This year, I’m putting together a draft report that will focus on the 2022 prospects from a Ravens perspective. Evaluating prospects generically without a team in mind can be difficult… That’s why each of my reports will feature a section that makes a projection about the player and then projects their fit with the Ravens. You’ll get the full report later in this draft season but when I designate a red star player – one who fits perfectly with the Ravens, I’ll publish that report early in one of these pieces entitled “Play Like a Raven”. Here’s the first, on Daxton Hill…

By Michael Crawford (@abukari)

In this piece, I take a look at snap participation for the Ravens defensive backs in the 2020 and 2019 seasons. I also try to unpack what roles they ask these players to fill and in which situations they use them. This may be the most important thing I say in the entire piece - thank you to @yoshi2052 (on Twitter) for providing this data. If not for him, none of what you’re about to read would exist. What’s in a name? Defensive Backs or DBs, includes Cornerbacks (CB) and Safeties (S). But those lines can blur. Sometimes a player listed as a CB may play like a S or the other way round.

Lamont Brightful, David Pittman, Lardarius Webb, Asa Jackson, Christian Thompson, Tray Walker – all I knew before setting off on this journey through the Ravens draft tendencies was that Ozzie loved a small school corner, he could not get enough of them. Though looking at this list, a one of out of six hit rate and you’re glad they stopped doing this as frequently as they used to. In fact one of the overall tendencies I’ve noticed, is that recently, we’ve reduced the frequency with which we take a player of any position from the small school ranks.

We’ve all done it. Ran a mock draft on PFF or The Draft Network, check the predictive board to see which group of players is likely to be taken next, and calculate that we can forego taking that guy we love until the 5th round. We can sit tight at our spots and execute advantageous trades based on the deviation the simulators have baked in, and not worry about other opportunistic teams trading above us to take guys we might potentially like. We are the only team allowed to trade on the board. Maybe we have a go six or seven times, maybe post version 6.2 to twitter as we got Devonta Smith to fall to 27 that time.