It’s the NFL offseason, where score is kept not on an actual scoreboard where the hopes and dreams of fans rise and fall with every fourth quarter red zone snap, but instead here in the time between the draft and the preseason we keep score by one metric and one metric alone: drug test suspensions.
And, in that category, the Baltimore Ravens have left the rest of the league behind.
According to ESPN, “When Ravens tight end Darren Waller was suspended for the full 2017 season last week, it marked his second suspension and the 13th total suspension, coming from 10 different players, that the Ravens have received since 2010 for either performance-enhancing drugs and drugs of abuse. According to ESPN, that’s the most of any team.”
ESPN detailed the long, sad tale that has been the Ravens story over the last few years when it comes to PED’s:
Waller is one of 10 Ravens players who have been suspended since 2010 for performance-enhancing drugs or other substances: WR David Reed (2011), DE Ryan McBean (2012), CB Asa Jackson (2012, 2013), S Christian Thompson (2013), DT Haloti Ngata (2014), S Matt Elam (2015), TE Nick Boyle (2015, 2016), S Will Hill (2016) and Dixon (2017).
The Ravens, according to Assistant General Manager Eric DeCosta, have endeavored to limit the chances of any future positive PED tests by emphasizing the importance of character evaluations to their scouts. At a pre-draft news conference back in April, DeCosta said, “We challenge our scouts to go into schools and talk to at least four different people to generate a profile on who the player is off the field.
“We look at specific things like durability, personality, coachability, intelligence, football intelligence—which is a little bit different—leadership and things like that. That is a big part of being a scout—going in and doing that.”
It’s also not working.
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