
Thanks to their Super Bowl win, the Ravens will be selecting 32nd in the first round of the NFL Draft.
One former member of the team thinks it is unlikely that they’ll be picking in the same spot again next year. Ray Lewis continued his transition from middle linebacker to commentator by sharing his thoughts on the Ravens’ chances of repeating as Super Bowl champions. Lewis thinks his former teammates will be fighting an uphill battle.
“It’s going to be very hard, after you lose that much chemistry,” Lewis told Robert Klemko of USA Today. “But who knows? It’s unpredictable, as always. Hopefully, they try to pull enough together, use their youth and try to make a run. But it’s hard to try that formula. That formula usually doesn’t work.”
Lewis is right about the team losing several key members of the team and Baltimore will certainly need to reorient themselves with mainstays like Lewis and Ed Reed no longer in the locker room. Thing is, you could have offered up exactly the same analysis about the formula if the Ravens had kept the band together.
Eight teams have repeated as champions in the Super Bowl era and only two have done it in the salary cap era, which means taking the field over the Ravens is a pretty smart play when it comes to predicting who will win the Lombardi Trophy in 2014.