Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta said Tuesday that he’s “fairly confident” the team will re-sign safety Ar’Darius Washington this offseason.

Washington, a restricted free agent, has until Friday to sign an offer sheet with a new team. If he does not, the Ravens wouldn’t have to match any offers better than the one-year, $3.3 million deal they tendered last month.

Washington was a revelation for the Ravens’ defense last season, stabilizing the secondary after Marcus Williams was benched. In 17 games (10 starts), he had two interceptions, a forced fumble, a sack and 64 tackles, pairing seamlessly with Kyle Hamilton on one of the NFL’s best pass defenses over the season’s second half.

DeCosta said in January that adding a starter next to Washington would allow Hamilton to make more “splash plays” closer to the line of scrimmage, but he said at Tuesday’s pre-draft news conference that Washington’s future had little bearing on the team’s draft strategy.

The Ravens have been linked to a handful of early-round prospects at the position, including Georgia’s Malaki Starks and South Carolina’s Nick Emmanwori, widely considered the draft’s top two safeties.

“I think it’s a pretty deep safety crew, and it’s obviously the top guys, but then there’s four or five or six guys that will probably be third-, fourth-, fifth-round guys that are good players,” said DeCosta, who added that he expected to draft at least one safety. “I mean, this is a really nice pool of players to pick from. I think we definitely will look at that.”

Note: DeCosta said the Ravens would draft a kicker “if you have the right kicker” available. With Justin Tucker’s future uncertain amid allegations of sexual misconduct from 16 massage therapists in the Baltimore area, the Ravens are expected to add at least one rookie at the position, but DeCosta said he would “never have any expectations, because you don’t know how the thing’s going to unfold.”

He added: “It just depends on the board. It depends on the player. It depends who’s there. It depends on how your coaches see them. And also, it should be said that some of the greatest kickers of all time weren’t drafted, right? So there’s no blueprint for finding a kicker, except you’ve got to be able to evaluate the kicker.”

The Ravens have never used a draft pick to take a kicker. Matt Stover was a member of the Cleveland Browns when the franchise relocated to Baltimore and kicked every year from 1996 to 2008.

The team claimed undrafted free agent Stephen Hauschka off waivers in Stover’s final season and activated him for eight games.

Midway through the 2009 season, the Ravens released Hauschka after he missed several attempts and brought on veteran Billy Cundiff.

Cundiff’s miss on a potential game-tying kick in the final moments of the 2011 AFC championship led the team to bring in Tucker, an undrafted rookie out of Texas, as competition ahead of the 2012 season. Tucker won the starting job in the preseason and has held it ever since.

Tucker has denied the allegations.