Something is off with the Lamar Jackson situation.
This week, the Baltimore Ravens hit Jackson, a former unanimous league MVP, with the non-exclusive franchise tag after failing to secure a long-term deal. It’s unprecedented. We haven’t seen a team put the non-exclusive tender on a quarterback this century.
The Ravens believe Jackson is worth a contract somewhere in the range of $160m to $180m in guaranteed money. Jackson wants a contract in line with that signed by Deshaun Watson a year ago, a fully guaranteed deal worth $230m. Baltimore’s position: find someone else willing to pay you that and then get back to us.
The mechanics of the non-exclusive tag are wonky. But the upshot is that Jackson is free to negotiate a contract with any team in the league. If he agrees to a deal with a team other than the Ravens, Baltimore then have the option to match that deal and keep Jackson – or allow him to leave, receiving two first-round draft picks back as compensation.
Jackson is 26 and slap-bang in the middle of his athletic prime. All but a handful of teams should be falling over themselves to talk to Jackson, who is negotiating a deal himself alongside a management team rather than using a traditional agent.
And yet: nothing.
The league just spent a week in Indianapolis pushing, prodding and studying the latest crop of soon-to-be draftees at the annual scouting combine, trying to figure out which prospects will turn into franchise changers – evaluations that will mostly turn out to be wrong. Yet with a known game-breaker available, the ultimate one-man offense … silence.
Why are all of these teams so publicly “out” on Lamar Jackson, an MVP winner in his prime at the most important position in the entire NFL?
— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) March 7, 2023
What am I missing here?
It’s head-spinning. An offense-altering, league-defining player is available, today, for a reasonable price, one that’s only slightly more than the likes of Carson Wentz and AJ Brown were dealt for over the past 24 months. A player of Jackson’s ilk is almost never available. And certainly not in the middle of their athletic prime.
Yet within an hour of the Ravens announcing their decision, a batch of quarterback-needy teams ruled themselves out of the Jackson sweepstakes. The Falcons, Commanders, Dolphins, Panthers and Raiders, all teams with varying degrees of need at quarterback, decided that they would not pursue one of the league’s best.
The Panthers seem happier to pay a steeper price to trade up in the draft for a rookie who could be good, than agree to a guaranteed deal that would ensure superstar quarterback play. According to CBS Sports’ Josina Anderson, the Dolphins are exploring all options to ‘upgrade’ their quarterback position in light of Tua Tagovailoa’s health concerns, except, of course, pursuing Jackson (which despite not having a first-round pick this season, the Dolphins’ would be eligible to do at the conclusion of this year’s draft), the one available player who would represent an upgrade over Tagovailoa.
A reminder: this is not a frisky-but-replaceable player. Jackson has been exceptional despite a relative lack of help around him. No team has invested less in their offense over the last four years than the Ravens. But Jackson has continually made the group a threat. When healthy, he guarantees wins and playoff appearances.
Teams are justified in worrying about Jackson’s injury history: he has failed to complete the last two seasons. Whether or not he can stay healthy for a full campaign remains an open question. And if not, can he evolve his game, shifting away from the style that has made him a unique threat in the modern game?
Those are sensible questions to ask when engaging in a long-term negotiation. But since when did the NFL become the league of 32 sensible, forward-thinking teams and 32 sane owners?
Teams delight in setting money and assets on fire in a bid to gain instant success. This is not a league governed by the lucid or responsible. Jim Irsay hired a coach last season with no significant coaching experience because he was his cigar buddy. He is consistently chasing the sugar rush of the Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck years, even if it means acquiring a fossilized Matt Ryan or Philip Rivers or a craptastic Carson Wentz. But he decided within 40 minutes that he wanted no part of the Lamar Jackson Experience?
It’s not just Irsay. In a league where two-thirds of the team vacillate between quarterback purgatory and quarterback desperation, Jackson is one of the few sure things. He’s available and ready to leave Baltimore, but a league governed by egomaniacal, tempestuous owners and front offices under pressure to win yesterday has decided, as a collective, to punt on this play.
It’s either a strange coincidence or evidence of collusion.
Arizona were happy to hand $190m guaranteed to Kyler Murray, a player with an uneven resume compared to Jackson’s. The Packers forked out $150m guaranteed to Aaron Rodgers at 38 years old, a man who could announce at any moment announce that he’s leaving to start a yoga retreat, run for political office or that he’s entering the Quantum Realm. But the guaranteed cash runs out at Jackson, one of the few players with the talent, accolades, and career runway to demand a deal comparable that of Watson.
When the Browns went rogue and handed the disgraced Watson $250m guaranteed a year ago, it upended the quarterback market. It made players – most notably Jackson – reassess the way the league structures contracts. Kylian Mbappé, LeBron James and Mike Trout all receive fully guaranteed contracts. In the NFL, players have been pushed over decades into accepting two contracts within one: A top-line figure and a guaranteed portion.
Jackson is, in essence, going to war with the league’s salary structure as much as he’s demanding a deal from the Ravens or the open market.
Owners are loath to accept Watson’s deal as a precedent. It’s a contract that has the potential to be a poison pill to the Browns’ books. His annual cap hit is close to $55m. At that figure, a quarterback has to be the best in the NFL to justify the outlay in a league with a hard salary cap. But if there is any sign of decline or injury concerns, there is no way to wriggle out of the deal. The dead cap numbers would serve as an albatross to the Browns’ budget. Were they to release Watson in the 2023 league year, they would take a dead cap charge of $219m. In 2024, that falls to $165m. In 2025, it’s still north of $109m, and only in the last year of the deal does the dead cap match the ‘live’ cap charge.
The Watson contract scared owners for all the wrong reasons. He was terrible once he returned from an 11-game suspension after allegations of sexual misconduct. (Watson was never charged criminally.) The rebuffing of Jackson feels like a league-wide fightback against Watson’s deal rather than an indictment of Jackson as a player.
Knowing about collusion and proving it are two different things. Catching an owner or executive with proof – a text, a voice memo – is close to impossible; just ask Colin Kaepernick. The league would rather settle a lawsuit than turn phones over to discovery. And even when the teams have tried to collude in the past, they haven’t been good at it. Greed, ego and the hunger to win have typically gotten in the way of any handshake deals in smoke-filled rooms. When the league tried to implement a secret salary cap in 2010, Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones couldn’t help themselves, splashing the cash behind the backs of the other 30 owners.
But this situation seems different. How else do we explain franchises that have stunk for 20-odd years bailing on a chance to acquire one of the best players in the league?
The Ravens have dared Jackson to find a team willing to match his all-guaranteed, highest-paid-player-in-the-league request. So far, there do not appear to be any takers, which is either a sign that Jackson has completely misjudged his own value or that there’s something more sinister at work.
