Kyle Goon: Vega Ioane or Rueben Bain? The Ravens made the only choice they could afford.

As the Ravens came on the draft clock Thursday, they should have felt incredible power at their fingertips.

Three highly touted prospects, maybe each the best at his position, had fallen to the No. 14 pick — at tight end, guard and edge rusher.

It was a classic Baltimore draft setup. Somehow, through mere discipline and patience, the Ravens had found the pathway to the perfect first-round selection.

But did they really have a choice at No. 14? Could they have taken anyone else but Penn State guard Vega Ioane?

If they could have chosen differently, I believe they would have.

But in Ioane — a steady-handed pass blocker who immediately makes their offensive line better — the Ravens made the safe choice, which was the only one they could afford to make, given the ugly state of this roster.

It’s not the strategy that fed the Ravens’ coffers for decades, making them perennially one of the league’s better teams. But the way general manager Eric DeCosta has managed his talent, his front office was essentially backed into a corner where it had to use the first pick on a guard — a position on which the Ravens hadn’t spent a first-rounder since Ben Grubbs in 2007.

Miami’s Rueben Bain Jr., the No. 6-ranked prospect by Pro Football Focus, was among the options, and he had fallen farther than most observers had guessed coming off a dominant run to the NCAA title game. Purely on positional value, it made the most sense for the Ravens to grab Bain.

Guard is not typically a glamour position to spend a draft pick in the teens. But, looking at the context, what else could they have done?

With Tyler Linderbaum’s departure, they couldn’t afford not to add a Day 1 starter in the heart of their offensive line.

With the failure to extend Lamar Jackson’s contract, the team couldn’t afford not to use its first pick to show it wants to keep him upright and untouched.

With a good season of Derrick Henry essentially gone to waste last year, the Ravens couldn’t afford to let their 32-year-old running back continue to take hits behind the line of scrimmage.

Talent evaluation is a key part of the draft, and Ioane certainly has the upside to be great. When asked if the rookie eventually will need to be a Pro Bowl-level player to justify the early draft selection, DeCosta acknowledged, “that would be the goal.”

But in the short term the goal of picking Ioane is not to implode a fragile state of affairs on the offense. Only the Baltimore draft intelligentsia knows for sure how much debate it took, but the debate portion of the selection likely was short.

Even with Bain on the board, reaching for an edge rusher with a gaping hole in the middle of their line had to feel too rich for the Ravens this year.

It’s telling that the past two years have seen the football draft projection world essentially make the Ravens’ first-round pick for them. DeCosta smarted last week when asked about being predictable in the draft, but safety Malaki Starks was the popular pick in 2025, and most analysts had Ioane pegged to the Ravens a long time before draft night.

Some of that is because the football world has such a clear picture of what an ideal Raven is, which is a compliment to an organization with such evident hallmarks. But it’s also true the team has possessed needs so glaringly obvious the past two years it would have felt like malpractice to ignore them.

Such an obvious chalk draft pick also limits the leverage the Ravens possess. DeCosta mentioned a potential deal to move back from the No. 14 pick “kind of ended up just falling apart.” But it’s hard to bluff and force teams to trade for your pick when it’s obvious to the rest of the league who you’re going with no matter what — and choosing Ioane had an accompanying sense of inevitability for Baltimore.

For DeCosta, not getting his work done early has made it harder to reach for luxury buys. The Ravens should have extended Linderbaum before last season, if keeping him was a priority, but waiting until after the 2025 season cost them the chance to keep their Pro Bowl center.

The Ravens should have gotten an extension done with Jackson (an incredibly tricky task, to be sure) before free agency. Now they face pressure to appease him with just two years remaining on a salary cap-crippling deal.

To DeCosta’s credit, he swung the deal for Trey Hendrickson, which served as something of a consolation to the Maxx Crosby trade gone awry. Edge rusher is not as strong a need as it was last season. But Bain is the kind of player who has the potential to embarrass you for not picking him, a college star at the second-most-important position in football.

If Bain goes on to be a Pro Bowl-caliber player for the Bucs, it could make the Ravens look foolish for passing on him — no matter how good Ioane ever becomes.

To be clear, there are a lot of qualities worth appreciating about Ioane. He loves contact. He never gives up sacks. He said he was excited to play in the AFC North because, “I don’t want to go nowhere else where it’s soft football.”

Although it will take time to see if he plays like a Raven, he already sounds like one.

But what has made the Ravens a great drafting organization is tremendous agency in the process. They’ve rarely had the kinds of roster holes that limit them to one position in the first round, which is one reason they have hit on those picks so often.

For eight minutes on the clock, DeCosta and the Ravens should have felt all the power in the football world with the freedom to choose their future star.

But in the end it’s hard to say they ever really had a choice at all.