Ravens Still Hoping For Lamar Jackson Extension

This was always going to be the battle in Baltimore after they reached their first extension agreement with Jackson on a five-year, $260MM deal in 2023. While still substantial, Jackson’s cap hits in the first three years of the new deal were more manageable at $22.15MM in 2023, $32.4MM in 2024, and $43.5MM last year. The cap hits were then scheduled to jump to $74.5MM in the final two years of the deal, forcing the Ravens front office to either come back to the table for a potential extension or allow a single player to represent nearly a quarter of their cap space.

The first time the two parties underwent extension discussions, things got fairly dicey. The two-time MVP represented himself, as he still does to this day, and after Baltimore placed the non-exclusive franchise tag on him, in an effort to let the open market determine his value with an intention to match, Jackson requested a trade, intimating that the team was not interested in meeting the value he had placed on himself. For most of two months, it seemed a resolution was out of reach and the situation was irreconcilable, until an extension was announced on the first day of the 2023 NFL Draft, showing that the Ravens would be making Jackson the highest-paid player in NFL history with the highest signing bonus ($72.5MM) in NFL history at that time.

The biggest sticking point that prevented an agreement from being reached for so long was Jackson’s desire for a fully guaranteed contract. Previously seen done reasonably by the Vikings in 2018 for Kirk Cousins on a three-year, $84MM deal, the Browns seemingly ruined the party for everyone in 2022, when they did the same for Deshaun Watson on a record-setting five-year, $230MM contract. Knowing now that NFL owners were found by an arbitrator to have colluded to reduce the locked in compensation on player contracts and avoid fully guaranteed deals, there’s belief that this played a hand in the rocky negotiations between Jackson and Baltimore.

It’s unclear if Jackson will be pursuing another fully guaranteed deal as negotiations continue, but there was a sense that the Bills laid out the groundwork for the Ravens to follow when they extended their own MVP quarterback, Josh Allen, in the last offseason. Allen’s deal reflected a lot of what the Ravens ended up doing with Jackson’s first extension, in terms of backloading the bulk of the cap burden in later years to encourage renegotiation. The difference was that Buffalo timed the extension when Allen still had multiple years remaining on his previous deal. Knowing that their MVP was making less per year than less-accomplished passers, the deal simply brought Allen up to top of the market in annual average value and kicked the can down the road for them to do the same thing again in a couple years to keep up with the inflating market.

When Jackson’s restructure was originally reported, we covered most of the details in regard to dollar amounts getting affected. Yesterday, though, KPRC’s Aaron Wilson disclosed some new details of the reworked agreement. Per Wilson, the restructure added another voidable year in 2030 as well as a no-trade clause, including an agreement not to use the franchise tag on Jackson following the 2027 NFL league year. One expects the Ravens have no plans of getting to that point as their intentions to secure an extended agreement persist with the rest of the offseason in front of them.