I've Got Your 8th-Best RB Right Here

Imagine walking a few miles in the shoes of Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta, one of the most experienced and successful executives in the NFL.

You started the 2026 offseason by conducting the first head-coaching search of your career, the Ravens’ first coaching search in 18 years. Selecting Jesse Minter took weeks of candidate interviews and meetings/debriefings with Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, his advisory cabinet, and team president Sashi Brown. (Here’s a Ravens org chart; you can’t tell one guy in a purple tie from another without an org chart.) 

While deciding upon Minter, you were also laying the groundwork for free agency: making overtures to important in-house free agents like Tyler Linderbaum and Isaiah Likely (through their agents, though also touching base with them personally), offering futures contracts to bottom-of-the-roster players, assembling a Big Board of available veterans, finalizing a 2026 budget, and so on. 

This is not Madden Franchise Mode or fantasy football. None of these decisions were made on a whim with a click of the button. Each of these tasks required phone calls, meetings, and coordination among several departments. Think of all the hassles and stakeholders involved in buying a car: the dealerships, the sales managers, the creditors, the insurance companies, the counter offers, the paperwork. Now replace the car with an All-Pro center with a mind of his own, and imagine how the complexity exponentiates. Then imagine you are buying and selling dozens of cars as *part* of your job. 

While Minter was still settling in, you engineered the Maxx Crosby blockbuster, then figured out a way to cram that genie back into the bottle.

The Crosby trade was announced on March 6th. You, Mr. DeCosta, nixed it after his physical four days later. The trade must have required weeks of delicate negotiations among you, senior management (acquiring Crosby surely required Bisciotti’s blessing), the Raiders’ knotty front office, Crosby and his agent. Undoing the deal required a detonation squad which included the media and public relations departments. 

You signed Trey Hendrickson as soon as free agency started, just days after looking out from the shower and declaring the Crosby trade was all a dream. So there was clearly another party in the loop for all of the Crosby discussions. I picture you hammering out rough trade parameters with John Spytek at a back table at Prime 33 in Indianapolis at 2 AM during the Combine, then quietly returning a text from Hendrickson’s agent while Spytek stepped away to ask his various daddies for permission. The Crosby-Hendrickson transactions, and all of their knock-on effects (clearing cap room, last-ditch efforts to sign Linderbaum, letting other veterans leave) occupied incalculable amounts of bandwidth.

While live ammunition was flying in free agency, you had to begin serious preparations for the draft. As general manager, you did not sit in your office “grinding film.” You have a scouting department and a coaching staff for that. You watched just enough film to stay broadly informed, confer final blessings on Vega Ioane-tier prospects, and maybe adjudicate some disagreements. Heck, you may have barely watched any Fernando Mendoza film. Why bother? 

Your job during draft season, Mr. DeCosta, was to coordinate and communicate among your new coach, his new staff, college scouting director Joey Cleary and his staff, other departments (pro scouting, data/analytics, possibly the legal department to check on the prospects who crashed their Lambos into orphanages) and potentially the Bisciotti masthead. You established short-term draft needs and priorities, determined what types of players the new coaches prefer, and supervised the development of a “Big Board,” all the while trying to predict what your 31 peers around the league will do, entertaining or initiating trade offers and (of course) still negotiating with or signing free agents. It was one department meeting after another, with phone calls and some film sessions in between.

All the while, you were trying to negotiate with Lamar Jackson, who may or may not have been negotiating back. You performed a “simple extension” in March, converting most of Jackson’s 2026 salary into a bonus to free up some cap space. But Jackson’s 2027 cap figure is now $84 million as a result. You presumably called Jackson, his agent-mom, and/or his agent-mom’s lawyer’s secretary rather frequently, possibly leaving some messages, then reported back to Bisciotti/Brown. You surely have an extension offer worked up and ready for either a signature or a serious counter-offer. That offer, even if it’s unfinished and hypothetical, is yet another product of hours of meetings and discussions among several departments. 

Oh, and you were simultaneously working on a Zay Flowers extension. That effort, also still unfinished, kept getting complicated by extensions for receivers like Christian Watson and Drake London.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. You conducted April’s draft, then you supervised the signing of undrafted free agents and invited prospects like Diego Pavia to tryouts. You signed Calais Campbell and K’Von Wallace in May. Your staff probably handled the signings of most of the Ravens draft picks, but everything crossed your desk. 

You may not have been as busy in May and June as you were from January through April, Mr. DeCosta, but you remained in constant communication with Minter about remaining needs and player progress, with agents about possible extensions or other issues, and with everyone on the Jackson extension action team. If you are at your desk right now, you are monitoring waiver wires and keeping tabs on unsigned veterans, plus sending carrier pigeons around Jackson’s neighborhood. You spent Fourth of July weekend reintroducing yourself to your family and perhaps falling asleep in a boat with a fishing pole in your hand.

Now, after that long and exhausting overture, here’s a question for you, Mr. DeCosta: How much do you really know about Jahmyr Gibbs?