The Baltimore Ravens currently have five draft picks in the 2023 draft, a relatively low number compared to what they usually have. There will be plenty of prospects that Baltimore is interested in come draft weekend, and could end the festivities with more selections than they started with.
During his 2023 NFL Scouting Combine press conference, Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta was asked about how the team’s draft board is created. DeCosta talked about how he could talk about the topic for hours, but mentioned the value of certain positions, analytics, interviews and more.
“Again, I could probably talk about that for six hours. But it’s basically a mosaic, so imagine a huge board, and basically, you’re taking all these different data points, and you’re trying to meld them all together. And certainly, there are some positions that, quote unquote, the PFF [Pro Football Focus] people of the world would say, ‘These positions are more valuable than other positions,’ and we factor that in to a degree. For us, it’s how the guy plays; it’s the comps; it’s the sequence lists that the scouts do, which is a ranking of the players by position, but also across the board. We’ll use some analytics, [and] we’ll use some true old school scouting. The interviews will play a factor in that, so we’ll background information that our scouts get, which I think is probably some of the best in the league. And then my job is to come up with a list, ranked, [of] all positions that we think are top to bottom the best, and we’ll make the decisions based off of that list.”
