually traded back out of the first round since 2012 and didn’t do it much before then.
It also jogged my memory of an old quote from one of the members of the Ravens front office, I believe it was when they were asked about moving up from pick 6 in the 2016 draft or it might have been about moving up for Matt Ryan in 2008. They said that they are reluctant to give up future first round picks after the experience of not having one in 2004, after the Boller trade the year previously.
Those first round trade back deals a decade ago were not very successful when you look back and think specifically about how the front office might have felt about them. The deal in 2010 landed us Sergio Kindle and all Ravens fans will remember that disaster. But I think at the time it wouldn’t have been thought of as a total waste from this front office that treasures extra picks. We used the picks we got from Denver on Ed Dickson and Dennis Pitta – both played an important role in future successful Ravens teams. I think this emboldened the front office to consider it again in 2012 and when they had the opportunity, they took it. Courtney Upshaw, the pick at 35 after the trade back was entirely more successful than Kindle, certainly in the short term anyway as he became a part of our Superbowl team. In the long term though, he was not what we would have wanted from our first selection of the draft. And, with the pick we got back from Minnesota we picked Gino Gradkowski, who I always hoped would do well but never locked down a starting gig.
When you look at both trades, I think they’ve ultimately made the front office a little gun shy of trading back out of the first round entirely from the 20s. Kindle and Upshaw did not meet the standard of a Ravens number one pick, the standard that Humphrey and Stanley have got us back to in recent years. I think a large part of this is because of the trade back and the players you lose out on. Harrison Smith, Devin McCourty and Rob Gronkowski were all taken between the picks we were supposed to have and the picks we did have in 2010 and 2012.
My hypothesis is that, because of this experience in 2010 and 2012 (the Ravens front office has so many consistent faces who will remember) the Ravens have, in recent years, been staring at a cluster of players they think are worth their pick and instead of trading back to pick up at least one of them as they are want to do across the rest of the draft, they’ve stood pat and picked their favourite.
This does feel a bit far-fetched though – the front office aren’t fans – surely they don’t react like this. Read the next post for my less emotional response.