Ravens Announce Front Office Changes
The Ravens announced a litany of front office updates this week, with promotions in player personnel, operations, and analytics. Atop the player personnel department, Bobby Vega and Andrew Raphael were named assistant directors of player personnel. Joey Cleary moved into Raphael’s former position as the new director of college scouting, and Corey Frazier was promoted to director of pro personnel.
Vega started his NFL career with the Ravens as an intern in 2004. The next year, he began a 13-year stint with the Browns before returning to Baltimore as an east area scout in 2018. He was promoted to national scout in 2023 and named senior personnel executive last year. Raphael joined the team as a player personnel intern in 2013, after serving a season as the assistant recruiting coordinator at Boston College. After two years, he became a player personnel assistant before being elevated to southeast area scout the next year. Starting in 2021, he spent three years as a national scout and was promoted to director of college scouting two years ago.
Cleary now steps into his former boss’s role as he enters his 12th season with the team. Starting in Baltimore as a player personnel assistant in 2015, Cleary was promoted to area scout, working the northeast area (2019), west area (2020), and southeast area (2021-23). When Raphael was promoted to director of college scouting, Cleary was promoted just under him. Cleary now drops the “assistant” from his title as the new director of college scouting. Frazier also joined the team as a player personnel assistant, starting in 2017 after a scouting internship two years prior with the Broncos and work as an advanced scout at Vanderbilt in 2016. He became a pro scout for the Ravens in 2019 and returned to the pro side of things as assistant director of pro personnel in 2024 after three seasons as a west coast area scout.
Also, in the scouting department, player personnel assistants Joe Moreno and TJ Ajibola have been promoted to northeast area scout and pro scout, respectively. Moreno started at the collegiate level as a recruiting intern at Harvard and Stanford before arriving as a player personnel graduate assistant at Auburn in 2019. He left to serve three years as director of player personnel at Southern Miss before joining the Ravens in 2024. Ajibola’s path to a promotion was a bit slower. He’s finally earned a new title after joining the team as a player personnel assistant in 2019. Lastly, after it was announced that former Raiders senior director of player personnel JoJo Wooden would join the Ravens as a front office consultant, the team’s latest disclosure appears to officially name him as a west coast area scout.
In operations, Nick Matteo has been promoted from vice president of football administration to vice president of football operations and Sophie Cortese has been elevated from football administration/salary cap analyst to assistant director of football administration. Before arriving in Baltimore, Matteo worked nine years with the NFL Management Council, eventually getting promoted to senior director of labor operations for the league. He joined the Ravens in his former role in 2019 and oversaw day-to-day salary cap management and all roster transactions for the past seven years. After working as an offensive analyst at Colby University, Cortese joined the Ravens as an analytics players personnel training camp intern in 2021and was promoted to her prior position in 2023.
Lastly, in analytics, David McDonald has been promoted from vice president of research and development to vice president of football science and David Kang from quantitative analyst to senior data scientist. McDonald arrived in Baltimore after a five-year stint as a football systems developer for the Falcons in 2010. He spent five years as the Ravens director of research and development before earning the VP title. Kang only joined the team last year in his previous role before earning this offseason promotion.
NFL Front Office Updates: Ravens, Jets, Eagles, Raiders
The Ravens announced a number of promotions in their front office this weekend, per team editorial director Ryan Mink, with four new positions in the scouting department and two more in analytics.
In the scouting department, we saw Bobby Vega elevated from national scout to senior personnel executive. Vega started his career as a player personnel intern for two months before landing a scouting assistant role in Cleveland. Over 13 years with the Browns, Vega moved up the ladder to college scout, national scout, and eventually director of college scouting. In 2018, he reunited with Baltimore, spending seven years as a college scout before moving into his most recent role for the last two years.
Vega’s role will reportedly be filled by two staffers, Brandon Berning and Chas Stallard. Berning has been with the Ravens since 2015 after shorts stints with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, the MLB’s Milwaukee Brewers, the University of Wisconsin football team, and the Giants. He most recently served as the team’s midwest/southwest area scout. Stallard joined the Ravens in 2018 as a player personnel assistant and most recently served as Baltimore’s southwest area scout.
Lastly, in the scouting department, Terrell Parker will become the team’s central area scout after serving a year as pro scout & salary cap analyst. He worked two internships with the team in 2018 and 2019 before getting hired as a player personnel assistant and moving up to scouting and salary cap analyst then elevated again to his most recent role.
In the analytics department, James Oncea has been promoted from football systems manager to director of football systems. He started with the team in 2021 as a football systems developer. Samantha Lazar also moves up in Baltimore’s analytics group. She started with the Ravens two years ago as a quantitative analyst and has been promoted to senior quantitative analyst.
Here are a few other staff updates from other teams around the NFL:
- The Jets also made recent additions to their scouting and analytics departments. Per Matt Zenitz of CBS Sports, JaLun Morris has been hired as a scout. After time at UAB and Alabama, Morris breached the NFL ranks in Seattle before spending three years as a player personnel assistant for the Raiders. ESPN’s Seth Walder also tells us that Arjun Menon has been promoted to football analytics assistant. Menon had been working an internship with the team after his time as a data analyst on the championship-winning Michigan Wolverines team in 2023.
- Neil Stratton of SucceedinFootball.com tells us that Ryan Myers is being promoted to director of college scouting for the Eagles. Myers has been in Philadelphia since 2013 after seven years with the 49ers, as well. Before that, he worked in the Canadian Football League, United Football League, Arena Football League, and the NFL league office. After serving in several college and pro scouting roles over his first five years with the Eagles, Myers spent four years as west coast area scout and three as assistant director of college scouting.
- Lastly, the Raiders have hired Andrew Fedele to work in the role of manager of football data science and engineering, per Seth Walder of ESPN. Fedele had previously been working with the Jaguars as senior manager of strategic research and development. Before coming to the NFL, Fedele worked analytics for the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA.