The Ravens will be changing General Managers after the end of the 2018 season and that’s not the only change that team owner Steve Bisciotti would like to see in the personnel department.
During a press conference earlier this month, Bisciotti was asked about the team’s tepid results at the top of the draft in recent seasons. The last five years have seen the Ravens mix hits -- linebacker C.J. Mosley and defensive tackle Brandon Williams -- with major misses -- safety Matt Elam and wide receiver Breshard Perriman -- in the first three rounds of the draft.
They’ve taken 17 players in the first three rounds over the entire period and will need to get a lot out of 2017 rookies Tyus Bowser and Chris Wormley to approach a 50 percent hit rate. Bisciotti said he thinks “we may get too many opinions about the top players in the draft,” but a bigger issue may be who is providing the opinions. Bisciotti lamented the way the team has replaced veteran members of the scouting department with less experienced people.”
“When we lost those scouts, we didn’t necessarily go out and hire equal scouts to replace them, and I think that was a mistake,” Bisciotti said, via ESPN.com. “I think that, in retrospect, you can say that you can’t lose those three scouts with 30 years of experience between the three of them and then hire 25-year-olds that are ready to give it the old try. ... I think that it shows that we have not done a very good job of filling in senior people with senior people. That’s something we are going to address starting right now and hopefully rebuild that on the fly, because we can’t wait for 25-year-olds to get as good as [former Ravens scout and current Eagles vice president of player personnel] Joe Douglas was at 36.”
Ozzie Newsome will get a final chance to improve on those recent draft results before handing the G.M. job over to Eric DeCosta, who should probably be looking for some experienced hands to help him if he’s going to keep the guy writing the checks in high spirits.