It was a fun fascination, Maxx Crosby tearing off the edge in a Baltimore Ravens uniform and terrorizing opposing quarterbacks. The Ravens haven’t had that impactful of a pass rusher since perhaps Terrell Suggs was in his Defensive Player of the Year prime. The fit was perfect, and the possibility was tantalizing.
Yet, let’s be serious. It would never happen.
This was the Ravens, after all, the organization that treats even Day 3 draft selections as if they are gold trinkets. They build through the draft rather than chasing expensive quick fixes. They don’t deal premium picks. In their 31-year history, they had never traded a first-rounder for a player.
That is until late Friday night when they acquired Crosby, the pass-rushing dynamo, from the Las Vegas Raiders in their boldest and arguably biggest trade in franchise history. The price was immense: Baltimore’s 14th overall selection in next month’s draft and its first-round selection in 2027.
And the message sent by the move, which won’t become official until the new league year begins Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET, is crystal clear.
The Ravens know their window to win a Super Bowl with star quarterback Lamar Jackson in his prime isn’t going to stay open forever. Drastic measures were needed after last season’s 8-9 letdown. Staying the course and touting organizational stability was no longer good enough. Approaching things the same year after year and expecting different results grew tired.
That’s why longtime head coach John Harbaugh was fired two months ago. Owner Steve Bisciotti felt that the team, and Jackson in particular, needed a reset and a new voice to help a star-studded roster get over the hump.
That’s also ultimately why Crosby, in about as uncharacteristic a Ravens’ move as possible, will soon join a defense led by first-year head coach Jesse Minter and featuring Roquan Smith, Kyle Hamilton and a host of ex-first-round picks and Pro Bowl performers. The Ravens believe he can be the missing piece, a guy that takes the team to the next level and is a force multiplier.
The Ravens concluded that they needed to do something different, to get out of the comfort zone that has otherwise served them well. Bisciotti and general manager Eric DeCosta, who coincidentally were together in Florida over the past couple of days with other high-ranking members of the organization, needed to take a big swing and check caution and patience at the door.
The Ravens’ decision-makers were tired of watching their proud defense blow leads and fail to get off the field on late-game drives. They were tired of watching their playoff hopes go up in smoke because the team was constantly losing the turnover battle in the season’s biggest games. They were tired of trying to piece together a pass rush by relying on scheme or heavy blitzing, while watching from the opposite sideline as the likes of Myles Garrett and T.J. Watt caused havoc and destroyed offensive game plans.
So they went out and got the best available pass rusher. Crosby has four double-digit-sack seasons in his seven years. Even last year, when he missed two games and was on probably the league’s worst team, Crosby finished with 10 sacks, which was a third of the Ravens’ sack total in 2025.
Since he entered the league in 2019 as a fourth-round pick, Crosby leads all defensive linemen in tackles for loss, is second in quarterback pressures and hits, and fifth in sacks. He’s been an elite pass rusher in the NFL from the jump, and he exudes the relentlessness, aggression and swagger that define what team officials like to call, “playing like a Raven.”
Maxx Crosby has had double-digit sacks in three of the past four seasons. (Ian Maule / Getty Images)
For an organizational fit, they don’t come much better. As one of Minter’s former players pointed out late Friday, a reliable and relentless pass rush is essential to having the type of defense he wants. Crosby can play the run, as well.
But there are certainly risks involved here, too. Teams traditionally trade multiple first-round picks to land franchise quarterbacks, not 28-year-old pass rushers who are a few months removed from knee surgery. The Ravens did not look last year like a team that was one player away from scaling the NFL mountaintop. Their desultory 2025 campaign exposed a roster that was much too ordinary in the trenches and now looks thin at positions like wide receiver and cornerback.
The Ravens can mercifully cross edge rusher off their list of needs, but they now are short two significant assets and a chunk of cap space that were earmarked for plugging holes along the offensive and defensive lines and in the secondary. There’s heavy lifting to be done on the roster and creativity required to make it all work without the team’s next two first-round picks and considerable cap space.
And let’s be clear: This trade will feel incomplete in a way if the Ravens are unable to extend Jackson’s contract, which they may have to do anyway to fit in Crosby’s cap number, and if they let pending free-agent center Tyler Linderbaum walk or at least fail to adequately replace him. DeCosta can’t stop or even slow down now.
The pressure is on him and his staff to make more deals and to maximize their assets. In many ways, the Crosby move was necessitated by DeCosta and the Ravens missing on a handful of early-round pass rushers and being forced to Band-Aid one of the NFL’s most crucial positions with moderately priced veterans in the twilight of their careers.
The Ravens probably don’t make this deal if they were enthralled by their options with the No. 14 pick next month. They needed a much surer thing. Crosby, who wanted out of Las Vegas, was always at the top of their list — and rightly so.
DeCosta is no stranger to making deals. He’s acquired Smith, Marcus Peters, Yannick Ngakoue, Calais Campbell and a few other established veterans. He’s far more aggressive on the trade market than his widely respected predecessor, Ozzie Newsome, ever was. But this feels a little different than the others.
The return for Crosby alone tells you this one is different. The Ravens had little interest in parting with two first-round picks until they undoubtedly concluded that they weren’t prying Crosby out of Vegas for anything less.
It surely made for an interesting debate with DeCosta, Bisciotti, Minter, team president Sashi Brown and vice president of football administration Nick Matteo meeting over the past couple of days at Bisciotti’s Jupiter, Fla., home. Bisciotti has acknowledged that the draft is one of his favorite times of the year, so sitting out the first round of the next two will be agonizing for him and DeCosta. It’s a major concession.
For years, DeCosta and other Ravens decision-makers have downplayed the idea of a Super Bowl window. They maintain that the team is built to contend every year and the window will stay open as long as they continue to make smart decisions and hit in the draft.
They probably won’t acknowledge it, but this Crosby deal, along with Harbaugh’s ouster, suggests that the organization is operating with a greater sense of urgency this offseason.
And just like the addition of an elite pass rusher, that approach was probably long overdue.
