The trade deadline has come and passed, and the Baltimore Ravens opted against making any deadline deals.
General manager Eric DeCosta has been known to make his fair share of trade-deadline swaps in recent years with the likes of Marcus Peters and Yannick Ngakoue immediately springing to mind.
But things were always going to be different this year.
The Ravens were never going to be able to make the splash addition of a player like Peters or Ngakoue simply because they didn’t have the finances to make it work.
Strapped for cap space, there was very little the Ravens could take on in the form of salary. And as a result, their trade options were limited.
They would either need their trade partner to take on almost all of the salary of the player they were trading for or simply trade for a player making roughly $1.5 million or less this season.
That’s not an easy task for any general manager.
Even with positions that could have been addressed such as offensive line or running back, the Ravens decided not to make any deals, instead relying on the players on their roster and those returning from injury in the near future.
But in a purely hypothetical world, what trades could the Ravens have made instead?
This isn’t to say they should have made these trades as it’s impossible to know what actually goes down in trade discussions.
The following three moves are instead trades that the Ravens could have realistically made, but didn’t. Let’s take a look.