Close, but no cigar. That has been the motto for this era of Baltimore Ravens teams. Since 2019, when Eric DeCosta became the executive vice president and general manager and selected QB Lamar Jackson with his first draft pick, their 68 regular season wins rank 3rd-most. However, they’ve gone just 3-5 in the postseason, which is as much their fault as it is Patrick Mahomes’.
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The top three teams in regular season wins from 2019 to 2024: K.C., Buffalo, and Baltimore. The top two teams in playoff losses over the same span: Buffalo, with six, and Baltimore, with five. This year, Mahomes beat both of those teams in the postseason.
That’s how good the Kansas City Chiefs have been during DeCosta’s tenure in the Charm City front offices. Because of that, remaining competitive is tough, but DeCosta has found ways to do it.
On The McShay Show, he talked about why he loves the start of the offseason because it’s the point where he can once again become part of the “solution” after sitting “like a hostage” during the season when he can’t make any moves.
“When the season ends, I’m all about how do we get better, what’s the solution? What are the areas we can exploit? How do we find value? What are the small little margins we can play in to get better as a football team… We always try to be innovative, we’ll look at the roster, how do we save money, who should we sign, what comp picks do we have, how do we get more comp picks?”
It’s all about those small margins, and the Chiefs are a perfect example of that: they are currently riding an NFL-record streak of 17 straight wins in one-score games. Maintaining an advantage in those small margins has become even more difficult in this age of player empowerment and increased player movement. DeCosta discussed navigating that in the 2024 offseason.
“Last year, we lost a slew of good players on defense… but you know what, we replaced them. We traded Morgan Moses on offense, we let Kevin Zeitler walk, well you know what, our running game was better than it was last year and Lamar was sacked less! … The reality of it is, if you have a good team, you can’t keep everybody, you become a victim of your own success by drafting really good players,” he added.
Luckily for DeCosta, he wasn’t thrown into the fire with this GM position. That has helped him find success early on in the big Baltimore job. Prior to taking the gig in 2019, he spent seven years as the assistant GM to Ozzie Newsome, a Hall of Fame tight end and one of the greatest front office execs in NFL history.
Newsome taught him a crucial lesson that helped him in his first year on the job in 2019 when there was another exodus of key defensive players.
“I would say you sometimes do what’s right for the organization even though you know it’s the wrong thing to do… I think sometimes you have to just accept that you have to make the hard decision… Ozzie just has this way of when the time comes we got to do it… And so I had to just eat it. I had to do it because it was the right thing to do. It was very hard. And I learned that from Ozzie,” he continued.
Eric DeCosta will once again have his work cut out for him if he’s going to give this team the boost it needs to leapfrog Patrick Mahomes and company. The Ravens have all their draft picks, but they’ll be picking near the end of each round again. They also have the 10th-fewest cap space (just over $5 million) in the league for 2025.
