The Baltimore Ravens were not interested in trading their pick with Nate Wiggins available at No. 30 overall.
The option to trade down was always on the table for Baltimore Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta. That is until Clemson cornerback Nate Wiggins was available at No. 30 overall.
It didn’t take long for the Ravens to go from “on the clock” to “the pick is in.” The broadcast feed hardly ticked down 30 seconds before the switch was made.
If that wasn’t convincing enough to show their affinity for Wiggins, DeCosta shared the team declined numerous trade offers for their pick.
“We had a lot of options. The phone rang a lot this year,” DeCosta said. “More so than it has in the last couple years. I can honestly say we probably had eight different potential trades that we could have investigated.”
Landing Wiggins came as a result of an intriguing draft where the first defensive player wasn’t taken until a dozen offensive players were off the board. DeCosta said he wasn’t sold on the possibility of a player they had so highly rated like Wiggins being available, but credited Derrick Yam, the teams’ manager of data and decision science, who thought otherwise.
“I got to give Derrick Yam credit. Derrick works for me upstairs in analytics. He does a great job with modeling and different things. He was convinced that we would get a player in our range of between 13 to 20 in our sequence [and] we’re picking 30. I didn’t think it was going to happen this year. But he was right.”
In closing, DeCosta was emphatic on why they didn’t send the pick elsewhere.
“When you get a player that you have highly rated, who you love, who fills a position of need, then you got to take him,” DeCosta said.
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