As if there wasn't enough NFL news going around this week! Days after the Aaron Rodgers trade ended one of the offseason's longest-running sagas, the hours before Day 1 of the NFL draft yielded a conclusion for another. After months of speculation, tweets and rumors, Lamar Jackson and the Ravens came to terms on a five-year contract extension. Baltimore's star quarterback isn't going anywhere for years to come.
While it had become clear that the most likely scenario for Jackson was a return to Baltimore, the extension means that Jackson will be the Ravens quarterback beyond the 2023 and 2024 seasons. In addition to solving what looked to be a possible quarterback quandary for John Harbaugh's team in the long term, it also brought an end to one of the more interesting opportunities we've seen for NFL teams over the past decade. Given an opportunity to try and land a 26-year-old former MVP at the most important position in sports, no one bit.
After closely observing everything that went down with Jackson, the Ravens and the rest of the league over the past two months, I believe that there are a few lessons to be learned. Here are my takeaways from the entire Jackson saga and what I gleaned from the process, which impacts both the Ravens and other players and teams around the league for years to come.
It worked out pretty well in the end for Jackson
No, Jackson didn't get the fully guaranteed deal he reportedly wanted throughout this process. We're still waiting to see the exact structure and cash flow of the deal to get a sense of how the guarantees work, but the top-line numbers are huge. Jackson has reportedly landed a five-year, $260 million deal with $185 million in guarantees. Both numbers would be the largest for any player in football, narrowly topping the deal Jalen Hurts signed with the Eagles earlier this month.
If Hurts' deal is a baseline for Jackson's, the contract Jackson is about to sign won't be fully guaranteed, but it will be something close to practically guaranteed. I've used this term to talk about deals where it would be financially imprudent or close to impossible for a team to move on from paying a player because of how the deal is structured, often with his salary or bonuses becoming fully guaranteed a year in advance of payment.
Take Hurts' deal as an example. The first $110 million -- his signing bonus, base salaries in 2023, 2024, and 2025, part of his bonus in 2026 and option bonuses worth a combined $79.7 million in 2024 and 2025 -- is fully guaranteed at the time of signing. If the Eagles suddenly decided that they didn't like quarterbacks who can out squat most of the roster and inexplicably cut Hurts, they would owe him that $110 million. Fully guaranteed is fully guaranteed.
Even after that $110 million, though, the structure of Hurts' deal makes it extremely likely that he'll see an additional $99 million. In 2024, as long as Hurts is still on the roster, $16.5 million of Hurts' $49.8 million option bonus in 2026 becomes fully guaranteed. The following year, the remaining $30.8 million becomes fully guaranteed, 12 months in advance of when it's actually paid. Likewise, $22 million of Hurts' $51 million compensation for 2027 guarantees in March 2026.
The only way the Eagles get out of those payments is if they cut Hurts, but given that Hurts' 2023, 2024 and 2025 compensation is already fully guaranteed, it's extremely unlikely that the Eagles will move on from Hurts before 2027 at the earliest. Cutting Hurts would cost the Eagles more than $100 million if they move on before the 2028 season, which has the effect of keeping Hurts' cap hits relatively low while making it exceedingly difficult to move on from the Alabama and Oklahoma star.
Jackson's deal is likely to have a similar structure, with a signing bonus and a year two or three option bonus to keep cap hits low. That's a dangerous game to play when you're doing it with multiple players on your roster, but it's understandable when you're paying the most important member of the franchise. I would expect Jackson to have more than $110 million fully guaranteed at signing and more than $210 million in practical guarantees over the next five seasons after you consider what he was already owed by the Ravens for 2023.
Is that fully guaranteed at the time of signing? No. It's pretty close, though, and it's in line with what the best quarterbacks in the league are getting in terms of their structure. Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen have longer-than-normal deals that look like outliers with the rest of the market, but their deals have more practical guarantees than full guarantees at signing. Players like Hurts, Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson have similar year-in-advance structures to extend their guarantees further. I would expect Jackson's deal to be right in line with those contracts, and given the timing of when he signed, Jackson was able to top Hurts' deal when the Eagles star was coming off an MVP-caliber season.
In the end, Jackson represented himself and won. The star quarterback did exactly what good agents do: He set the bar extremely high with his first demands, and when he eventually compromised, Jackson ended up landing the best possible deal the market was likely to deliver. He could have gone year-to-year and tried to enter unrestricted free agency in 2025, but after missing time each of the past two seasons with lower-body injuries, you can understand why Jackson was willing to take a massive guarantee right now. And without needing to pay an agent their cut, Jackson will save up to $8 million over the course of the deal.
Fully guaranteed veteran deals aren't coming anytime soon (outside of very unique circumstances)
There have been two veteran quarterbacks to sign significant fully guaranteed deals over the past decade. One was Kirk Cousins, who inked a three-year pact with the Vikings as an unrestricted free agent after playing out two franchise tags with Washington. The other was Deshaun Watson, who negotiated with several teams as part of a trade. Watson (who was facing what would become an 11-game NFL suspension for multiple allegations of sexual assault, as defined by the NFL) ruled out the Browns, whose interest infuriated incumbent quarterback Baker Mayfield. After Mayfield requested a trade, the Browns went back to Watson with what amounted to a blank check, and Watson signed the five-year fully guaranteed deal before being traded to Cleveland.
What did both of those cases have in common? To start, the two players were quarterbacks in the prime of their careers. Cousins was 29 when he signed his first deal with Minnesota. Watson was 26 at the time he was traded to Cleveland. Other veterans might sign fully guaranteed deals for more modest amounts of money, but when we're talking about the top of the market, only the guys who stand among the most valuable players in the entire league in terms of positional value and career arc were able to land a fully guaranteed pact.
Jackson fits into that group in terms of position and age, but there's a big difference. While Jackson was technically able to talk to any of the league's 31 other teams, he wasn't truly available. Cousins was an unrestricted free agent, and while he required significant draft compensation in return, Watson was able to negotiate with whomever was willing to send the Texans their desired draft capital. Teams were in a position where they had to negotiate with each other to land a player at the most important position in sports.
Jackson was able to negotiate with whomever he wanted, but even a successful negotiation wasn't going to guarantee anything for that team. The Ravens held the rights to match whatever offer Jackson received, and given how much they paid their star quarterback to stay in Baltimore, the leaguewide expectations suggesting the Ravens were always going to keep Jackson around seem to be warranted.
I think it's reasonable to believe that this had at least some semblance of a chilling effect on negotiations. I'm not sure I ever understood what it meant when teams were "unwilling to do the Ravens' work for them," given that teams help each other establish the market by bidding against each other for players in free agency every year, but the only reason the Vikings and Browns were willing to offer fully guaranteed deals was because those contracts were what was needed to get those agreements over the line. Without the same promise in a Jackson negotiation, I don't think the league was willing to make the same sort of leap.
Teams can probably use nonexclusive franchise tag in the future
One effect of the Jackson situation: Organizations probably don't need to worry about using the exclusive franchise tag in the future. Jackson received the nonexclusive tag, which allowed teams to negotiate with the quarterback and sign him to an offer sheet, with the Ravens landing two first-round picks if they chose not to match. The exclusive franchise tag would have prevented teams from even negotiating with Jackson, but it would have been about $45 million as opposed to the $32.4 million cost of the nonexclusive tag.
The nonexclusive tag always made more sense for the Ravens because they wanted to get this deal done this offseason. The worst-case scenario for Eric DeCosta and company wasn't losing Jackson for two first-round picks. It was losing Jackson for nothing more than a compensatory pick in 2025 after using two franchise tags on the star quarterback and being unable to afford a third. Using the exclusive tag would have made it more likely that Jackson went into 2024 playing on his franchise salary or further incentivized Jackson to sit out part of the season.
As a 26-year-old quarterback and former MVP, Jackson was arguably the most tantalizing player to hit the franchise tag market in league history. If anyone were going to drive teams to make a significant offer and run the risk of shipping off two first-round picks to land a franchise player, it would be a quarterback with Jackson's ceiling in the prime of their career. Nobody was willing to even make that offer over the past two months.
Teams simply don't seem willing to risk two first-round picks and/or tie up short-term cap space to try and acquire a star, knowing that the opposing team is likely to match. Teams have traded away players on the franchise tag for something less than two first-round picks, but the last player on a nonexclusive tag to sign an offer sheet and have his team decline the sheet to land two first-rounders was Sean Gilbert in 1998, and even that required Gilbert sitting out an initial tag in 1997 to get a deal done.
In other words, if an organization has a star player coming up for a possible franchise tag, it can probably sit back and save a few million dollars by using the nonexclusive tag as opposed to the exclusive one. That also matters in terms of structuring contracts, since some teams will use the values of what it would cost to franchise a player up to two times to help negotiate extensions before the franchise tag window. If there's no real threat of losing that player to an offer sheet, they'll feel comfortable using the nonexclusive cap numbers as opposed to worrying about an exclusive tag figure.
There are still teams who see Jackson as something less than a great quarterback
Having said all that, I don't think we would have seen the same sort of hesitation about someone like Mahomes or Allen if they hit the franchise tag market under the same conditions. Let's imagine a world where Mahomes doesn't sign an extension and received the nonexclusive franchise tag for the 2022 season. With the same constraints and concerns about his team possibly matching, I think any team with even a tiny bit of cap space or a question about their quarterback would have been attempting to outbid the others for a shot at Mahomes.
Here, that wasn't the case. Teams like the Falcons and Commanders with uncertain-at-best situations under center immediately announced through the media that they weren't going to pursue Jackson. No team was willing to tie up their cap space in the first few days of free agency with a Jackson offer, and even after the dust settled and organizations weren't likely to incur much of an opportunity cost by making an offer, no one did.
Remember: Jackson was the 32nd pick and the fifth of five first-round quarterbacks selected in the 2018 draft. The vast majority of NFL teams passed on him, a list which includes the Ravens, who drafted tight end Hayden Hurst at 25 before moving back up to land Jackson with the final pick of the opening round. Some of the public chatter about moving Jackson to another position seemed foolish and uninformed at the time and looks downright embarrassing years later, but even many of the teams who saw Jackson as an NFL quarterback didn't see him as the best player on their boards in the first round.
There's no doubt that the Ravens crafted a unique offense around Jackson to help unlock the most out of the former Heisman Trophy winner. Former offensive coordinator Greg Roman installed a slightly modernized version of the quarterback run game he used with Colin Kaepernick in San Francisco. DeCosta and Ozzie Newsome invested heavily up front and paid a premium for players like blocking tight end Nick Boyle to ensure that the Ravens would be able to physically overpower teams in the running game.
Those moves led to an immediate impact for Jackson as a rookie starter and an MVP campaign the following year, but it would be naive to pretend that Jackson has been quite as impactful over the ensuing three campaigns. Jackson's still been a very good quarterback, but owing to a lack of offensive counterpunches, the regular absences of star left tackle Ronnie Stanley as a result of injuries, and receivers who have either been underwhelming or injured for stretches, Jackson's numbers have declined. He set career lows in 2022 with a 62.3% completion percentage and 6.9 yards per attempt, figures which were both below league average. The concerns about Jackson's playoff performance are overblown (look at what Peyton Manning did in his first three playoff games), but Jackson's Ravens have generally been disappointing in the postseason.
The injuries also mattered. I believe Jackson's very good at avoiding big hits unless absolutely necessary and protects himself on the field, but the former Louisville star has missed each of the final five games of the season in 2021 and 2022 with injuries. Jackson's absence cost the Ravens a playoff berth in 2021 and a division title in 2022, with backup Tyler Huntley famously fumbling away a touchdown on the one-yard line and the Bengals returning the fumble all the way for a defensive touchdown in the opposite end zone in a narrow playoff loss. Pocket quarterbacks get hurt all the time, too, but there are organizations afraid of the less familiar who are going to chalk up back-to-back season-ending injuries to Jackson's style, even if the hits which ended those seasons weren't a product of careless play on Jackson's part.
The good news for Jackson is that he will have every opportunity to prove the doubters wrong. Jackson will be ensconced in Baltimore for years to come. The Ravens replaced Roman with Georgia offensive coordinator Todd Monken, who should hope to build a modern offense combining Jackson's rushing ability with a more advanced passing attack. Jackson, who ran a pro-style offense in Louisville under former Falcons head coach Bobby Petrino, should be running an offense similar to the one we saw the Eagles build for Jalen Hurts last season.
Jackson should also have more help than ever before. The team's 2021 first-rounder Rashod Bateman is back after missing most of his sophomore season with injuries, and he'll be joined by former Giants and Rams standout Odell Beckham Jr. Mark Andrews will be aided by the ascension of second-year tight end Isaiah Likely, who caught 36 passes as a rookie. Stanley played virtually every snap across the final six games of the regular season and the postseason, the first time he's been able to do that since 2019.
Of course, the stakes are higher than ever before. Jackson was a spectacular bargain for the Ravens over the past few seasons, a superstar who made just $32.5 million combined between 2018 and 2022. Now, he's becoming one of the highest-paid players in football. Excellence for a player on a rookie deal is a pleasant surprise. Excellence from a player making $50 million per season is the expectation.
Jackson was the player who got the Ravens out of a bind the last time they dealt with this situation, when Joe Flacco bet on himself entering the 2012 season. Flacco proceeded to get white hot in the postseason and lead the Ravens to an unlikely Super Bowl, and without any leverage, the Ravens gave him a six-year deal with an onerous structure to stay. The contract proceeded to destroy Baltimore's cap flexibility, forced a second restructure on player-favorable terms, and eventually left the Ravens in no-man's land.
After the Super Bowl run, the Ravens won just one playoff game over the next five seasons and went a combined 44-45 before a Flacco injury forced John Harbaugh to turn the team over to Jackson. He's gone 45-16 as a starter since, albeit while also winning just one playoff game over that span. Jackson didn't quite get what he wanted, but he's been rewarded for his efforts over the past few seasons by becoming the highest-paid quarterback in football. Now, the Ravens will count on Jackson to ensure that this extension to a quarterback who bet on himself works out better than the last.