Our weekly afternoon notes with the trade deadline less than 24 hours away …
• The Ravens’ trade of second- and fifth-round picks for Roquan Smith is very much a Baltimore deadline move. They’ve made these sorts of deals in the past, with Eugene Monroe, Marcus Peters and Yannick Ngakoue big names to come in over the past decade. Two of those trades were made to bring in guys, such as Smith, in contract years—they wound up re-signing Monroe in March 2014, five months after trading for him, and losing Ngakoue the offseason after dealing for him.
It won’t be cheap to keep Smith, and the Ravens presumably won’t have the franchise tag to preserve his rights, absent a deal getting done with Lamar Jackson before March. But if they lose him, they’d presumably have a third-round compensatory pick coming back in 2024, and they already had an extra fifth-rounder in ’24, which they acquired from the Patriots two summers ago for young corner Shaun Wade.
