Ravens head coach Jesse Minter said earlier this offseason that it’s incumbent on the team to make players believe it is important to attend the voluntary portions of the offseason program and one of the players they’ll need to persuade is quarterback Lamar Jackson.
Jackson has skipped voluntary work in the past and offensive coordinator Declan Doyle’s general February comments that the team expects players to be there as they install a new offense could be read as a message to Jackson in particular. On Tuesday, Minter repeated that it is “our job to make it an environment and an opportunity” that players feel they’re getting a lot out of in the offseason.
Minter was asked later in the session if he expects Jackson to be in attendance when the Ravens program gets going next week.
“I think Lamar is really excited about what we have going on,” Minter said. “I think he’s excited about opportunities in the offseason program. And again, we’ll see on April 6. We’ll see who all walks in the door.”
The only mandatory work on the Ravens’ offseason schedule is a June minicamp, but the team will be hoping that’s not the only time Jackson is around the team in the coming months.
The Cowboys tried hard to trade for Maxx Crosby. They reportedly made three offers for the edge rusher.
Dallas, though, did not come close to the offer the Ravens made, and the Raiders agreed to trade Crosby to Baltimore for two first-round draft picks.
However, Crosby’s physical with the team four days later prompted the Ravens to back out of the deal. Doctors expressed concerns about a degenerative issue in Crosby’s knee, with Dr. Dan Cooper, the Cowboys’ team physician, among those the Ravens consulted.
The Ravens drew intense criticism for reneging on the deal, but Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said that until a player passes a physical, nothing is final.
“For me, there’s no hidden item there,” Jones said, via Adam Hill of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “You have to pass a physical. You have to. And we’ve never completed an agreement until the player passes a physical. That implies that your doctors, your trainers and everybody involved gets to take a look at him. That goes with the territory. We would have basically had the same conditions with the physical. As you know, we were in on making an offer for him. So he would have come to Dallas, and we’ll all just guess what would have happened.”
Crosby is expected to play for the Raiders this season, but Jones was asked whether the Cowboys might have interest in exploring a trade at a later date.
“Standing here right now, I don’t anticipate revisiting that situation. Is it possible? Yes,” Jones said.
The Ravens continue to field questions about the fallout from the failed trade for Maxx Crosby. On Tuesday, it was head coach Jesse Minter’s turn with the media.
“So much respect for Maxx,” Minter said. “We were obviously excited about it, and then disappointed about it. I’m not going to speak to many details about it. Tons of respect for him as a player and the Raiders as an organization.”
The Ravens agreed to send two first-round draft picks to the Raiders for Crosby on March 6. Four days later, following Crosby’s physical with the team, the Ravens reneged on the deal because of concerns about a degenerative issue in Crosby’s knee.
Crosby returned to the Raiders, and the Ravens pivoted to Trey Hendrickson, whom they signed as a free agent.
The Ravens continue to take heat for rescinding the deal, but team president Sashi Brown defended the move on Monday. Brown blamed the criticism on a “slow news cycle.”
The failed Maxx Crosby trade from earlier this month continued to be a topic of conversation at Ravens president Sashi Brown’s press conference from the league meetings in Arizona on Monday.
Baltimore agreed to send a package including two first-round picks to the Raiders for Crosby, but called the trade off after Crosby visited the team ahead of the official start to the league year. While a report indicated that concerns about a degenerative issue in Crosby’s knee led to the decision, Brown said that they will “treat all of this with the right privacy and respect and dignity that it deserves” when asked about the decision.
Brown also said that he doesn’t think it will create a reputational problem for the Ravens when it comes to dealing with other teams.
“We’ve got strong and long relationships across the league,” Brown said, via Jeff Zrebiec of TheAthletic.com. “We have emphasized the importance of doing things the right way. We’ll continue to do that, and we understand that it is a headline story because of its profile and significance. We believe our relationships, to the extent that you need time to repair them, people understand who we are and what we’re about. Our locker room understands that as well, but when you have high-profile transactions like this and opportunities like this, it’s unfortunate that sometimes these things do happen. No fault of Maxx’s or ours or the Raiders, it’s just [how] it played out.”
In the wake of the deal falling apart, there has been conversation about altering the trade process leading into the new league year because of the impact that a deal falling apart can have on salary cap space involving other moves being agreed to in the negotiating window. Brown said he thinks “this is how it should be handled,” however, and the Ravens have moved on with Trey Hendrickson as their main defensive acquisition of the offseason.
John Harbaugh was fired as coach of the Ravens after going 8-9 last season, but he doesn’t think that record reflects the reality of the job he and his staff did.
Harbaugh, now head coach of the Giants, said on Pardon My Take that he thinks the Ravens’ staff was as good as ever in 2025.
“I took a lot of pride in what we did,” Harbaugh said. “I took a lot of pride in this season. I thought, honestly, as a coaching staff, it might have been our best job this year coaching this team. I thought we did a great job. But it wasn’t good enough in terms of getting us where we needed to get for whatever reason.”
Still, Harbaugh says he has no hard feelings for the Ravens firing him.
“If the job’s not getting done, it’s not good enough, they’ll make a change,” Harbaugh said. “I really wasn’t worried about it ever, keeping the job. I felt like at some point in time if they felt like I wasn’t the best guy for the job to do the job then they’re going to put me out of a job, and that’s what they should do if they feel that way.”
Harbaugh said that his agent told him within 20 minutes of the Ravens firing him that multiple teams had called to express their interest. The Giants were first on the list, and now Harbaugh will try to do his best coaching job with the Giants.
