Wide Receiver · Baltimore Ravens

Rashod Bateman

No. 7 · 6th season

DeCosta called last year a lost season. Now he can't stop talking about Bateman.

There is something quietly telling about a general manager who volunteers the words 'lost season' and 'phenomenal athlete' in the same breath about the same player.

Rashod Bateman is a wide receiver for the Baltimore Ravens. What he has been, at least recently, is mostly unavailable — a player who keeps showing enough to make people believe, then disappearing before he can make it stick. Eric DeCosta, the Ravens' general manager, named last year exactly what it was: lost.

But DeCosta isn't done with Bateman. He called him a great route-runner — someone with the footwork and instincts to get open against defenses at the highest level — and said he has already shown flashes of being a genuine headache for opposing teams. The excitement in the front office, by all accounts, is real.

That matters. A GM publicly writing off the past and pointing at the future is not nothing. It is the organization saying: we still see it.

The question now is whether this is the year Bateman stops being a player people talk about and starts being a player people prepare for.

Content sourced from publicly available information. Gripd is an independent fan platform not affiliated with the NFL or any team.