Eric DeCosta reveals Baltimore Ravens had interest in Ricky Pearsall

Every year there are the what-ifs in an NFL Draft. What if this player had been on the board just a little longer? That was certainly the case for the Baltimore Ravens in the early rounds in 2024.

General manager Eric DeCosta explained that there was a player his franchise was eyeing that didn’t quite make it to where he was draftable for them.

“There were receivers in the second and third round that we liked that we could have taken,” DeCosta said. “One of my sleepers in this draft was (Ricky) Pearsall, and I mean he went in the first round, which was crazy. It was a great pick, I give those guys a lot of credit. I thought that that was a guy we might get that was a sleeper for us, Pearsall.”

Pearsall went in the first round with the final pick, taken by the San Francisco 49ers. He surprised as a first-rounder after not getting much first-round buzz heading into the event.

Of course, Ricky Pearsall’s testing numbers were through the roof. He was one of the best jumpers in the draft class, and the athleticism he flashed can’t be taught.

He just does all the little things right.

“He really wasn’t like a hot, hot commodity name, but that was another guy when you watched his game super impressive player on tape,” DeCosta said. “And that reminded me of the year that we drafted just, for all the historians out here, the year we drafted Haloti (Ngata), I always thought that you want to have a fallback guy. You always think you have a fallback guy, and I thought Donte Whitner, he’ll be there 100% when we pick. And he went before Haloti, which shocked me. I think that shocked all of us.”

Indeed, Whitner went No. 8 overall to the Buffalo Bills back in 2006, four picks ahead of Ngata. Can’t always plan it out perfectly.

As DeCosta put it, when it comes to Ricky Pearsall:

“He was a good player, but as scouts sometimes you don’t really see the consensus bias, that doesn’t really factor in,” he said. “It’s more like, ‘Oh this guy is my guy, nobody else really seems to like him as much as I like him.’ And so Pearsall was one of those guys this year, ‘Oh my God,’ because I really thought that might be a good pick for us at some point. He got picked.”