Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta, right, and quarterback Lamar Jackson shake hands during a news conference Thursday. (Julia Nikhinson, AP)
Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson signed his five-year deal reportedly worth $260 million with the team Thursday morning, then fielded questions from reporters for the first time since Dec. 2. Jackson, flanked by general manager Eric DeCosta and coach John Harbaugh, talked for more than 30 minutes about why he signed now and why he thinks the Ravens are poised to chase that Super Bowl win he promised when he was drafted five years ago.
Here are three takeaways on what he did and did not say:
In Jackson’s telling of the story, he never wanted to be anywhere but Baltimore.
Ravens fans could be forgiven for feeling whiplash after Jackson said he had asked for a trade at the end of March, only to sign his record-setting extension a month later. But he did not explain Thursday why he fired off that initial dread-inducing tweet — saying the team “has not been interested in meeting my value” — just as Harbaugh was about to speak with reporters at the NFL owners meetings in Arizona.
When he broke his silence in that manner, even Jackson’s most ardent Baltimore loyalists steeled themselves for a breakup.
With his deal signed, however, he said he never thought seriously about decamping to another NFL city. “I wouldn’t want to go no other place,” he said. “I really didn’t care for other teams. I just wanted to get something done here.”
When he was asked about recruiting free agent wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. even though he did not have a contract at the time, Jackson said he never stopped thinking of himself as the Ravens’ quarterback.
So what are we to make of Jackson’s trade demand in retrospect? Was he simply using his bully pulpit — his most powerful source of leverage given the lack of an offer sheet from another team — to press DeCosta?
For their part, DeCosta and Harbaugh never stopped saying Jackson would be their quarterback, and the centerpiece of the franchise, in 2023 and beyond. They could afford to wade past his trade request because the market for quarterbacks, reinforced by the deal Jalen Hurts signed with the Philadelphia Eagles earlier in April, was on their side. There were no greener pastures for Jackson to find.
He talked Thursday about how Baltimore has become his third home (after South Florida and Louisville), how much he loves the thousands of young fans who wear his No. 8 jersey and scream his name every summer at training camp. He said he has not forgotten the promise he made the night the Ravens traded back into the first round to draft him, to bring another Super Bowl title to the city.
Was he truly unwilling to leave all that behind when his extension negotiations with the Ravens seemed to be going nowhere? We’ll never know for sure.
Perhaps, as Jackson suggested, it does not matter what he said during negotiations. That was business. What happens from here is the part fans will remember.
We still don’t know why the tide of negotiations turned when it did.
Jackson brushed past the idea that Hurts’ extension, $5 million less than the one he signed, helped him and DeCosta reach the finish line. He was thrilled when the Ravens signed Beckham, whom he described as a “Super Bowl-winning receiver,” but didn’t portray that as a decisive event either.
So why did he finally sign after more than two years of negotiating stops and starts?
Jackson said it was a simple matter of the Ravens offering acceptable terms. But he also acknowledged feeling the urgency to strike a deal this offseason instead of playing 2023 on the $32.4 million nonexclusive franchise tag and facing all the same questions and anxieties for another 12 months.
“I absolutely wanted to get it done,” he said. “I was tired of going back-and-forth.”
DeCosta said the nonexclusive tag, which the Ravens applied March 7, was best for the team and for Jackson, who had a chance to feel out the market for his services.
A cynic, however, might describe it as a not-so-subtle means of forcing Jackson to recognize he would not find a more lucrative or happier home elsewhere. No “Godfather” offer emerged from another team, and Hurts’ deal confirmed what we already knew, that the league’s owners were not prepared to embrace Deshaun Watson’s $230 million, fully guaranteed deal with the Cleveland Browns as a new normal.
So Jackson was confronted with the practical limits of his bargaining position. He could attempt to force his way out of Baltimore in search of a market-redefining contract that might never materialize. Or he could take an offer that would make him the highest-paid player in NFL history and keep him with a franchise that has built everything around his talents and personality.
Jackson emphasized again and again Thursday that he’s a cold businessman when he needs to be, and he made the most prudent business decision by re-upping with the Ravens. For all the misassumptions and emotions — the “he-said, she-said,” in Jackson’s words — that swirled around the standoff between team and superstar, a reunion was the logical endpoint, and both sides recognized they could budge a little to reach it.
Now that the negotiating is done, there’s real excitement over a new Ravens offense built around Jackson.
Jackson joked (or perhaps he was serious) that he might throw for 6,000 yards this season with Beckham, first-round draft pick Zay Flowers, a healthy Rashod Bateman and Pro Bowl tight end Mark Andrews among his targets. He said his early intelligence on new coordinator Todd Monken suggests “this offense is gonna be pretty smooth.”
So Jackson, who’s healthy after he finished last season on the sideline because of a knee sprain, shares the optimism that has bubbled forth from Ravens fans over the past few weeks. A team that ended 2022 with the least productive wide receivers in the league and its quarterback situation in limbo suddenly looks like it might be able to hang in shootouts with Patrick Mahomes’ Kansas City Chiefs and Josh Allen’s Buffalo Bills.
Jackson never ran down his wide receivers or complained publicly about Monken’s predecessor, Greg Roman, even when the Ravens’ offense was at its most stagnant. But he was surely waiting for a scenario like this, with at least four pass catchers capable of going off in a given week and a play caller eager to spread passes all over M&T Bank Stadium. Jackson spent so many years asserting that he was a quarterback, not a brilliant runner who happens to throw some passes. Now, he’s set up for an honest shot to show how good he can be.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Harbaugh said, though he acknowledged Jackson will also face higher expectations than ever.
Jackson’s extension will also give DeCosta financial wiggle room to add more veteran talent, which he has vowed to do. With $32.4 million set aside for Jackson’s franchise tag, the Ravens had to make a few difficult decisions, such as waiving veteran defensive end Calais Campbell. The structure of Jackson’s new deal will give them room to recoup some of those losses.
“We will get a little bit of relief,” DeCosta said of the team’s salary-cap position. “We needed it, quite honestly.”
He gave his efforts to build around Jackson a B grade to this point. “We’ve done a lot of good things, but we haven’t achieved what we said we would and Lamar said he would,” DeCosta said. “We’re not there yet, but we’re going to get there.”
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Originally published at Tribune News Service