Baltimore has turned 67 of 103 draft picks into 500-snap NFL players since 2012, the most raw hits of any franchise in the league and the second best rate. Across the eleven complete classes from 2012 through 2022, the Ravens converted at 65.0 percent against a league mark of 57.3. Only Philadelphia, at 67.5, finished ahead. Kansas City came in fourth at 63.8, and Atlanta, whose board this series covered two weeks ago, sat between them at 64.1.
The standard account of why credits the top of the board. Ozzie Newsome ran the room through 2018 and Eric DeCosta has run it since, and both have reputations built on first-round decisions that worked, most famously the trade back into round one in 2018 to take Lamar Jackson at pick 32. A franchise with that history is assumed to be winning where the picks are expensive.
It is not. In rounds 1 through 3, Baltimore went 33 of 41, a rate of 80.5 percent against a league mark of 82.0. The Ravens are a fraction below average in the rounds everyone watches. The entire gap between them and the other 31 teams sits in rounds 4 through 7, where they went 34 of 62 against a league rate of 41.0.
The expensive rounds are unremarkable
Round by round, the top of Baltimore’s board reads like anyone else’s. The Ravens went 7 of 9 in the second round against a league rate of 83.1 percent, which is a shortfall. They went 13 of 19 in the third at 68.4 percent, against a league 71.0, which is another one. Neither gap is large and neither is a scandal. They are simply not an advantage.
The obvious counter is that Baltimore drafts late because Baltimore is usually good, and late first-round picks are worth less than early ones. That objection is real and this metric cannot settle it. What it can settle is whether the Ravens are hoarding premium capital, and they are not. Of their 103 picks in the window, 22 came in the first two rounds. That is 21.4 percent of their board against a league share of 24.9 percent. Baltimore spends proportionally less at the top than the average team and still finishes second overall.
The misses in the middle are ordinary misses. Ben Cleveland went 94th in 2021 to play guard and has 1,007 career snaps with a best season of 412, short of the line. Baltimore’s third round has produced Mark Andrews at pick 86 in 2018 and Nnamdi Madubuike at 71 in 2020, and it has also produced enough shortfalls to land the Ravens under league average in that round across eleven years. A front office that lived on rounds 1 through 3 would not look like this.
Fourth-round picks, over and over
The fourth round is where the record turns strange. Baltimore made 29 fourth-round selections in the window, more than any other single round on its board, and hit on 20 of them. That is 69.0 percent against a league rate of 62.0, and it arrives on a sample large enough to mean something.
Two of the current roster’s most-used players came out of it in the same weekend. Isaiah Likely went 139th in 2022 and has played 63 games with 641 snaps in his best season. Daniel Faalele went 110th in the same class and has 2,800 career snaps with a peak of 1,199, which is a full season of offensive line work from a pick made after the third round ended. Neither was a reach and neither was a headline.
The pattern predates both of them by a decade. Za’Darius Smith went 122nd in 2015 and has played eleven seasons and 6,345 snaps, peaking at 947 in a year, and he is currently in Philadelphia. Alex Lewis went 130th in 2016 and put up 816 snaps in his best season. Baltimore hit on at least one fourth-round pick in ten of the eleven classes, every year except 2017, which is what separates a habit from a fluke.
The rest of Day 3 tells the same story with smaller numbers. Baltimore went 6 of 14 in the sixth round, 42.9 percent against a league rate of 33.6, and 2 of 6 in the seventh against a league 23.8. Round five is the exception at 6 of 13, essentially league average. Add the four rounds together and the Ravens converted 34 of 62 Day 3 picks. The league converted 696 of 1,697.
Minnesota ran the same experiment
The easy reading of 103 picks is that volume explains the 67 hits, and there is a control group for that. Minnesota made 114 picks in the same eleven classes, more than any team in football, and converted 58 of them. That is 50.9 percent, thirtieth of 32, against Baltimore’s 65.0 at second. The Vikings took eleven more swings than the Ravens and finished nine hits behind.
Volume is not the mechanism. At the league rate of 57.3 percent, 103 picks should have produced about 59 hits. Baltimore produced 67. The eight extra are not an accounting artifact of a big board, and they are not concentrated at the top of it either, because Baltimore’s distribution of picks across the rounds is close to league-normal: 62 of their 103 selections came on Day 3, a share of 60.2 percent against a league share of 60.4. The surplus shows up in classes like 2020, when the Ravens went 9 of 10 and hit on all four of their third-round picks, Nnamdi Madubuike at 71 among them. Minnesota’s problem was never the number of chances.
It is worth stating the measure plainly once, because the whole argument rests on it. A pick counts as a hit if the player produced 500 or more offensive, defensive, or special-teams snaps in a single regular season, with any team, the threshold this series applies to all 32 franchises so the rates compare cleanly. The window runs 2012 through 2022 and stops there because classes from 2023 forward have not had time to resolve. Full definitions are at /methodology.
Two ways to finish at the top
Philadelphia is the only team that drafted better, and the two rosters those boards produced look nothing alike.
Baltimore’s 2025 active roster carries 69 players. Forty of them are Ravens draft picks, 58.0 percent, and only 12 were drafted by another franchise, 17.4 percent. Philadelphia’s roster carries 72, of whom 34 are Eagles picks at 47.2 percent and 24 arrived via someone else’s draft, 33.3 percent. The team with the best draft record in the league imports a third of its roster. The team with the second best imports a sixth.
This series argued in April that Howie Roseman’s record is build-and-keep rather than a paradox, and that holds. What the Baltimore comparison adds is that build-and-keep is not the only way to sit at the top of this table, and it may not even be the purest version of it. Philadelphia drafts brilliantly and then goes shopping. The Eagles’ 2025 roster includes Saquon Barkley, drafted second overall by the Giants in 2018, and A.J. Brown, a Titans second-rounder from 2019. Baltimore’s entire imported cohort is twelve players, headlined by Derrick Henry out of Tennessee’s 2016 second round, Roquan Smith out of Chicago’s 2018 first, and DeAndre Hopkins out of Houston’s 2013 first.
Seventeen more of the 69 Ravens went undrafted, which is 24.6 percent of the roster and more than the number acquired from other teams’ draft boards. Baltimore’s roster is built out of its own picks and players nobody picked at all.
The 2022 class never left
Retention is the other half of this series’ question, and Baltimore answers it the way the roster construction suggests it would. Of the hits from the 2017 through 2021 classes, 8 of 32 are still on the 2025 roster, a rate of 25.0 percent. Atlanta, covered here two weeks ago, kept 5 of 24 at 20.8 percent. Las Vegas kept 3 of 25, which came out at 12 percent and is the lowest cohort figure this series has published so far.
The survivors are the picks you would expect and a few you would not. Marlon Humphrey came 16th in 2017 and has 131 games and 7,762 career snaps. Jackson came 32nd the following spring. Andrews came 86th in that same draft and has 5,146. Madubuike came 71st in 2020, and Broderick Washington went 170th in the fifth round of the same class, cleared the threshold with 582 snaps in his best season, and is still on the roster six years later.
The class that shows what this looks like when everything holds is 2022. Baltimore made eleven picks and hit on seven, 63.6 percent. Four seasons later, eight of the eleven are still there: Kyle Hamilton at 14, Tyler Linderbaum at 25, David Ojabo at 45, Travis Jones at 76, and four of the six fourth-rounders in Faalele, Charlie Kolar, Jordan Stout and Likely. One weekend produced a starting safety, a starting center, and most of a Day 3 rotation that has not turned over since.
The shape of the 40 homegrown players follows from all of it. Nineteen play defense, eleven are skill-position players, eight are offensive linemen, and two are specialists, and the most-drafted single position is linebacker at six. That is not a roster assembled around a few premium acquisitions. It is a roster made of depth that stayed.
What 500 snaps does not tell you
The bar is presence, not quality, and it is generous in two directions that both matter to this piece.
The first shows up in round one. Baltimore went 13 for 13 there, which looks like the headline and is not one, because the league rate in the first round is 330 of 351, or 94.0 percent. At least seven other teams also went perfect in the window, including the Jets at 15 for 15 and Miami at 13 for 13. Matt Elam went 32nd in 2013, played three seasons and 2,180 snaps, cleared 1,158 in his best year and scores as a hit, and nobody in Baltimore files that pick under success. Breshad Perriman went 26th in 2015 and cleared the line with 651 snaps in a season. A first-round pick who starts as a rookie clears 500 snaps almost automatically, whether or not he was worth the slot.
The second direction is the one that cuts at the actual argument. Special-teams snaps count toward the threshold, and Day 3 is exactly where teams draft the players who live on special teams. Baltimore spent a fourth-round pick on a punter in 2022. A franchise that uses late picks on rotational bodies and specialists will convert them into 500-snap seasons more often than a franchise chasing upside with the same selections, and that is a roster-building choice rather than an evaluation edge.
So the honest version of the finding is narrower than 54.8 percent makes it sound. Baltimore turns Day 3 picks into players who are on the field a lot, at a rate far above the league mark, and on the field a lot is not the same claim as good. What the number does establish, and what the first-round objection cannot touch, is that the advantage is not sitting where the reputation says it sits. The rounds where Baltimore is merely average are the rounds people talk about.
What it means
The Ravens are second in the league at drafting and they got there without an edge in the first three rounds, without an unusual share of premium picks, and without volume doing the work. What is left is the part of the weekend that most front offices treat as a lottery.
That is a harder thing to copy than a good first round. A team can trade up. A team cannot decide to be better at the 130th pick. And it points at a specific vulnerability, because an advantage concentrated on Day 3 produces contributors rather than stars, which is precisely the kind of roster that needs the expensive rounds to land the difference-makers. Baltimore’s answer to that has been Lamar Jackson, taken 32nd in 2018, 6,825 career snaps and eight seasons in, and Kyle Hamilton, taken 14th in 2022 with 3,902 snaps through four.
Twenty-two first- and second-round picks in eleven years is not many, and the Ravens have been average with them. The question the next decade asks is whether a front office can keep finding starters in the fourth round long enough to cover for being ordinary in the first.