PHOENIX — As the Ravens' team president, Dick Cass is involved in every aspect of the organization.
Much of his work is done behind-the-scenes. However, Cass received plenty of attention this past season for the role that he played following Ray Rice domestic violence arrest last year.
Cass spoke to The Baltimore Sun on Monday at the NFL owners meetings at the Arizona Biltmore resort and addressed several topics, including the tumultuous 2014 season.
On the state of the organization after a difficult 2014 season: "I think you always can build on adversity. I was very proud of the way our players, our coaches, our entire staff held together through the adversity. I think we're a stronger organization because of it. As we're going through it, one of our goals was to make sure that the adversity off the field wasn't directly impacting the team. I think as an organization, we were able to do that. We stayed together, we stayed strong. I thought it was a bonding experience for the team."
On how difficult it was for him to be under significant scrutiny for the organization's handling of the Rice situation: "That's my job. It comes with the territory. That's part of my job, to deal with situations like that. No, I didn't think it was tough. It was tough, I thought, on our coaches and our players and our entire staff. But it wasn't any tougher on me as it was on them.
"It was difficult to see the organization criticized the way it was. It was difficult to deal with some of the stories out there that were not true. The balance between refuting a story versus just continuing the story on for another day and inviting more attention, we're constantly dealing with the balancing. When it was something that we really felt was important, we would respond., If not, we would just let it go. We let a lot of things go that were simply not true. You cannot respond to everything."
On whether the organization has anything planned to regain the faith of its fans: "I am concerned how the fans react to the arrests that we've had. It's obviously a concern of all of us. But we don't have any specific efforts to reach out to the fans. What the fans want to see is better conduct. That's what we're trying to focus on."
On this month's trade of franchise cornerstone Haloti Ngata: "It's very difficult. Haloti is a foundation player, an iconic player for the Ravens. He'll always be part of our history. Nobody wanted him to leave, but we set financial parameters and we make decisions on our salary cap situation. Based on that, we set a parameter and we couldn't get a deal done with him. We tried to recover something in terms of draft picks and extra cap room. That's why we made the decision."
On whether some key decisions next offseason, including having to adjust quarterback Joe Flacco's contract which would occupy $28.55 million of the salary cap as it's presently constitued, impacted this year's free agent activity: "Joe's still under contract. I wouldn't assume that's the case necessarily. We try to look ahead. When we meet in Florida, we always look at least one year ahead, where we're going to be, think about the players coming up, project cap room. We do look ahead, but we haven't made any decisions about next year."