Childs Walker: The Ravens did what they could to salvage hopes for the season

In a five-day span, the Ravens made the most ambitious trade in franchise history, annulled it, got hitched to the No. 1 free-agent pass rusher and became the NFL’s villain of the moment. Oh, and while all that went down, a parade of free agents, led by Pro Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum, departed for other ports. Here are five things we learned from a week unlike any other in Ravens annals.

The Ravens made the best move available to dig out of the rubble they created

Would you rather have Maxx Crosby coming off knee surgery or Trey Hendrickson and two first-round draft picks?

There’s more to this story, but pro football is a bottom-line business, and when we boil it down, that was the question Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta faced Tuesday.

Crosby was already in Baltimore, meeting not just with doctors but his future coaches. He had bid the Las Vegas Raiders a heartfelt farewell and embraced the Super Bowl expectations accompanying his new team.

But the Ravens had paid a dear and unfamiliar cost — first-round picks in 2026 and 2027 — to obtain one of the sport’s most fearsome edge defenders. With the trade unable to be completed until Wednesday and new details coming in about the state of Crosby’s surgically repaired knee, DeCosta had time to change his mind.

Did he know he could sign Hendrickson, a longtime Ravens nemesis and the top pass rusher on the open market, before he blew up the Crosby deal? It’s hard to imagine DeCosta would have walked back such a seismic trade without an appealing contingency plan.

But, when he met with reporters Wednesday afternoon, he said he had treated the trade for Crosby and the pursuit of Hendrickson as “mutually exclusive.” He added that losing Linderbaum pushed the Ravens to look at Hendrickson as perhaps the best player they could acquire with the money previously earmarked for their center. He even suggested pairing Crosby and Hendrickson was on the table, though the idea sounds far-fetched.

Regardless, DeCosta knew he was inviting scorn, not just from a spurned trade partner in Las Vegas but from fellow executives, fans and the great commentariat. So he had to believe strongly he was choosing the best value for his team, even if he felt “gutted” by turning away from a player as brilliant and productive as Crosby.

“Every decision we make is based on this idea, ‘Is this the best thing for the Ravens?’” he said.

Crosby is a better all-around player than Hendrickson, an elite run defender who almost never has to come off the field. He’s also almost three years younger than the former Bengal (though he has played almost 1,500 more snaps than Hendrickson). He would have significantly raised the ceiling for Jesse Minter’s defense in 2026.

But as a pure pass rusher Hendrickson stands up there with Myles Garrett and Micah Parsons, the elite of the elite. He will give the Ravens an element they have never had in the Lamar Jackson era, when they’ve consistently struggled to produce sacks and turnovers in the biggest games. And DeCosta will have the No. 14 pick with which to add another starter, whether that’s a badly needed interior blocker or an impact defender.

The Ravens took an ugly path to reach this more palatable balance of risk and reward. DeCosta could have simply kept those picks, signed Hendrickson and not set off a stink bomb that will hover over the franchise for some time to come. Clearly, he and his brain trust viewed Crosby as enough of a game changer to merit an unprecedented sacrifice of draft capital. They knew, at least roughly, Crosby’s recovery timeline from meniscus surgery. So what specific piece of information shook the Ravens’ belief? We might never know the answer, and even if more is revealed, that information won’t satisfy critics.

So we can only go back to the base question: Did the Ravens emerge from this mess with a good football solution? Yes, they did.

The Ravens are the NFL’s villain of the moment, but moments pass

Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, it was difficult to find an insider who wasn’t sharing anonymous comments from league sources denouncing the Ravens as shady.

The consensus view held that, even if they operated within their rights, they had lost their nerve on Crosby and used injury concerns as a convenient excuse to take a safer path.

Were they smart to change course? Perhaps, but the run-up to NFL free agency is an elaborate game of dominoes, and the Ravens upset that game by reversing one of its key moves. The Raiders signed a raft of players, led by Linderbaum, on the assumption they wouldn’t be paying Crosby. Other teams, such as the Dallas Cowboys, pivoted to signing or trading for lesser pass rushers when Crosby was no longer available. All of that transactional paste could not be shoved back in the tube just because DeCosta changed his mind.

Not to mention Crosby now faced unwanted, probably unfair, questions about his health and his dimming chances of landing with a different contender.

So, yeah, folks were pissed.

But can we please put to rest the notion that this was some grand conspiracy? It doesn’t make sense to believe DeCosta concocted the trade of the offseason only as a means to dampen the market for Hendrickson and screw the Raiders.

It’s more plausible to think that, as the Ravens developed a clearer understanding of Crosby’s health, they realized they could gain much of the same reward while taking on far less risk by simply signing Hendrickson and taking their picks back. DeCosta said that isn’t what happened, but it at least makes sense.

Should the Ravens have investigated Crosby’s health more rapidly and thoroughly to prevent this mess from mushrooming to the degree it did? It’s a fair question. DeCosta acknowledged as much while also saying, “I don’t really know what we could do differently than what we did.”

At the very least, the organization’s cherished veneer of competence was blemished.

Will the Ravens face lasting consequences?

Probably not. The reality of the NFL is that agents and general managers will always do business with a negotiating partner who’s willing to pay the right price or offer the right player.

Might the Ravens’ relationship with the Raiders or Crosby’s agents, Doug Hendrickson and CJ LaBoy, be damaged? Sure.

Will they be blackballed from doing business in a proudly cutthroat industry? Give me a break. The New England Patriots were feared and despised for the better part of two decades. That never stopped Bill Belichick from building his roster as he saw fit.

“I understand the question,” DeCosta said when asked about a potential dampening effect on his dealings with agents and teams. “It hasn’t stopped my phone from ringing; I’ll tell you that.”

The Ravens remain a strikingly incomplete team

We must applaud DeCosta’s determination to erase his team’s chief defensive weakness. He was ready to sacrifice his most precious draft picks and a significant chunk of his war chest to obtain a formidable edge rusher. With Hendrickson in the fold, if the Ravens receive good news about defensive tackle Nnamdi Madubuike’s potential return from the neck injury that ended his 2025 season, we’re suddenly looking at a much scarier front for Minter to leverage.

But the loss of Linderbaum exacerbated the Ravens’ other greatest concern, the inconsistency of an offensive line that could not consistently protect Jackson in 2025. The Pro Bowl center was supposed to be a building block, the type of homegrown talent the Ravens usually keep over two or even three contracts. Instead, he blew the top off the center market with the three-year, $81 million deal he signed to go to Las Vegas.

Asked if the Ravens were competitive to the end on Linderbaum, DeCosta compared it to his failed effort to buy a house in Federal Hill when he was a young Ravens scout. In other words, he made his best offer but never had a chance to beat the Raiders’ winning bid.

Fair enough, but we have to ask if the Ravens could have avoided this by making a more aggressive extension offer back when they signed Linderbaum’s draft classmate Kyle Hamilton. They also could have picked up Linderbaum’s fifth-year option, though they understandably didn’t want to do so because the $23.4 million price tag would have been unprecedented for a center at the time.

There’s not much use staring in the rearview, and DeCosta is correct that it would not be prudent for the Ravens to commit almost 10% of their salary cap to a center. But the loss of an excellent player who wanted to stay in Baltimore leaves a shaky interior line further destabilized.

The Ravens did sign a familiar face, powerful and durable John Simpson, to fill one of their holes at guard. Many mock drafts have them plugging the other guard spot with Penn State standout Vega Ioane. DeCosta said he’s confident they can draft another good starting center, though few rookies are as ready to go as Linderbaum was in 2022. He also expressed great faith in new offensive line coach Dwayne Ledford, who will be charged with improving on George Warhop’s player development record.

But the bottom line is the Ravens will likely go into another season hanging their Super Bowl hopes on unproven starting linemen.

They’ll also have to rebuild their tight end corps after Isaiah Likely and Charlie Kolar signed with other teams, sign or draft a punter to fill Jordan Stout’s shoes and add at least one playmaker to complement Derrick Henry and Zay Flowers.

Yes, DeCosta has millions to spend and picks to spare, but it’s an ample shopping list.

Most, maybe all, of the departed free agents were gone one way or another

A sweeping first-day exodus is nothing new for the Ravens, who generally lose more than they gain at the dawn of free agency. But the loss of so many key supporting actors stung more in light of the Crosby deal collapsing. It was natural for fans to wonder if players such as Stout, Kolar and fullback Patrick Ricard might have stayed had the Ravens not been tied up with that expensive mess.

“I can’t say that it would have changed that much,” DeCosta said, and his past practices, learned from mentor Ozzie Newsome, back up that assessment. The Ravens believe in assigning a value to each player, and if the market soars away from where they’re comfortable, they wave goodbye. That discipline has remained essential to their operation for 30 years.

“You have a threshold that you get to, that you want to get to, and typically we try to be fairly responsible when it comes to that, and we have to make tough calls,” DeCosta said.

There’s more than money at play. Some of the Ravens’ choices probably reflect Minter and his staff’s talent assessments. Perhaps new offensive coordinator Declan Doyle did not see a place for a bruising fullback, even though Ricard has been essential to the Ravens’ ground-and-pound juggernaut over the last seven seasons. Perhaps Doyle wanted a more versatile back than speedy Keaton Mitchell, whom the Ravens probably could have kept with a modest tender offer.

Some of these talent losses might not make sense at the moment, but we have to give Minter and Co. room to customize the roster to their vision.

Jackson remains as essential and enigmatic as ever

The Ravens’ pursuit of an elite pass rusher would not have been possible without them extending or restructuring their most important player’s contract. Owner Steve Bisciotti made it clear in January that their offseason plans hinged on reducing Jackson’s $74.5 million cap hit.

They hoped to do it with an extension similar to the five-year deal Jackson signed before the 2023 season. Bisciotti said he was optimistic his quarterback would be amenable.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, the Ravens kicked the can one year down the road, restructuring Jackson’s contract to create almost $40 million in cap space but raising his 2027 hit to about $85 million.

Why?

“We kind of ran out of time,” DeCosta said, offering precious little detail about how far, if anywhere, he and Jackson got in discussing the future.

So how to interpret this? Did Jackson feel no urgency to engage, preferring to let extension talks slumber as he waits to assess where he might want to be after the 2027 season? Does he want some commitment beyond a more lucrative version of the last deal he signed?

As usual, the questions outnumber the answers with the player around whom the Ravens plan everything. With his stirring performance in their season-ending loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, Jackson reminded us why he’s worth all this intrigue. Him piloting a new coordinator’s offense will make for must-watch football in 2026.

DeCosta said he’s hopeful about an extension, that it won’t be more difficult because of the restructure. But we’re in for another year of Lamar Jackson contract speculation, and that’s an exhausting prospect, no matter how thrilling we find the player at the center of it all.