Ben SolakMar 7, 2026, 08:00 AM ETCloseBen Solak joined ESPN in 2024 as a national NFL analyst. He previously covered the NFL at The Ringer, Bleeding Green Nation and The Draft Network.Multiple Authors
play1:42How Jesse Minter plans to build team around LamarJesse Minter joins “The Pat McAfee Show” and speaks on building around Lamar Jackson and his thought process going into the 2026 NFL draft as head coach.
Schefter: Raiders got offer they couldn’t refuse in Maxx Crosby trade (1:18)Adam Schefter discusses the Raiders’ decision to trade Maxx Crosby to the Ravens for two first-round draft picks. (1:18)
How Jesse Minter plans to build team around LamarJesse Minter joins “The Pat McAfee Show” and speaks on building around Lamar Jackson and his thought process going into the 2026 NFL draft as head coach.
Jesse Minter joins “The Pat McAfee Show” and speaks on building around Lamar Jackson and his thought process going into the 2026 NFL draft as head coach.
For the weeks that rumors swirled around Las Vegas Raiders edge rusher Maxx Crosby’s trade market, many teams flickered in and out of contention. The Cowboys. The Eagles. The Bears. The Lions. The Patriots.
But none of them got it done. All were priced out by the one team that would never, ever overpay in the NFL trade market. The one team that would never send first-round picks for a non-quarterback. The Baltimore Ravens.
Here they are in uncharted waters. Crosby is the first veteran player that the Ravens have ever traded a first-round pick to get, and they thought he was so nice, they did it twice. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reports that Baltimore is trading its 2026 and 2027 first-round selections to the Raiders for Crosby in what is the first big splash of the 2026 offseason.
As with all trades that include multiple first-round picks, this is probably a bad idea. It is always safer to draft and develop young, cost-controlled talent. That’s the long-term view. It’s sober and wise.
At this exact moment, I do not care for it, though. I think it’s incredibly fun that a player of Crosby’s specific skill set has landed on a team like the Ravens, who so desperately need a jolt to get over the AFC playoff hump and appear in a Super Bowl. Crosby is a truly elite player at a premium position, and his presence on the Ravens’ defense vaults the team from the middle of a crowded AFC playoff picture to the front on the line.
I don’t think there’s a team in football that needed Crosby more than the Ravens. They had 30 sacks last season, tied with the Cardinals and Panthers for the third fewest in the league. Their 29.9% pass rush win rate ranked fifth worst.
So how does he pull it off? By asking his defensive linemen to play multiple gaps. This was one of the magics of Macdonald during Seattle’s Super Bowl run. After signing DeMarcus Lawrence in free agency, Macdonald had an elite run defender at defensive end. Lawrence could knife into interior gaps and pursue interior runs, he could step down when unblocked and disrupt pullers to destroy timing, and he could simply put his hand in a tackle’s chest and control him across the line of scrimmage.
Lawrence was second among all edge rushers in run stop EPA last season. The only edge rusher who created more value stopping the run was Crosby.
But it isn’t just the ironman endurance. Crosby is long and ridiculously strong, and he has a tremendous instinct for the running game. He is an uber-reliable drag-down tackler when making plays, even while still getting blocked. A supercut of Crosby’s best run defense snaps would look like this, from November against the Browns:
But those fourth-quarter leads can be sustained and secured by an elite pass rusher, who uses the surety of the opponent’s dropback to his advantage. Crosby rarely saw big second-half deficits in Las Vegas. Here’s the same table of pressure rate, but I adjusted for only dropbacks on obvious passing downs.
Yes, microwaving is the road to disaster. Yes, shortcutting the long road of patient, draft-first team building is generally bad. But the Ravens have been sitting around and drafting, drafting, drafting around Jackson for years now. It hasn’t born fruit. It’s time to get in and get going while the getting’s still good.
The move reeks of desperation. But desperate moves are defensible in desperate times, and this is one of those times. Too many teams sit too long on “good not great” status without committing to a legitimate push, prying that championship window open for a season more. The Ravens have leapt into the pool with both feet. Now they sink or swim.
It has been hard for Baltimore to find a good edge rusher. It has spent at least a fourth-round pick on an outside rusher in each of the past five drafts: Mike Green (2025), Adisa Isaac (2024), Tavius Robinson (2023), David Ojabo (2022) and Odafe Oweh (2021). The best season it has gotten out of that group was the 10-sack campaign Oweh gave it in 2024. But one year later, the Ravens flipped him to the Chargers at the trade deadline. Veterans like Jadeveon Clowney (9.5 sacks in 2023) and Kyle Van Noy (12.5 in 2024) have held the roles admirably, but the Ravens have not rostered a field-tipping edge rusher since Terrell Suggs in 2017.
Of course, those were the issues of the old coaching staff. Jesse Minter has replaced John Harbaugh as the new head coach of the Ravens, and with him comes his defensive system. Minter, who is a branch off the Mike Macdonald schematic tree, used the fourth most two-high coverages in the NFL as the Chargers’ offensive coordinator last season, per NFL Next Gen Stats. (Macdonald’s Seahawks were right behind in fifth.) The Chargers were also fourth in light box percentage against the run at 44.7%. Minter’s defense does not stack numbers near the line of scrimmage to defend the ground game.
Crosby was so valuable against the run in large part because of the volume of snaps he saw against it. He simply doesn’t leave the field. Unlike many elite pass rushers, who are on the sideline on early downs to keep their legs fresh for speed and explosiveness on late downs, Crosby simply doesn’t take snaps off. In December of the 2024 season, he had played every single snap in six consecutive games for the 2-10 Raiders (387 in a row). That was the longest streak by a defensive lineman in the Next Gen Stats database, going back to 2016.
Crosby is a little different of a run defender than Khalil Mack, who was Minter’s run-stuffing defensive end in Los Angeles. Crosby plays faster and more upfield, looking to create penetration and stuffs for loss instead of slowing runners down. Minter will have to adjust how he uses his new star defensive end within the context of the playcall. But on a depth chart that otherwise featured Robinson, Green, Isaac, Ojabo and Van Noy, Crosby is an enormous breath of relief in run defense. It’s hard to imagine how Minter’s defense would have worked without the addition of a run-defending end, and he got the best one in the NFL.
Part of the Ravens’ theory behind acquiring Crosby, who will turn 29 when the season begins and is accordingly on the wrong side of his athletic prime, is that he will become a more productive pass rusher in their building than he was recently in Las Vegas. It’s worth noting then that Crosby’s pressure rate has decreased in each of the past two seasons. As he is a player who never leaves the field, his rapid approach to 30 does create some concern that his legs are closer to 31, 32, even 33 years old. His usage, while admirable, looks like it isn’t aging well.
The pressure fall off now isn’t so much a two-year decline as it is a one-year decline. And of course, Crosby was injured during the 2025 season. He hurt his knee in the Raiders’ Week 7 game against the Chiefs and played on it through Week 16, when he was shelved on injured reserve. It becomes much easier to explain Crosby’s 2025 fall off in the context of the terrible Raiders team and that injury — though excuses are still excuses. There is some risk here that Crosby won’t bounce back to his 2023 form.
The second thing the Ravens can, and hopefully will do, for Crosby is convince him to take fewer snaps. True to his form of deep personal commitment, Crosby played 100% of the snaps in his final five games as a Raider — on a bum knee in a lost season. For a playoff contender like the Ravens, which intends to play not just a 17-game season but also another three or four postseason games, Crosby simply must sit. He cannot keep this towering snap count up at that height. The Ravens need him to be fresh in January, and perhaps, on a new team, he’ll take that advice to heart.
If Crosby indeed sits for some early downs, he’ll take the field on third down as the Ravens’ best pass rusher by a mile. Baltimore needs 12-plus sacks to go with the impressive run down production in order to justify the package they sent to Las Vegas to get Crosby, and he has that in him. Even in his down year for pressure rate, he had 10 sacks in 15 games, along with 7.5 sacks in 12 games the previous season. But his career best is 14.5, and that’s closer to the number Baltimore will be expecting.
The history of trades that include multiple first-round picks is not encouraging. The Colts’ recent trade for cornerback Sauce Gardner is a cautionary tale; Gardner got injured two games after the deal. The Seahawks’ Jamal Adams trade lives in infamy. There are some encouraging wins — Micah Parsons to the Packers, Khalil Mack to the Bears, Jalen Ramsey to the Rams — but all three of those players were approaching their second contract. Crosby is well through his second deal and onto his third. This is when players typically start falling off.
The Ravens’ defense is littered with the uncertainty of age and health. Yes, Kyle Hamilton is the young star safety, and Nate Wiggins continues to ascend as a CB1. But linebacker Roquan Smith is also 28-turning-29, and his age has shown up in consecutive seasons in which he has started the year a little slower than the Smith we’re accustomed to seeing. CB2 Marlon Humphrey is turning 30 this summer, and he was one of the least successful CBs when targeted downfield last season. He allowed a completion percentage of 58.3% (league average was 32.3%) and a passer rating of 107.6 (league average was 90.2). His legs have begun to show their wear.