Two pros and two cons for the Ravens making a blockbuster WR trade

Pro: Maybe the Ravens need to overpay a receiver

There is no such thing as perfection in football- anyone or anything good has one crippling weakness. Whether it be the great quarterback who takes many sacks, the great coach who has trouble hiring good assistants, or something else, football is a sport full of fatal flaws.

The Ravens are no different. Even as one of the best drafting organizations in football, the Ravens have simply never been able to draft and develop wide receivers.

Considering that part of the Ravens’ continued competitiveness stems from their organizational stability of keeping the same infrastructure in place for over 25 years, it must be said that that same infrastructure simply has a problem drafting receivers.

This is the entire list of wide receivers drafted by the Ravens in the first three rounds since the team moved to Baltimore in 1996: Patrick Johnson, Travis Taylor, Devard Darling, Mark Clayton, Yamon Figurs, Torrey Smith, Breshad Perriman, Marquise Brown, Miles Boykin, Devin Duvernay, and Rashod Bateman.

For those keeping score at home, that list contains a grand total of zero combined Pro Bowl appearances and zero players signed to second contracts.

In fact, the only one of those players that I would definitively say turned into a good pick was Torrey Smith (while I believe in Rashod Bateman, it is too early to make a final ruling on the pick).

Even if trading for a receiver is an overpay, maybe the Ravens need to overpay a receiver because they are so good at identifying talent in other areas that they can afford to try to find value with lower picks/less cap space.

Sure the Ravens can’t draft receivers, but they can draft Orlando Brown Jr, Mark Andrews, Anthony Averett, DeShon Elliot, and Bradley Bozeman in the third round or later in the same draft.

What’s more, you have to look at the other unquantifiable ways in which overpaying a receiver can make up for the disparity in pure value. The attention that type of player draws could open things up for other players and take the pressure off of Mark Andrews.

And for all his faults, Greg Roman does use pre-snap motion at a high rate, which could especially be useful should the Ravens trade for Deebo Samuel.

Moving him around forces the defense to exert a significant amount of energy whether or not he is involved in the play, opening things up for other players.

Maybe trading for a receiver is an overpay in a vacuum, but the extraneous variables of this Ravens team could close that gap.