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.
Ravens Announce Several Front Office Promotions
Much like their roster and coaching staff, the 2023 Ravens saw their front office fall victim to departures for bigger jobs around the league, as well. Executive vice president and general manager Eric DeCosta announced seven promotions this week to help fill some of the new vacancies. 
George Kokinis was the first staffer mentioned to take the next step up in his career. After spending the past five years as director of player personnel, Kokinis has been promoted to the title of vice president of player personnel. He is one of the longest-tenured staffers in Baltimore’s player personnel department and has worked in the NFL for 33 years. His tenure with the team technically dates back to when he was a scouting intern in Cleveland in 1991. He was invited by former owner Art Modell to join in the franchise’s move to Baltimore in 1996.
In 2023, the team had two directors of player personnel: Kokinis and new Chargers general manager Joe Hortiz. With Hortiz gone and Kokinis receiving a title bump, former assistant director of player personnel Mark Azevedo will step up into the role the former two once shared. Azevedo is another long-term staffer, joining the team as a player personnel assistant in 2005. In the past 19 years, Azevedo has worked his way up through the scouting department.
Former director of college scouting David Blackburn crossed the beltway to work with the Commanders, leaving the door open for former national scout Andrew Raphael to step up into the role. Raphael has been with the team for 10 years, joining as a player personnel intern in 2013. He will be joined atop the college scouting department by Joey Cleary, a nine-year Ravens staffer who served as a Southeast area scout for the past three seasons.
On the pro scouting side of things, Corey Frazier has been promoted to assistant director of pro personnel. Joining the team as a player personnel assistant in 2017, Frazier spent two years as a pro scout before working the past three seasons as the team’s West Coast area scout.
The team also named a couple of promotions in their analytics departments. DeCosta announced that David McDonald would be named vice president of research and development. McDonald has been in Baltimore for nine years, leading all software and data development aspects of the player personnel department as director of research and development since 2019.
Lastly, Derrick Yam was promoted to director of data and decision science after serving the past two seasons as manager of data and decision science. Yam joined the Ravens as a quantitative analyst in 2019 after earning a master’s degree in biostatistics from Brown University.