Mike Preston: Joe Flacco considered Ravens return in offseason

BALTIMORE — Former quarterback Joe Flacco had a brief conversation about returning to the Ravens this offseason, and once that didn’t happen, he made another investment in the Baltimore community with Caddix cleats, a local shoe company.

According to Flacco, the Ravens inquired about his return but eventually signed former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Cooper Rush to a two-year, $6.2 million deal on March 18 that could be worth up to $12.2 million. Flacco, 40, signed a one-year deal with the Cleveland Browns for $4 million last week.

The initial talks with the club drew interest from Flacco, whose hot streak in the 2012 postseason led the Ravens to a 34-31 victory over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl 47. Flacco was named the game’s Most Valuable Player after completing 27 of 33 passes for 287 yards and three touchdowns. He started his career in Baltimore as a first-round draft pick out of Delaware in 2008, staying with the franchise until 2018. The Ravens won the AFC North twice and appeared in three conference championship games.

“They did kind of reach out to [my agent] Joe [Linta], gauging my interest for something like that to happen,” Flacco said. “My agent called me up and was like, ‘What do you want me to tell them?’ I’m like, ‘Well, listen, I’m interested. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s not like choice No. 1, I don’t know what’s going to happen here with me if I’m going to get an opportunity to do something a little bit more, but I wasn’t against it.’

“I think I would’ve been excited about it in a little bit of a way.”

Flacco still has strong ties in Baltimore, especially former teammates and tight ends Todd Heap and Dennis Pitta. So much, in fact, that all three have invested in Caddix, which has revolutionized cleats so that they “flex” or give a little instead of getting stuck in artificial turn. That can help alleviate injuries without sacrificing performance. The main feature is using smart-studs to reduce rotational force, which is responsible for many knee and ankle injuries.

Flacco wore a pair this past season with the Indianapolis Colts, who are interested in making the shoes available to players in 2025. And the Browns might be next.

“It felt like a normal pair of cleats to me,” Flacco said. “They break in quickly, and then there is the injury prevention thing. Everybody wants to extend their career and play as long as possible.

“With the money that guys are making these days, why wouldn’t you want to try to stay around as long as you can and at least be a top performer for as long as you can? With all the noncontact injuries and how big and strong guys are getting, and the move from natural grass to turf because all these owners want to capitalize on the profit as much as they can in the offseason as well as in season, I just think it’s kind of a no-brainer and you’re gaining a bit of a peace of mind.”

It does make a lot of sense, especially if a knee or ankle can’t lock into artificial surfaces. You wonder how many careers could have been saved or extended in the past 20 years with these spikes. It’s like what the NFL now does with helmets because of the increased concerns about concussions.

Kirk McCullough, former team physician with the Kansas City Chiefs who also served on the NFL’s foot and ankle subcommittee, says the new spikes could be like the first commercial designs for automobile airbags, which were introduced in 1970’s.

“We just have to do the best job we can to limit risk with every cut and pivot and motion that they’re doing on those surfaces,” McCullough said. “I think there was probably a point at which someone thought when they first came up with airbags that, oh, that it just can’t work … it’s going to be too much of a risk, all these other things, and yet it’s now a standard look.”

According to Flacco, about 20 to 25 NFL players wore the cleats last season, but that might jump to nearly 100 in 2025. The spikes were created by Jack Rasmussen, 30, of Catonsville, 11 years ago and Heap saw a video while scrolling through Instagram.

Both Jack and his father, Jeff, the cofounder, were watching a football game when a player’s cleat got caught in the ground.

“My dad and I were watching a football game and someone went down with a noncontact [injury] and tore the ACL, and he and I both thought that looked preventable,” Jack Rasmussen said. “But he was an advertising guy and I was a college dropout, so we weren’t exactly the most fit team to figure it out.

“So I brought a book about patents. I bought a pair of cleats and I tore them apart and figured out how they worked,” he said. “And the next day I quit my job, drove home and sat in my room for 13 months and taught myself biomechanics, physics, anatomy, material science, just all the stuff I needed to learn to get my head around what this injury was. My dad and I actually wrote the first patent when I was 19, and the mechanism that we came up with actually does reduce the force.”

Actually, it seems that the spikes were geared more for women because they appear to struggle more with knee ligament tears. Several top women’s lacrosse players wear Caddix, including attackers Lindsey Marshall (Clemson), Ava Angello (Johns Hopkins), Alison Harbaugh (South Florida) and Northwestern defender Sammy White.

“So we make football cleats that double as men’s lacrosse cleats, and we make women’s soccer cleats that double as women’s lacrosse cleats,” Jack Rasmussen said. “We do want to focus on women’s sports because they’re at a higher risk of injury because of anatomical differences between men and women. And we want to kind of help negate that as much as we can.”

But Caddix makes every type of spike for just about every sport now, regardless of whether it’s men or women. At the same time, Jack Rasmussen gets to pal around with his longtime heroes. Pitta and Flacco were members of the 2012 Super Bowl team. Heap is in the Ravens’ Ring of Honor and Jack still has his jersey on a wall somewhere in his house.

But the emphasis will be on the reduction of injuries, regardless of age.

“The young athletes tend not to be as developed as a guy like myself or a 24-year-old professional athlete,” Flacco said. “It’s not like they’ve been in the weight room and doing all those things. And with the amount of load that they deal with these days, all the constant year-round sports they’re doing, I think it’s just a huge market for parents to feel like, OK man, this has given us a little bit of an edge and it’s protecting my kid.”

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