OTL: Ravens Sit Out Initial FA Rush, as Usual (Stanley = BARGAIN!)

What’s more fun than the chaos of the opening day of NFL free agency? How about trying to track the moves made on Day 1 when there’s a major outage on X?

I’m kidding, that part was a nightmare. The news about free agent signings was out there, of course, but having it devolve into decentralized refreshing of sports media webpages was less than ideal for writing this piece. Eventually, connections were restored and we were able to get updates, the bulk of which didn’t really impact the Ravens.

Of course, there were a couple of notable departures from Baltimore in the early window that I think a lot of us expected were coming, but it’s still kind of a bummer anyway. Pat Mekari, Brandon Stephens and Malik Harrison all departed, with Stephens and Mekari hauling in some lucrative contracts with the Jets and Jags respectively, while Harrison rejoined Patrick Queen in Pittsburgh.

Traditionally, the Ravens aren’t very active in the initial wave of free agency, and some of that speaks to their roster building year-to-year. With the Ronnie Stanley signing, they got ahead of the curve on securing their highest-value target ahead of free agency, which speaks to what the front office knew. I’m sure they got the indication of the kind of paycheck that Ronnie could get if he hit the free market, and Monday definitely showed that.

Dan Moore got paid a boatload of money, and I get it; if you’re a team trying to entice a player to gut it out through a rebuild, you have to be willing pay up (looking at you, Myles Garrett). Still, when you think about the quality of play you’ve seen out of Stanley since his full recovery from injury, and you compare that to basically any of the rest of the available tackles, free agency contracts shouldn’t have come anywhere close. For Moore’s contract to beat out Stanley’s AAV is a huge bullet dodged by the Ravens.

Now the bad news accompanying that is that the Ravens have very little cap to work with as a result of inking that deal, which means they’ll have to sit on the sideline for the feeding frenzy. The good news is that it means they didn’t go head over heels on a contract trying to bring in a difference-maker. Teams like the Panthers and Patriots had been movers identified by pundits ahead of free agency due to their cap space and obvious rebuild situations with QBs still on rookie deals, but holy cow, did they break out their checkbooks.

The Patriots made a bevy of moves, while the Panthers locked in key pieces of their secondary by signing Safety Tre’von Moehrig and inking Jaycee Horn to a 4-year deal worth $100 million. While a few of those names were batted around by hopefuls around the Flock as being guys who could be pursued by the Ravens during the offseason, the price tags on those contracts make it clear that they were never going to work, and honestly, I’m ok with that. I’d rather the team not be completely over a barrel with guys outside the system coming in and being expected to make an immediate difference.

The next step will be those second-wave signings as the market begins to dry up and the asking prices go down for some of the guys who remain out in the cold. If you’re going to see the front office make a splash, that’s the time they’ll get hot.

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