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Ravens Ring of Honor
It was not the time for brags or bluster. Even 35 years ago, Eric DeCosta was fully invested and immersed in the NFL draft. Friends in his Massachusetts neighborhood knew it was one of the rare times during the year that DeCosta wasn’t coming outside for a wiffle ball game or a football toss.
On draft days, DeCosta and his father, Joe, were in front of the family television, any player information they could scrounge up on handwritten notes at the ready. They’d talk strategy, break down teams and prospects and watch the draft unfold.
They were the definition of armchair general managers, except 12-year-old Eric interrupted the proceedings one year to tell his father that wasn’t always going to be the case.
“Dad,” DeCosta told his father. “I’m going to be running a National Football League team someday.”
“I’m telling you, this is something he dreamed of as a kid,” Joe said. “Of course, I laughed it off. And he’s done it.”
Later this week, DeCosta will lead his first draft as the Ravens’ general manager, completing an ascension that started when he was hired as a scouting intern before the organization’s 1996 inaugural season in Baltimore. DeCosta, who’s been on the job for a little over three months as the successor to friend and mentor, Ozzie Newsome, says the draft will be business as usual.
What he doesn’t say is it will also be the culmination of years of patience and perseverance in chasing a lifelong goal.
“He’s always going to be that 10-year-old, annoying older brother,” said Dr. Joey Tryon, DeCosta’s sister. “But the thing that’s interesting about him is he’s always been himself, he’s never changed.”
DeCosta, 48, has always been a dreamer, but that’s only a small part of his story. He’s a relentless competitor, who considers games the worst part of his job because he has no control over the outcome. He’s a renowned prankster, with his sister and Ravens senior vice president of football administration Pat Moriarty the frequent targets of his hijinks. He’s a voracious reader and writer, a devout boxing and Boston Red Sox fan and a non-stop pursuer of knowledge, or anything that will give he or the Ravens an edge.
DeCosta learned to translate ancient Greek while an English and Classics major at Colby College in Maine, sometimes taking hours to convert one paragraph. He now leans on that focus and painstaking attention to detail when he breaks down film of draft prospects and projects how they’ll fit with the Ravens.
“Now, (the desire is for) instant gratification,” DeCosta said in a recent interview with The Athletic. “Sometimes, you just really have to work hard at something to get any kind of meaning from it. Going back to my college education, I think I learned hard work and to be detailed. The other thing for me in college, there was some really smart kids. I always felt like the underdog. I always felt like I wasn’t smart enough, unless I worked twice as hard as these kids did. It was very apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be the shining star in college as a student or as an athlete, but I always felt like the combination of both would give me an advantage. The sum of my parts would be greater than my individual parts.
“That’s kind of how I’ve approached my life. I was never really good at anything, but I always tried to be pretty good at everything.”
Building football teams gripped him. He loved the Dallas Cowboys, but it was Tex Schramm, Tom Landry and Gil Brandt, the architects of some of their great rosters, who he admired more than the star players. He collected baseball and football cards and organized them into hypothetical teams, put together after weighing the statistics on the card backs.
Thirty NFL teams once rejected DeCosta’s interest in working for them. All it took was an offer from the Ravens for him to defy the wishes of his mother, who badly wanted her only son to go to law school. The Ravens paid DeCosta $18,000 a year to be the organization’s first scouting intern.
“He’s like (Bill) Belichick,” said Arizona Cardinals Vice President of Player Personnel Terry McDonough, who became close with DeCosta when both worked in the Ravens’ scouting department. “I don’t care what profession they chose — Wall Street, working in politics, you name it — they were going to be successful no matter what they did. Because they are bright, tough and really don’t have any weaknesses. Eric’s a special guy, a one-percenter.”
I n what was his last draft as Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome had Eric DeCosta at his side with 2018 first round draft picks, tight end Hayden Hurst, third from left, and quarterback Lamar Jackson, third from right (Patrick Semansky/Associated Press).
Owner identifies succession plan
“Hey, do you have a few minutes? I’d like to meet with you.”
Eric DeCosta is 36 years old, the Ravens director of college scouting and a man who’d consider his relationship with the team’s owner, Steve Bisciotti, cordial but not particularly deep. It’s a casual scene with a thinning crowd of coaches and scouts at a social outing, hosted by Bisciotti at the Caves Valley Golf Club in 2007. In nearly as casual a manner, Bisciotti changes the course of DeCosta’s life.
“Are you going to be my next general manager someday?” Bisciotti asks.
“It was an easy thing for me to say yes to,” DeCosta said. “Once I did, in my mind, there was never any going back.”
Baltimore is DeCosta’s adopted hometown. He’s lived in Charm City for 23 years. His wife, Lacie, is a Baltimore girl through and through. Their family, which includes daughter, Jane, and sons, Michael and Jackson, is active in the community. DeCosta, with his thick New England accent, is also very much a product of the place and the people he grew up with.
Taunton, Mass., is a close-knit, blue-collar town about 40 miles south of Boston that was once known for its silver production. DeCosta is the grandson of Portuguese immigrants and the son of a man who ran two manufacturing companies that built metal devices. His mother, Donna, worked in a bank. The DeCosta’s lived modestly and it was made clear to Eric and Joey that hard work was not just an expectation, it was a requirement.
“There were no blue bloods in his background, I can tell you that,” Joe said.
Eric still keeps in touch with many of the same neighborhood friends that he had three decades ago, their bonds formed over wiffle ball games and living room horseplay, and strengthened over the years by periodic visits or text messages just to check in.
“He’ll stick by your side through thick and thin,” said Sean McDonough, a friend and former classmate of DeCosta’s.
John Monteiro played football with DeCosta at Taunton High. As DeCosta’s NFL front office star was on the rise, Monteiro would periodically run into former Tigers’ teammates and the conversation would eventually shift to their old buddy, now in Baltimore.
As the captain of the Tigers, DeCosta demanded that teammates worked as hard as he did and were fully committed. Monteiro knew that years later DeCosta was still living by those tenets.
“Guys questioned me all the time about him and I’d say, ‘You’re never going to see that guy leave Baltimore. He loves Ozzie. His family is there. He’s such a loyal person. There’s just no way,’” Monteiro said. “Even when he was spending 20 hours a day on the road as a scout, we’d ask him, ‘What’s your endgame, what’s your ultimate goal?’ And he’d say that it was to be the GM of the Baltimore Ravens. Here we are.”
Marquee organizations, like the Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears and Seattle Seahawks, coveted DeCosta for their general manager openings. Late Seahawks owner Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, called DeCosta directly. DeCosta, who loves reading biographies about highly-successful people and leaders, was flattered. Yet, he turned down the interview request and many others over the years.
Within the Ravens front office, DeCosta found the type of relationships that he still maintained back home. He worked with his best friends who tolerated his endless supply of pranks. It was fun, challenging and productive, and he figured he’d get an opportunity to succeed Newsome someday. So, why leave?
“People would question me either to my face or behind my back, but I think one thing people would say about me, they’d say I am loyal,” DeCosta said. “Even as a kid, I really admired the players that played their whole career with one team — guys like Larry Bird, Carl Yastrzemski, players on the Cowboys. What an amazing book from the first page to the last chapter, where you’d stay with one team.”
Started, literally from the bottom
The general manager’s office at the Ravens’ Under Armour Performance Center overlooks the practice fields and is sparsely decorated. Three game balls sit perched on a shelf. Pictures of family dot the room. A few boxing posters hang on the wall.
The reminders of the improbability of his professional journey are tucked in a drawer, neatly stacked and easily accessible if he needs a dose of motivation or perspective. Some of the letters and envelopes show their age with frayed corners and faded type. Bill Belichick wrote him back; so did George Young and Al Davis. There are 30 letters in total. They all say some version of “Thanks, but no thanks, and best of luck.”
Eric DeCosta rises from his seat across the room, pulls open the desk drawer and lifts the stack, carrying them over to a visitor in his office.
“I always felt like if I got an opportunity, whatever it was, then I would maximize it,” DeCosta says. “I would find a way to succeed as long as I got a chance.”
DeCosta was an undersized, yet ultra-intense linebacker for Colby College. Teammates affectionately called him a smurf, but his head coach, Tom Austin, described him differently.
“Tougher than a bag of hammers,” Austin said. “He played a lot bigger than he was and his commitment to detail was unmatched. If you just took it off the playing field to whatever role he chose, he was going to be a first-rounder.”
After DeCosta graduated from Colby, Austin helped him get a coaching internship at Trinity College (Conn.) in 1993. While many of his college friends were securing lucrative jobs in financial fields, DeCosta was buried under student loans, making $1,500 per semester and stealing bagels from the campus cafeteria to make sure he had enough food to get through the week. But he was in his element; coaching, watching film, recruiting and learning from Don Miller, who retired as the all-time winningest Division III football coach in New England history.
A chance meeting at a local establishment near the Trinity campus proved to be the impetus he needed. DeCosta struck up a conversation with a guy who’d just finished a scouting internship with the Washington Redskins.
“It was like I got hit with a lightning bolt,” DeCosta said. “Everything stopped for me in my moment and I was like, ‘I have to do that.’ I ran home and started working on my résumé. I’m like, ‘This is my chance.’”
The Redskins and the Detroit Lions were the only two of 32 teams that responded with an offer. DeCosta worked as a training camp intern in the Redskins’ player personnel department in 1995. He did myriad odd jobs, but he hit it off with coaches and scouts.
DeCosta was then recommended for an opening with the Browns, who were gearing up for a move to Baltimore. He wasn’t the first choice. The Ravens originally offered the job to Les Snead, who opted instead to join the Jacksonville Jaguars. A decade and a half later, Snead was named the GM of the St. Louis Rams.
Meantime, DeCosta awaited word on whether he’d be accepted at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and was still pondering a teaching career. Donna DeCosta had made her feelings on the matter clear, and she didn’t support her son taking a minimally-paying internship with a nascent NFL team more than 400 miles away.
But the DeCostas also understood what their two kids always wanted to do. Joey wanted to be a doctor, but when she didn’t immediately get into her preferred medical schools, she went into the Peace Corps and spent several years in southern Africa. Over a tennis match with his father, DeCosta made up his mind.
“I was sitting on a court with my Dad and he said, ‘Listen Eric, I know how your mom feels about this and she’s not there yet with you going to Baltimore. But you’ve known since you were seven years old that this is what you want to do. You know what? You just have to take a chance. You just have to do it,’” DeCosta recalled. “I felt so good about it.
“And then he looked at me and said, ‘But don’t tell your Mom I said that.’”
DeCosta’s first job with the Baltimore football team in 1996 was as undefined as the franchise itself. The team stationery had blank helmets on it. Their facility was a converted police barracks. DeCosta’s “work space” consisted of a card table, and his job changed on a daily basis.
He helped out in the training room and with the public relations department. He picked up draft prospects at the airport and was in the war room on draft night to break down trade scenarios. He was a chauffeur to head coach Ted Marchibroda, even driving him to a funeral … in Buffalo.
“If I was going to describe him, ubiquitous comes to mind. He was just everywhere,” said Moriarty, the organization’s chief financial officer in 1996. “He was helping Ozzie. He was helping Ted Marchibroda. He was helping out Phil Savage, who was the college director at the time. He was just there. It seemed like he was everybody’s assistant.”
Marchibroda would give DeCosta a $100 bill to take his car for an oil change. DeCosta found a place on Reisterstown Road that would do it for $9.99. He got to keep the change.
“I didn’t really have any money but I had the opportunity,” he said. “It was all about my job. I had no family down there. It was learning the business of football and succeeding. That’s it.”
Thinking out of the box
Orioles center fielder Adam Jones hits the first home run. Two batters later, Manny Machado connects. Chris Davis homers, and when Mark Trumbo deposits a pitch over the wall against the Houston Astros, the 2016 Orioles become the first baseball team since 1900 to hit four homers before recording an out.
Eric DeCosta shifts uncomfortably in his Camden Yards seat. He’d reached out to the Astros’ front office because of his deep respect for the forward-thinking organization and their approach to team-building. He wanted to trade ideas. He’d spent time earlier in the day with Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and Sig Mejdal, the former NASA engineer who led Houston’s analytical team, and then joined them later for the game.
DeCosta doesn’t deal with losing well. Never has. As a kid, he’d go on 10-mile runs to blow off steam when the Cowboys didn’t play well. He broke countless rackets during matches with his sister, even though Joey doesn’t ever recall winning one.
As ball after ball leaves the yard, DeCosta observes the Astros’ GM and his assistant with awe. He doesn’t know them well at this point, and DeCosta imagines how he’d act if his team was the one on the wrong end of that type of record. “Gosh,” he thinks, “I’d be going crazy. I’d be punching holes in the wall.”
“It’s baseball,” they assure him. “Don’t worry about it.”
The Astros come back to win the game, leaving DeCosta with one lasting thought: “This is a different sport. It’s totally different.”
DeCosta’s curiosity and desire to always be on the cutting edge led to a relationship between the Ravens and Astros that both sides say has been beneficial. DeCosta has grown especially close with Mejdal, who is now the Orioles assistant GM under another former Houston executive, Mike Elias.
“It didn’t take long to realize that he has a growth mindset,” Mejdal said of DeCosta. “He has an incessant desire to learn, explore, get ideas from outside of football. That’s a wonderful person to talk to and exchange ideas with.
“When you can find a modern, open-minded (coach or executive) searching for innovations and when you can have a conversation with them, it cannot not help. There was ideas related to the draft, to scouting, to the traits of a scout that were very illuminating to us that we put to use with the Astros and now with the Orioles, too.”
Mark Jackson was a teammate of DeCosta’s at Colby, and their post-playing careers seemed to be running on parallel tracks at one point. DeCosta helped Jackson get a grad assistant job at Trinity, and the two lived together there. Jackson moved on to the New England Patriots before taking an administrative position at University of Southern California. Now the athletic director at Villanova University, Jackson and DeCosta still regularly exchange ideas.
“I go back to Colby, and I remember him reading the English classics, and doing things that — at least in my perspective — weren’t all that commonplace,” Jackson said. “I always sensed that there was some kind of angle that he always wanted to grow, always wanted to learn more. He was very cerebral. This isn’t a guy that’s just about football either. It’s not all about X’s and O’s and salary cap. He’s a very cultured guy. There’s a really healthy well-roundedness about him.”
Still, DeCosta is a scout at heart. He may not miss the weeks upon weeks spent on the road, some in remote football outposts, but he loves evaluating players. That part of him shows itself often: DeCosta and other Ravens officials are fond of using scouting terms to grade their meals.
Back in the late 90’s, DeCosta returned to his alma mater to teach a two-day clinic to the Colby staff on film evaluation. He arrived with four three-ring notebooks containing lengthy explanations of the ideal qualities he looks for in players at each position. Austin, who now works at Bridgton Academy, still shares the information in those notebooks to colleagues.
“He’d say, ‘Coach, you have to understand that it’s about more than just height, weight and 40 times,’” Austin said.
DeCosta was promoted to area scout in 1998 and he took over the director of college scouting role in 2003. In 2012, he was elevated to Newsome’s top assistant. During his time as scouting director, the Ravens selected Terrell Suggs, Haloti Ngata, Joe Flacco, Ray Rice and Marshal Yanda among others.
“Marshal was not an obvious choice coming in, but Eric had the ability to see beyond the measurables,” said Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, the Ravens’ offensive line coach for their first three seasons in Baltimore. “To me, that’s the whole story with Marshal. He wasn’t a combine guy. He was just a football player, and Eric could see that.”
Terry McDonough has been a scout for nearly three decades and he’s worked with hundreds of young evaluators. He said of DeCosta: “It takes a long time to be able to master the craft of scouting and he was the best evaluator in the room at an early age. That’s the reason I took to him. When he spoke about a player, he was usually right.”
Baltimore Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta, from left, learned a lot of lessons from his predecessor Ozzie Newsome and owner Stephen Bisciotti realized DeCosta’s ability years earlier. (Patrick Semansky/Associated Press)
Personal training from Newsome
Eric DeCosta is walking around aimlessly, unable to shake the feeling that he’s the kid on his first day at a new school. Blending in is about all he can think of doing as he searches for a seat to watch prospects at his first NFL scouting combine. The faces around him are mostly unfamiliar.
Then, a recognizable voice calls out.
“Come on up here,” Ozzie Newsome says, waiving the young pro personnel assistant to a seating area infiltrated with general managers and head coaches.
“For the last 23 years, I’ve sat with him at the combine,” DeCosta says, two-plus decades later as he’s introduced formally as the Ravens GM. “He basically took a 25-year-old kid who had no experience in the NFL … and gave me a chance and accepted me.”
When the Ravens introduced DeCosta as their GM this past January, he cited his father and late mother, his sister, and his wife who “without her, I’m probably working in a different city.”
His voice cracked with emotion as he brought up Newsome.
Newsome, who remains in the organization as a trusted ear for DeCosta, is from the Deep South. He’s an Alabama football legend who played under Bear Bryant before fashioning a Hall of Fame playing career. He’s even keeled, measured and patient. He gives off the impression that he’d rather be in a dentist chair than speaking at a news conference. And particularly galling to his longtime lieutenant, he’s a New York Yankees fan.
DeCosta, a New Englander to his core, won the Millett Award as a senior at Colby for outstanding athletic contributions over his four years. He has a sharp tongue, an aggressive personality and he looks completely at ease in front of cameras and reporters.
Yet, the two have been aligned for over two decades, even when it came to DeCosta eventually replacing Newsome. When Bisciotti had that career-altering talk with DeCosta in 2007, he’d already discussed the idea with Newsome. And then DeCosta and Newsome discussed it.
“This is really one of the most wonderful qualities about Ozzie, but he gave me an opportunity to watch him and to see what he does and how he did it. He would include me,” DeCosta said. “He’d share things with me and if I had a question, he’d give me an honest answer. He didn’t try to conceal things. The greatest thing for me… was just having the opportunity to observe and watch and listen and learn, and put myself in these situations. ‘What would I do? How would I handle this?’ That’s a gift that Steve and Ozzie gave me.”
In his first three months as the Ravens general manager DeCosta traded Flacco, a former Super Bowl MVP and the best quarterback in franchise history; cut popular safety Eric Weddle, a player who he became extremely close with; and watched defensive mainstays Terrell Suggs and C.J. Mosley leave for other organizations.
“I am sentimental, I am emotional, I’m not a robot. It’s very hard when you’re dealing with meaningful relationships that you have with players or other people that you really care about,” DeCosta said. “That being said, I feel like I have a responsibility to Steve, to the organization at large and to our fans to do what we all think is best.
“I waited a long time to be in this position and I’m going to do it my way.”
DeCosta responded by signing running back Mark Ingram and standout safety Earl Thomas. Now, here comes the draft, DeCosta’s favorite time of year. Thirty six years after telling his father of his ambitions to run an NFL team, DeCosta is determined to be right again.
