Most of the NFL scouts saw the four top-tier, potential starting quarterback prospects in the spring of 2008 as Matt Ryan (Boston College), Chad Henne (Michigan), Brian Brohm (Louisville) and Joe Flacco (Delaware) and pretty consistently in that order throughout the process.
Other than Ryan, this was not expected to be a hearty crop, and he was the consensus grand prize. Everyone wants a chance to select that glorious franchise quarterback, but no team really wants to be bad enough in any season before to warrant a pick high enough to get the first quarterback taken. You either have to stink or deal away parts or most of a full draft to move way up the board to pick a blue chip quarterback.
There were many inside the Ravens organization who believed Billick’s last 2007 victory over Pittsburgh might’ve cost the Ravens a chance to draft Ryan. The Atlanta Falcons were one of four teams that finished 4-12 and they won the third pick. The Ravens finished 5-11 and picked eighth. That innocuous win over the Steelers loomed very large on the 2008 NFL Draft and also potentially moved them five picks further back in every round.
But as the Ravens continued to lose in November and December, the scouts started believing there’d be a chance to draft Ryan so they travelled all over the country and monitored him.
“All of our guys loved Matt Ryan,” one scout said. “We loved his ability to throw, loved the makeup, that take charge kind of guy. He was a leader. You could see it. He put Boston College into a BCS game that year. He willed them to beat good teams like Miami and Virginia Tech. He was special.”
Even if he couldn’t beat Maryland in College Park, he was still the best quarterback in the class by what most scouts thought was a wide margin.
And during the holiday week while Bisciotti was pondering his future with Billick, the scouts were pondering a future with Matt Ryan in Baltimore.
That fifth win over the Steelers in the finale was a wakeup call and realization that they’d better have another game plan at quarterback because dealing up from No. 8 to No. 2 to get Ryan would cost too much for a team welcoming a new head coach and with many other needs in April.
After Billick was fired and Harbaugh was hired, the Ravens could turn their executive front office team loose on evaluating the draft. For the first three weeks of January it seemed the draft was a distant vision while every day’s search was about finding a head coach.
Immediately following the hiring of Cam Cameron as the offensive coordinator, the scouts and new coaching staff went to work looking at film and exchanging information. Cameron and Hue Jackson, who was the new quarterbacks coach, were both veterans in the NFL and had been keeping an eye on college talent as they always had during their careers. Cameron had just been fired as head coach of the Miami Dolphins after a 1-15 season. Jackson had just departed the Atlanta Falcons, where he was the offensive coordinator for Bobby Petrino in one of the most disastrous reigns of coaching in NFL history. Petrino literally walked out on the Falcons in the middle of the night when the team was 3-10 in December to take the head coach job at the University of Arkansas.
