It's interesting that this is the point we're at. Week 17 of the 2023 regular season, and it's the Baltimore Ravens who have the best record in the NFL and the second-best odds to win Super Bowl LVIII. It's not so much that it's a surprise that the Ravens, as presently configured, are in this spot. We're talking about a franchise that has been one of the steadiest and most successful in the league for the last twenty-plus years, and a roster that is loaded with talent on both sides of the ball, including the 2019 NFL MVP, Lamar Jackson. But the fact that Jackson is still in Baltimore is what comes as a surprise.
Last offseason, it looked as if Lamar Jackson's time in Baltimore was up. The former league MVP requested a trade in early-March after the Ravens placed the non-exclusive $32 million franchise tag on him, a move that Jackson and many others around the league considered to be a slap in the face. Not only did the Ravens fail to immediately ink Jackson to a lucrative, long-term contract extension… they didn't even place the exclusive $45 million franchise tag on him, which would've prevented the rest of the NFL from negotiating with Jackson and potentially signing him to an offer sheet.
Then, with Jackson seemingly very available for the right team and right price, surprisingly nobody bit. And all these months later, with Lamar Jackson now signed to the long-term extension he initially hoped to receive, it's still a mystery why no serious suitors emerged for the current 2023 MVP favorite, or why only two of the remaining thirty-one teams in the league are known to have inquired about Jackson's availability.
“The two teams known to have inquired about Jackson's services were the Las Vegas Raiders and Carolina Panthers,” writes ESPN's NFL Insider Adam Schefter. “Neither team got overly aggressive with Jackson, and neither came close to signing him to an offer sheet that the Ravens would have had a chance to match.”
Derek Carr was on his way out of Las Vegas and Carolina had gone through multiple seasons with stop-gap quarterbacks. Throw in Washington, Atlanta, Tennessee, Tampa Bay, New Orleans, and the New York Jets (who had yet to trade for Aaron Rodgers), and right there are a half-dozen teams that theoretically should've been interested in Lamar then. That doesn't even factor in teams like the New York Giants, New England, Minnesota, and Denver, whose outlook at quarterback appears much murkier now than it did last year at this time.
As for why things turned out this way, Schefter and his sources have their theories. One of the more popular theories is “that Baltimore would have matched any offer sheet that Jackson signed.” In addition to that, there's the belief that teams were potentially scared away from pursuing Lamar because he “didn't finish either the 2021 or 2022 seasons because of knee injuries,” and that the entire process of signing him was made more difficult because Jackson did not have an agent.
Regardless of the why's that were present then, now there are surely a good number of teams asking themselves “why didn't we?”
Follow Us
Subscribe