The Baltimore Ravens not only have to fill some coaching vacancies, they’ll need to fill at least one front-office position as well. According to Jason Butt of AJC Sports and the team’s website, the Atlanta Falcons have hired Ravens midwest scout Dwuane Jones as their assistant director of college scouting.
The Falcons are in the middle of retooling their entire front office and coaching staff. The team fired bh general manager Thomas Dimitroff and coach Dan Quinn after an 0-5 start to the season. The Falcons have since hired Arthur Smith as their new coach and Terry Fontenot as the new general manager, but now the truly hard work comes in building out the rest of the front office and coaching staff.
The Ravens have been a popular spot for teams to hire coaches and front-office personnel over the years. Just this offseason, Baltimore has seen three defensive coaches and one offensive coach get hired away while several others have been interviewed for positions elsewhere. While the Ravens have been pretty good about being able to successfully fill their coaching vacancies, the scouting department has been another story.
Baltimore has been one of the best teams in the draft since the franchise was created in 1996. Though there’s a long list of successful picks, there was a stretch at the end of Ozzie Newsome’s tenure as general manager where the Ravens stumbled frequently and had many more notable misses than hits. In 2018 during the transition from Newsome to Eric DeCosta at general manager, owner Steve Bisciotti attributed some of those failings to Baltimore’s inability to refill the front office with experienced scouts.
“When we lost those scouts, we didn’t necessarily go out and hire equal scouts to replace them, and I think that was a mistake,” Bisciotti said at his season-ending press conference in Feb. 2018. “I think that in retrospect you can say that you can’t lose those three scouts with 30 years of experience between the three of them and then hire 25-year-olds that are ready to give it the old try.
“I think that it shows that we have not done a very good job of filling in senior people with senior people. That’s something we are going to address starting right now and hopefully rebuild that on the fly, because we can’t wait for 25-year-olds to get as good as Joe Douglas was at 36.”
Jones has been a scout in the NFL — with the New Orleans Saints and Ravens — for nearly 16 years. He joined Baltimore’s front office in 2016 and as the team’s midwest scout, Jones is obviously tied to the Ravens’ selection of quarterback Lamar Jackson in the 2018 NFL draft. Replacing him will be a tall task for DeCosta and the rest of Baltimore’s front office.
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