Solak: Why Crosby fits perfectly with the Ravens' D — and their Super Bowl window

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.

Let’s size up how he fits into both this defense and Baltimore’s Super Bowl timeline.

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How he fits with the defense
How he fits the Ravens’ timeline

How he fits with the defense

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.

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 such as 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.

So how does he pull it off? By asking his defensive linemen to play multiple gaps. This was part of the magic 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.

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.

But it isn’t just the iron man 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:

Just a hellion https://t.co/qtwKnCNFSv pic.twitter.com/NtUz29YVIx

— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) March 7, 2026

Crosby regularly splits double-teams with his first step, careening through tight ends with ease. But the way he comes to balance when working through contact is second to none, and it allows him to spring to the ball carrier when many other defensive ends would be pushed out of a playmaking position. Over the past four seasons, Crosby has 45 tackles for loss against designed runs. The next closest defensive lineman is Myles Garrett with 30.

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.

But the Ravens can do one thing the Raiders didn’t do often: lead in the second half. Under Harbaugh, the Ravens were a famously dominant team for the first 3.5, even 3.75 quarters of their games. Ask any Ravens fan about the fourth-quarter collapses, and you’ll get an earful. Just last season they surrendered multiscore fourth-quarter leads over the Bills and Patriots in what ended up becoming playoff-defining losses.

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.

The pressure falloff 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 falloff 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 do, and hopefully will do, is convince Crosby 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 Baltimore, 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 defense in order to justify the package it 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.

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How he fits the Ravens’ timeline

Let’s make no bones about it: The Ravens traded two first-round picks for a soon-to-be 29-year-old defensive end coming off knee surgery. That’s extremely risky.

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.

Perhaps the biggest conundrum is Nnamdi Madubuike, the young defensive tackle meant to share the night sky with Hamilton as a defensive star. Madubuike entered the league as an older prospect, and he’ll turn 29 in November. Over the past few years, he’d staked his claim as one of the league’s best defensive tackles … before a neck injury took him out of all but two games in 2025. Harbaugh was always careful when speaking about Madubuike’s injury, which took him away from the team and seemed to put retirement on the table.

The Ravens’ defense entered the offseason at a crossroads. And with Madubuike back and a defensive philosophy upgrade, the pieces are here to quickly reconstruct a league-leading unit. Safety Malaki Starks looked great as a rookie. Travis Jones has become an impactful DT2. Teddye Buchanan appeared to be a solution at linebacker alongside Smith before his torn ACL. While Smith and Humphrey might be on the back end of their careers, a reinvigorated offseason with a new head coach can turn back the clock.

It would have been defensible, and perhaps more prudent, to slam the reset button. Shed contracts, get younger in free agency and rebuild in Minter’s image. But it is also defensible to get a player like Crosby, turn to the veterans who have been so successful for so long and try to be elite again — right now. Trading for Crosby is risky, but in order to make the Ravens’ defense work — both in terms of structure and time horizon — it’s a necessary move.

It’s worth zooming out and looking at the larger picture of Lamar Jackson‘s window and the upcoming drafts in which Baltimore has traded these Day 1 selections. Jackson is 29 himself, and as a quarterback who relies heavily on his mobility, it’s unlikely he’s winning MVPs in his mid-30s. The Ravens have clearly felt urgency to win now with Jackson — enough so that Harbaugh was ousted after so many successful, if incomplete, seasons in Baltimore. The trade for Crosby reflects that urgency, as Baltimore attempts to microwave a contender around an MVP-caliber quarterback while he still has the legs to be called one.

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 borne fruit. It’s time to get in and get going while the getting’s still good.

And 2026 was the right year for it. The Ravens sent the Raiders the 14th pick in the draft, but the draft class is remarkably poor — easily the worst in the 10 years that I’ve been covering the event. The player selected at No. 14 overall would have gone in the mid-20s in past classes. Of course, many prospects will end up hitting in the draft and make this sentiment look silly in hindsight. But for the information we have at our fingertips now, first-round picks are less valuable than their sticker price this season.

So the Ravens spent No. 14 this year and a first-rounder next year. The 2027 first was the cost of getting Crosby off the Cowboys or the Bears, who were reportedly offering one Round 1 pick but refusing to cough up the second. It’s a steep price — one that I likely would have shied from if I were a general manager. It took a lot to get Crosby on the team, but nobody will remember the trade package if he drags Josh Allen down in the fourth quarter of a game the Ravens finally finish, a win that finally sends them to the game that has eluded Jackson for so long.

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 leaped into the pool with both feet. Now they sink or swim.