The end of the Ravens-Chargers game Sunday also marked the end of the first era of Baltimore Ravens football. Longtime Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome, the only head personnel decision-maker the Ravens have ever had and the first black general manager in NFL history, announced last year he would retire at the end of the 2018 season. While he will still have a relationship with the organization and consult on the draft—Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti said that Newsome will be “the highest-paid scout in America”—someone other than Newsome will manage the roster for the first time. Newsome, the architect of two Ravens Super Bowl squads, is perhaps the most impactful NFL executive of the past two decades.
”Ozzie, in my view, is the most important person at the Ravens,” Ravens president Dick Cass told ESPN late last month. “He has created two Super Bowl–winning teams 12 years apart and only one player [Ray Lewis] was on both teams. He’s a rare human being.”
Drafted in the first round out of Alabama by the Cleveland Browns in 1978, Newsome played 13 seasons at tight end for Cleveland and played 198 of 201 possible games, and his marks in receiving yards (7,980), receiving touchdowns (47), and catches (662) were all NFL records for the position until 2001. After retiring in 1990, he joined Cleveland’s front office as a scout and rose to director of player personnel by 1994. When the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens in 1996, owner Art Modell named Newsome vice president of player personnel and fired then head coach Bill Belichick.
Since then, Belichick is the only person who has had more success running an NFL franchise than Newsome. Since 1996, Baltimore and New England are the only two franchises with a playoff winning percentage above .600. The Ravens’ playoff point differential since 1996 is also the second largest after New England. In the 25 years before Newsome took over personnel decisions in 1994, the Browns were 192-192-4 including the playoffs. In the 25 years since Newsome took over, which includes the final two seasons of the original Cleveland Browns and all 23 years of the Baltimore Ravens, the franchise is 231-192-1.
Newsome’s run of personnel success began immediately upon moving to Baltimore. With the fourth and 26th picks in the 1996 draft Newsome selected left tackle Jonathan Ogden and linebacker Ray Lewis—each of whom went on to become a Hall of Famer—as the first two picks in Ravens history. Five years later, the 2000 squad won the Super Bowl with perhaps the best defense of all time under head coach Brian Billick, defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis, defensive line coach Rex Ryan, and linebackers coach Jack Del Rio. Newsome drafted safety Ed Reed 24th overall in 2002 to give Baltimore arguably the two best defensive players of the aughts in Reed and Lewis. The following year, he drafted Terrell Suggs, who is tied for 13th all time in sacks.
Newsome certainly had plenty of misses, including spending first-round picks on Kyle Boller in 2003 and Breshad Perriman in 2015. But he had far more home runs and consistently made solid contact. In 2008, he drafted quarterback Joe Flacco and was a key voice in hiring then–Eagles special teams coach John Harbaugh, and the two led the team to five consecutive playoff appearances (seven overall), three AFC championship games, and a Super Bowl win in the next five years.
Beyond building successful teams, Newsome is also respected around the league to an uncommon degree for front-office executives, who, unlike coaches, often keep a distance from the players they must evaluate. (“I would make the argument that if he wasn’t in the Hall of Fame as a player, he would be in as a general manager,” former Colts GM Bill Polian told ESPN. “That’s maybe the rarest of occurrences.”) He also has esteem among those on the opposite side of negotiations: This past offseason, Newsome was voted the most respected NFL decision-maker in a poll of 25 NFL agents conducted by USA Today.
Newsome’s career is astounding considering how many barriers he had to break at each level. Born in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1956, Newsome was part of the class that integrated a white school at age 12. He was in the third recruiting class to include black players under Bear Bryant at Alabama. When Baltimore promoted him from vice president of player personnel to general manager in 2002—a nominal change, as he was already carrying out those functions—he became the first black general manager in NFL history.
“It’s like everything,” former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson Jr. told The Undefeated. “The first is not evaluated on just their ability; there is added pressure. Whether Ozzie wanted it or not, he took on a responsibility.”
Newsome, who will be replaced by assistant GM Eric DeCosta, retires as the longest-tenured personnel man in the league, excluding Dallas’s Jerry Jones and Cincinnati’s Mike Brown, both of whom own their teams. Yet despite a quarter-century passing between his hire and his departure, he leaves the league almost as homogeneous as he found it. Of the league’s 32 owners, 31 are white. Two of the 24 head coaches left in the league are black, and with Newsome gone, Miami’s Chris Grier is the only black GM in a league where roughly 70 percent of the players are black.
After the Ravens clinched the NFC North in Week 17 against the Cleveland Browns, Harbaugh gave the game ball to Newsome as players began chanting, “OZZIE! OZZIE OZZIE!”
That moment would likely not have happened had Newsome not made a bold move in April. At the conclusion of the first round of his final draft with Baltimore, Newsome capped the day by trading back into the first round to select Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson—a move that garnered him a standing ovation from his staff. In his final draft, Newsome re-oriented the Ravens’ future once again, and after taking 12 players in picks garnered from six separate trades, Newsome felt optimistic about his team’s outlook.
“The Baltimore Ravens are a better football team after the past three days.”
The Ravens are also a better team after two and a half decades with Newsome in charge.
