Baltimore and the first round trade back – we don’t do it anymore (the rational response)

In my last post, I wrote that the Ravens don’t trade back out of the first round anymore because they are emotionally burdened by the mistakes of the past. But a small part of me keeps prodding that the premise is ridiculous – the front office aren’t fans. They don’t harbour deep-seated, historic misgivings of times gone by. They are calm, calculated and treat every draft or even every trade offer on it’s merits alone, don’t they?

The non-emotional side of my brain started searching for another reason the Ravens might have become less enamoured with trading back out of the first round. And the answer came from another fan-scar.

We have always struggled to sign our home-grown players to long-term contracts but in the past even the ones we know that we would keep on the franchise tag have been a concern. Wally Williams aside, two stars of noughties drafts - Chris McAlister and Terrell Suggs were both tagged twice before they signed long term deals. Then in later years we also tagged Haloti Ngata, Ray Rice and Justin Tucker before signing them to long term deals.

The first rounder fifth year contractual option has changed this landscape drastically. If you consistently hit on first rounders, as the Ravens do as well as any team, then that fifth year option really helps. The Ravens could have just got better at negotiating contracts for their important players early and before they break out – and I think they have. But I also think it’s no coincidence that we see more and more players signed before they actually play out their fifth year option.

Tagging someone twice is now prohibitively expensive and players don’t fear it as much, but first rounders who have played up to their billing, towards the middle of their contract, are staring down the barrel of playing on two separate one year deals – their fifth year option and a possible franchise tag. These two years of uncertainty were what we needed in the past to get McAlister and Suggs to sign long term deals, with the threat of it helping us with Ngata, Rice and Tucker.

It’s all about leverage and whether the players are motivated enough to sign away a possibly lucrative trip to free agency for some long term stability sooner. So, in the same way that major league baseball clubs have leverage over young players in arbitration and get long term deals done that span those arbitration years and beyond, NFL teams now have more leverage over their young stars that pan out. They can offer a deal that gives players longer term security, eliminating the possibility of playing out a fifth year option before being tagged, but also gives the team a discount over true market value if that player hit free agency and they had to bid to retain them.

This could well have had a knock-on effect on trading out of the first round. Since the new CBA was instituted there has only been one occasion when there were more than two trades back and out of the first round from pick 20 onwards. And many of the times it happened, serial trade-back candidates Seattle and New England were responsible. It’s possible that the Ravens, bullish about their chances of hitting on their first pick, don’t want the hassle of extending that player without the leverage of a fifth year option first before a franchise tag. Especially now that they have managed to use this leverage to sign Ronnie Stanley and Marlon Humphrey to long term deals. And it appears other teams have followed this strategy too. It does happen but its not as frequent as you might think, often for very good value and future picks.

Of course we are yet to see how the new CBA truly affects team leverage in these situations – I think Humphrey and Stanley give us some clues though. Prior to 2018 if a player was picked in the top 10, their fifth year option would have been close to franchise tag value, regardless of player performance in the league. If picked after the top 10 the fifth year option was significantly cheaper. So you could have two pro bowl calibre players, but one would be paid significantly more than the other because they were picked in the top 10.

This means the player picked in the top 10 has much more leverage in contract negotiations but still not enough to force a free agency exit – this can be seen from the fact that Stanley signed his extension after Marlon Humphrey, both in October this year, despite Stanley having been picked a whole year before Humphrey. Stanley could afford to wait until well into his fifth year before signing the extension but didn’t want to play a second year on a one year deal, as lucrative as it would have been. Stanley then showed why players don’t want to play under so much contract uncertainty, promptly suffering a season-ending ankle injury.

The new CBA now changes the landscape for all first round picks – if those players make the pro bowl in their first three seasons in the league, their fifth year option is comparable to Stanley’s fifth year option as a top 10 pick prior to 2018. This means teams picking at the end of round one don’t have as much leverage to get long term contracts signed with their mid-late first round picks that pan out, in the same way that the Ravens did with Humphrey, but they still have enough to get a deal done before they have to make a franchise tag decision.

Consequently the 32nd overall pick that becomes a pro bowl calibre player is still more likely to get a long term contract done and be a fixture on the team that drafted them for a decade than an equally productive 33rd overall pick. I think its enough to make teams think twice about trading back out of the first round, UNLESS, there is great value in the trade or if the team trading back is Seattle or New England.