Real business doesn’t work like that. Finish poorly and then get rewarded with a chance for the best prospects? Over and over again, year after year? No other business works like this, and this annual new lease on life for every franchise in the offseason, and at the NFL Draft in April acts as an eternal flame of hope for improvement.
“We did a pretty decent job, and obviously they continue to do a phenomenal job in Baltimore, with Ozzie Newsome and his group,” Billick said. “But JaMarcus Russell was the highest-rated player I’ve ever seen on any of our boards. If we had the No. 1 pick, we would’ve taken him. So we all missed on JaMarcus Russell. Make no mistake any team can make a huge mistake on a kid, but you try to cut down on the risk.”
The league is a balance of talent, managing a salary cap and knowing when to part ways with a player as well. No one has been more creative at “gaming” the system while filtering good players in and out of a franchise than Newsome and the Ravens.
The NFL salary cap can be unkind or it can be your best friend when competitors mismanage their financial ceiling. Because Newsome has been so deft at finding quality players the Ravens also have been annually decimated by departures for a number of reasons. First, five years of playoff appearances creates a resume of winning for everyone in your organization and other teams want to hire winners. It’s the reason a quarter of the teams in the NFL have head coaches who once were assistants in Baltimore.
But for the player pool there’s a salary cap that doesn’t exist for coaches. Newsome has shown restraint in not overpaying players for past accomplishments and instead focuses on what the present and future potential holds. As he always says, “Right player, right price.”
Instead of chasing serviceable players who are signing large contracts to go elsewhere – like linebackers Edgerton Hartwell, Adalius Thomas, Bart Scott – Newsome waits a year to get his compensatory picks and turns them into draft picks and cheaper talent for the next training camp and season.
It’s no secret that the younger the player, the less service time, the cheaper he is, and the better value he is vs. your salary cap. Newsome and the Ravens have the vision to know they’ll be losing some key players every year and understand that a segment of the fan base will always be unhappy with how the system works. They just don’t understand the true impact of the cap.
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And make no mistake about it, Newsome has learned to hoard draft picks the way his old partner Bill Belichick has in New England and the way that Jimmy Johnson did in building the Dallas Cowboys a generation ago. The draft is a lot about luck. The more picks you have the more chances you have of getting lucky and finding long-term starters for your franchise.
For years there has been an artificial feeding frenzy on Ravens players simply because of their success. You can’t sign and keep all of your players when you’re a winning team or you won’t remain a winning team. It’s almost counter-intuitive, but its been borne out as gospel over the years.
It goes back to Newsome’s “right player, right price” mantra. And Newsome is never blindsided by any aspect of the process of filtering through players and realizing that his roster will always be fluid.
Remember: NFL = Not For Long.
“In 2002, we knew we were going to lose [former Ravens safety] Rod Woodson so we drafted Ed Reed. I already can look down the stream. I know what the contract situation is, and No. 1, I know what our salary cap is, and I can look and say and know that we are not going to be able to retain some players, so that’s the reason why we go draft players and they sit around for two years and you all wonder why’s he not playing. Oh, he will play at some point. So, I don’t have to worry. I worry about winning today, but I’ve got to also worry about winning tomorrow, and I’ve got to be able to balance those books every year.”
The Ravens win consistently because they’re consistently drafting young players, paying them like young players, coaching them up, keeping the best ones, and getting them into the lineup. And when someone offers them more than Newsome thinks they’re worth, he lets them leave and takes the compensatory picks and begins the life cycle for the Ravens all over again the following April.
