His seat has started warming up — so it makes all the more sense for Eric DeCosta to be up on his feet this offseason.

The Ravens general manager is used to letting the job come to him. He’s patient in letting the right player fall to his spot in the NFL draft. Some of the biggest extensions he’s pulled off — Lamar Jackson or Kyle Hamilton, for example — have come later in the year than you might expect.

But with the Ravens organization in as much flux as it has experienced in decades, no job can be taken for granted. John Harbaugh took an axe for the failed 2025 season. After him, DeCosta has to take the second-most blame of anyone left in the Castle.

With that in mind, the long-tenured executive can show his survival instincts this offseason. But as comfortable as he may be in the draft war room, surrounded by scouting reports and the Ravens’ finely tuned board of prospects, that’s not the battlefield that will determine whether DeCosta gets to keep his job.

We know DeCosta can nail a first-round pick. But how good are his relationships with the players he already has?

It’s not the pick of the future that will help the Ravens most, but rather how DeCosta manages tricky decisions with Jackson and Tyler Linderbaum, among others. If he’s truly the GM that Steve Bisciotti thinks he is, he’ll find ways to scratch and claw for the desired outcomes in ways we’ve never seen before.

On Linderbaum, DeCosta sounded confident that the Ravens would bring him back next year: “At this point in time, we’ve made him a market-setting deal, proposal, offer, and hopefully we can get something done with him between now and the start of the new league year.”

But reading between the lines, there are reasons to worry about the future of the three-time Pro Bowl center. If the Ravens have offered to make him the highest-paid center in the NFL, then why hasn’t he signed the deal yet?

NFL Networks’ Ian Rapaport reported on the “NFL Daily” podcast that working with Linderbaum’s agent, Neil Cornrich, is “very difficult,” and DeCosta acknowledged that he’s unlikely to use the franchise tag to keep the team’s best lineman (his tag would correspond to tackles, not just centers). If you look at any ranking of the best free agents available in 2026, Linderbaum is among the top players — certainly the best interior lineman.

Is there a backup plan if some other team (let’s say the Chargers, for the sake of the drama) throws a bag of money at Linderbuam and the Ravens have to rebuild the entire inside of their offensive line? That’s unlikely to get the Jesse Minter era off on a great foot, and would continue a trend of divestment in one of the team’s most important position groups.

Linderbaum is going to be tricky to afford. But the Ravens can’t afford to let him get away.

That leads to one of the other great icebergs that DeCosta has to steer around: Jackson’s contract extension. If DeCosta finds a way to defer some of Jackson’s estimated $74.5 million cap hit this season, that will go a long way to helping the Ravens reload rather than rebuild. It gives them more breathing room in their payroll, which gives Jackson a better shot of winning his first Super Bowl.

There’s a world in which Jackson’s goals (to get paid) and DeCosta’s goals (to build the best team) have a lot of overlap. But getting Jackson to come to the bargaining table hasn’t always been easy, especially if you buy at face value that his phone mic wasn’t working while he was available to negotiate with outside teams in 2023.

But DeCosta can’t lean on excuses. Bisciotti said explicitly in January that he expected Jackson’s contract extension to be done before free agency.

“I made that clear to Lamar,” Bisciotti said. “And I think he was very appreciative of my stance and hopefully willing to work with Eric and not get this thing dragged out into April like it was the last time.”

But DeCosta saying Jackson isn’t necessarily the first big domino casts at least a shadow of doubt that the deal is close to done, even though free agency legal tampering can begin on March 9. It hurts the team if two of the Ravens’ biggest stakeholders can’t hammer out a deal before then.

There are other ways DeCosta can help Baltimore and his own case, but those two issues loom above all others. We’re still speculating about them weeks away from free agency.

That’s not a great sign, no matter the spin. Posturing won’t keep DeCosta behind the GM desk in Owings Mills. Decisive moves will.

A warming seat is not so much a warning sign for DeCosta — it’s a call to action. He can’t wait for the draft to solve his issues. He has got to save himself (and the Ravens) right now.