On Christmas night, the two best teams in the NFL will play against each other. So, too, will the ghosts of quarterbacks we can’t seem to understand or quantify properly (both present and future). Put down your weapons, though, we’re not here to try to flesh out the argument du jour about just how great Brock Purdy really is. I can’t safely ingest any more Advil, anyway.
We’re here to make fun of all the teams that wouldn’t make a legitimate run at Lamar Jackson this offseason when the Ravens slapped the nonexclusive franchise tag on him, dangling him to the football world at a time when the quarterback market was hungrier for real talent than a Fast and Furious movie.
I feel like the football world has comfortably moved on to the point where Jackson is considered a legitimate MVP candidate. There he is, right behind Purdy in most sportsbooks. But wind the clock back six months and remember the very academic argument that existed for passing on one of the most maddening players of his generation to defend, simply because the one offensive coordinator Jackson had ever played for in the NFL chose to use him in one specific, semireckless way that ignored a very large and successful body of work at Louisville and did its best to compensate for lack of talent at the wide receiver position. Because of that, we somehow convinced ourselves that there was only one way to deploy Jackson.
Jessica Rapfogel/USA TODAY Sports
I think the case for a Jackson-free existence for some teams went something like: Well, if you think about it, aren’t we better off building around Desmond Ridder or Sam Howell?
As it turns out …
I’ll admit that I was taken under the riptide. It happens. Baltimore had me headfaked throughout the entire Jackson contractual process. The Ravens are perpetually one of the smartest teams in the NFL, and if they hadn’t protected Jackson like a Black Lotus trading card, what were the rest of us to do? After a few times through the cycle, I can’t say it didn’t start making some sense to take those two first-round picks and the max contract, and spend that money and equity on stud skill-position players, linemen and defenders to buoy an otherwise middling prospect at the QB position (by the way, I do think that, as the quarterback position homogenizes, that will be the way of the NFL in years to come). Eventually, the Ravens ended up doing what they should have done before the idea that they didn’t necessarily value him metastasized: giving the quarterback a contract that was far more generous than the Jalen Hurts extension in its construction, signifying their confidence in Jackson’s long-term ability.
Back in March, as we were still waiting for that contract to come, a series of reports were blasted onto X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) in rapid succession to ensure that we all knew the Commanders and Falcons were definitely not interested in trading for Jackson.
“Looking at it objectively I’d say there’s some concern over how long he can play his style of game,” Falcons owner Arthur Blank said a few weeks after the report. “Hopefully a long time … but he’s missed five, six games each of the last two years. Each game counts a lot in our business.”
And then there was this:
“I’m not sure where it all comes from,” Commanders general manager Martin Mayhew said of the persistent Jackson to Washington chatter. “From the very beginning, we’ve been very consistent with our message, and it continues to come up. … It’s coming from somewhere. It’s not coming from us.”
In both cases, the Commanders and Falcons (and the lot of us who were saying Jackson wasn’t worth a pair of first-round picks) were basing their projections on the sample size of what had already been seen. Interestingly enough, this is the same thought process that allowed for Brock Purdy to fall to the seventh round in the first place. Scouts at the time saw what they believed to be a large and mostly mediocre set of data without a high ceiling, failing to give a second thought to Purdy’s willingness to grow or Jackson’s ability to play in a system that he’d been begging for us to believe he could thrive in for years.
It kind of makes you wonder what general managers or pro scouts really do, at least in certain places. What is their job if not to imagine what a player will look like outside of his current situation? What is a coordinator’s job if not to take an incredible skill set and place it within the parameters for ultimate success and longevity?
Watching Jackson now, I don’t get nearly as many heart palpitations. Many of his runs feel similar to those of Patrick Mahomes in terms of them being just sensible scrambles, and I don’t remember us having much of a problem with Mahomes leaving the pocket from time to time (Jackson leaves the pocket about twice as frequently as Mahomes, although the Ravens still call designed quarterback runs, while the Chiefs scheme similar concepts and funnel the load-carrying responsibilities through other players).
I see a quarterback who is playing like a combination of a modern pocket passer with a release so fast and consistent that, had we been looking at him the right way all along, we’d have been gushing over during the predraft process instead of arguing about which position Jackson should play. In addition, he can still escape the pocket with a move set and agility reminiscent of the Jabbawockeez. He’s also doing it mostly in 11-personnel. You know, the three-wide receiver, one-running back sets most commonly used throughout the league.
Feels like that would have been worth a few first-round picks to me, no?
