The Ravens gave tight end Dennis Pitta a second-round tender before the start of free agency, which will force teams that want to sign Pitta to fork over a second-round pick for the right to do it.
We’ll see if anyone is willing to buck recent trends and actually make an attempt to sign a restricted free agent, but Aaron Wilson of the Baltimore Sun reports that Pitta has been the subject of “preliminary inquiries” from other teams. If a team were going to make a serious run at signing Pitta away from the Ravens, now would probably be the time to do it since they are waiting for Anquan Boldin to take his physical with the 49ers and therefore still have his salary on the books.
Absent any guns more smoking than this one, though, we’ll go on assuming that Pitta is going to remain in Baltimore and work on getting a contract that will run for several years and pay him more than the $2.023 million he’d get for signing the tender. The combination of a new deal (structured in a way that the Ravens won’t match) and a draft pick is more than teams have been willing to do and we’ll believe that’s changed only when we actually see it happen.
