Free agent center Ethan Pocic has agreed to a one-year deal with the Ravens, Adam Schefter of ESPN reports.
The Ravens lost three-time Pro Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum to the Raiders in free agency. Danny Pinter, Jovaughn Gwyn and Corey Bullock are the other centers on the roster, and they have combined for 10 career starts, all by Pinter.
Pocic, who turns 31 next month, spent the past four seasons in Cleveland. He was recently medically cleared after tearing his left Achilles in a Dec. 7 game against the Titans.
He is entering his 10th season since the Seahawks made him a second-round pick in 2017. Pocic spent five seasons in Seattle, appearing in 57 games with 40 starts.
He signed with the Browns as a free agent in 2022 and started 57 games for the club.
Jared Verse burst onto the scene as the Rams’ first-round draft pick in 2024, winning the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year award. But he still remembers one offensive lineman who showed him the hard way that there’s a difference between the NFL and college football.
That player was 49ers left tackle Trent Williams, who physically overpowered Verse in a way he had never felt before when they locked up in the first home game of Verse’s career.
“It was against Trent Williams at SoFi Stadium,” Verse said on NFL Network. “He didn’t throw me to the ground or nothing like that. We were running a stunt game so I was going into the B-gap. They were trying to get outside of us, like a wide play. He got to my outside shoulder, and usually if somebody gets on my outside shoulder I’m able to just throw him off, move him out of the way, drop him to the ground. You can’t do that with Trent. I tried to move his hands and it was like moving cinder blocks. I move his hands — chopping, doing all this stuff to get his hands off. I literally said, like, ‘Trent, get off of me.’ Trent’s got a deep voice. He literally just starts laughing and was like, ‘You so funny, Verse.’ We’re watching film the next day. My coach was like, ‘Jared, you’ve got to get off this block.’ I’m like, ‘Coach, I tried, I don’t even know what you want me to tell you. I tried my hardest.’”
Williams has given a lot of rookies a rude awakening during his 16-year NFL career. The good news for Verse is that, now that he’s on the Browns, he won’t be seeing Williams this season.
I’ve got a theory about the Browns’ quarterback competition. It’s a simple one, which is roughly the limit of my cognitive ability.
It goes back to a clip that emerged early in the offseason program. The quarterbacks were doing a basic drill. Catch the snap, fake a pitch, make the drop into passing position, and throw the ball. Three times each.
Deshaun Watson did it crisply and cleanly. For Shedeur Sanders, it was lackadaisical, especially with the fake pitch.
Shedeur is a gamer. He performs when it counts. He has yet to embrace the process of checking various boxes in practice. And, in my opinion, new Browns coach Todd Monken is trying his damnedest to get Shedeur to do that.
And so, early in the offseason, the indications were that Watson had emerged as the leader for the QB1 role. Near the end, it seemed that Shedeur was making progress.
My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that, at some point, Monken explained to Shedeur that he can’t wait until the games to flip the switch. He needs to earn the right to have that opportunity by doing all of the little things when it’s not a live situation. If that’s what happened, it may have worked.
The test will be training camp. Every day, every practice, every rep. Focus, effort, repeat. Along the way, Shedeur will become better prepared to perform when it’s time to do so.
Watson will have a say in the process, too. If Shedeur does everything well, Watson will have to do it even better.
But that’s the key. Full commitment to the process of learning, and executing, Monken’s offense.
Of course, if Shedeur does it well enough to win the job, the challenge becomes doing it well enough to hold the job beyond 2026. The quarterback door in Cleveland has been revolving for years; as much as the team would like for it to stop spinning, they need someone who’ll play well enough, and win enough games, to get them to not keep looking for the next name to go on the back of the jersey that ran out of space a long time ago.
Shedeur has shown he can be good. Monken’s goal will be to get Shedeur to make the full commitment to being great. Which means ditching any traces of a Brett Favre-style mindset of not caring about anything but the game and caring deeply about everything else.
Center Ethan Pocic is available for work.
ESPN’s Adam Schefter notes on Wednesday that Pocic has been medically cleared after suffering a torn Achilles in December. Schefter adds that Pocic is considered “full go.”
Pocic is a free agent after spending the last four seasons with Cleveland.
A second-round pick in 2017, Pocic played his first five seasons with the Seahawks, appearing in 57 games with 40 starts.
He signed with the Browns as a free agent in 2022, starting 57 games for the club.
Whenever quarterback Joe Flacco finally retires, he’ll have a reward waiting for him in Baltimore.
Flacco will be joining the Ravens Ring of Honor.
The first episode of the latest season of Quarterback on Netflix focuses on Flacco’s Week 1 return to Baltimore in the 2025 season, where he faced the team that made him a first-round pick in 2008. During a pregame conversation, Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti makes it clear to Flacco that Bisciotti is ready to put the Super Bowl XLVII MVP in the Ring of Honor once Flacco finishes his playing career.
“I’m so happy you’re healthy and still pulling this off,” Bisciotti says. “I thought I’d have you up in my Ring of Honor about five years ago.”
“You called me five years ago,” Flacco responds.
“I did, didn’t I?”
“We can delay that a little bit,” Flacco says.
It’ll be delayed at least another year, as Flacco embarks on his 19th NFL season — and his eighth since leaving Baltimore after the 2018 campaign.
And he’ll be back in Baltimore again this year, as the backup to Joe Burrow with the Bengals.
