Baltimore Beatdown
Ravens General Manager interviewed on The Todd McShay Show and shared all things Ravens.
Baltimore Ravens General Manager joined Todd McShay and Steve Muench on The McShay Show: The Decision Maker Series for an interview. Below are some highlights of their conversation:
On the Process and Draft-Night Story of Selecting Lamar Jackson:
“I first think it goes back to just the fall evaluation and we had a couple scouts — Milt Hendrickson being one, Dwaune Jones be the other guy — they went into Louisville that year, came back and basically said [Lamar Jackson] is a special athlete. And this guy can do a lot of things that are unique at our level of football. Now, there’s some things to work on of course like all players but he’s a unique player and so I watched him, Joe Hortiz, our College Director at the time watched him. At some point we brought him to Ozzie [Newsome]. Ozzie looked at him. I would typically bring players to Ozzie to look at. He and I always worked together in the draft for 25 years before I became GM and he became a player that we were very interested in. ... That year what I remember most is Lamar did not have an agent. And we wanted to bring him into Baltimore — we’re very secretive in Baltimore, we don’t want to be connected to players. We’ll never really — if you see us connected to a player that probably means we’re not connected to a player. So, I never want to be connected to anybody. So the challenge was how do we get Lamar Jackson to come visit us in Baltimore? We didn’t bring any other quarterbacks in that year. We did like some quarterbacks, we figured they wouldn’t be there when we picked. So, we felt like Lamar might be the one guy that had a chance to be there in the twenties when we picked. ... We brought him into Baltimore — the best thing about a player that doesn’t have an agent: there’s no leaks. No one knew that Lamar Jackson spent a day and a half with us in Baltimore. ... At some point then as we got closer to the draft, the idea was to get as many picks as we could to trade back as many times as we could — either take Lamar or draft another player, but have a backup plan and we might get back in and [Philadelphia Eagles General Manager] Howie Roseman — a guy that always makes trades ... I learned from the Joe Flacco trade that the eighth pick we went back to 26, we went back up to 22, we got Flacco, that if you assess league value, you can go back and still get your quarterback. And so the idea was we were going to do the same thing with Lamar as we did with Joe. ... We end up drafting Hayden Hurst at 25, Kevin Byrne our...
