“I never really had a chance to compete at Pitt, which is all I really wanted,” Flacco said. “I just wasn’t going to get a chance to play there and it was clear. So I said, ‘I gotta get outta here because I didn’t want to wait two more years and finally play in my fifth year of college. I didn’t want to sit around. I believed I could play not only in college but in the NFL. I never, ever stopped believing that.”
“I figured at that point there was no way I’d be a top round draft pick coming from Delaware, but I just needed an opportunity and I could still play in the pros. I definitely was still thinking about the NFL, and I always figured I’d latch on someplace if I had a chance to play.”
Flacco came home to Audobon and his family paid the $30,000 out of state tuition from New Jersey to enroll at Delaware, and he essentially spent the 2005 season watching from the weight room and waiting his turn to get on the field as a junior in 2006 while working on his degree in accounting.
“I felt like I needed to play,” Flacco said. “And I realized I was gonna be a guy picked late in the NFL draft no matter what once I decided to take a year off and commit to Delaware. That was OK with me. I was willing to prove myself. I was willing to do whatever it took.”
Joe Linta, a Connecticut-based agent, found Flacco after his junior year at Delaware and told him he might go as high as the 3rd round if he had a big senior year, but expected that it would be as late as the 5th round.
“I’m not really sure there were a lot of people in the league who thought he was a first round quarterback,” Douglas said. “We heard all of the people talking after we picked him who thought he was a quitter at Pittsburgh. But they didn’t do their homework like we did. It’s easier for a scout to say that he’s not a competitor because he left someplace that was a bad situation or that he has a flat personality. It’s easier to say that than it is to go the extra mile up to Newark and spend time trying to get the real story.”
In early April 2008, the Ravens decided to bring Flacco down to Owings Mills for a traditional pre-draft visit. Essentially, yet another in a series of job interviews for those players who hope to make the team invest a valuable draft pick on the last weekend of the month.
A week before the visit, Cameron put together a mini playbook and sent it to Flacco with a note to “memorize” it.
Flacco drove down to Owings Mills and pulled into the driveway of The Castle.
His first impression?
“Honestly, I said, ‘Holy shit! Look at this place!”
Flacco had already visited St. Louis and Minnesota on his NFL tour and was blown away by how much nicer and more grand the Ravens’ training facility and offices were. The locker room, the fields, the offices – it was all so plush, so big league, so professional. It certainly wasn’t like anything he’d seen at Delaware or Pittsburgh or Audubon High in New Jersey.
It was like the difference between driving into Atlantic City and flying into Las Vegas.
When Flacco got upstairs in Cameron’s office, he had the playbook that had been sent to him, but wanted to do anything in his power to avoid going through it page by page and play by play with the new Ravens offensive coordinator.
