Ask the Ravens about Lamar Jackson and they’ll tell you he’s Rembrant. Picasso. Mozart. Einstein. Newton. This means two things. One is that he’s brilliant, the kind of comet that flies past our periphery once every 100 years. The other? No one else sees the world or the game of football quite like him. That can be both a tremendous advantage and something to work through.
That’s the thing about genius: It rarely translates from one person to another. It cannot be absorbed or passed on. It takes an infrastructure to support it and, most of the time, is so reliant on the continued stability of the genius themself. It came to mind on Sunday night, when Baltimore was effectively eliminated from the playoffs after Jackson went down with a back injury. Jackson will end up having played at most 14 games this year, though that seems like a stretch. He has played two complete seasons in the NFL, two 15-game seasons, two 12-game seasons and his rookie season when he was not a regular starter all year.
