The Ravens’ entire starting offensive line is made up of linemen they drafted, and four of the five starters are still on their rookie contracts. Ravens General Manager Eric DeCosta attributes that to the salary cap.
The starting line projects to be 2022 first-round pick Tyler Linderbaum at center, 2023 seventh-round pick Andrew Vorhees and 2022 fourth-round pick Daniel Faalele at guard, and 2016 first-round pick Ronnie Stanley and 2024 second-round pick Roger Rosengarten at tackle. That five-man group never played together in the preseason, and DeCosta knows they’ll need some time to get on the same page.
“I think it is a little bit of an unknown because we haven’t played as a unit in games. We’ve seen it in practice,” DeCosta said.
But the unknown of young players is just the reality of team building.
“Across the board, we made the decision to start to build up the line with young players,” DeCosta said. “Unfortunately, with a salary cap league, you just can’t build a team with veterans at every position. If you could, it’d be great. I grew up a Cowboys fan, and the 1993 Dallas Cowboys, one of the great teams of all time, if that team had been able to stay together forever they would’ve won Super Bowls every year. But there is a salary cap and there is free agency. And so you have to pay players, but you also have to understand you’ve got to draft and you’ve got to develop young players as well. And we have started to do that on the offensive line. . . . We may have some hiccups along the way, but we’ve started to build from the bottom up and I think a year from now we’ll be in a great place.”
We’ll see that new-look Ravens line all playing together for the first time on Thursday night in Kansas City.
