Lamar Jackson is attempting to usher in a new era in NFL, one where the player has the power. That has never been accomplished in the past, even at the most visible position in the league, the quarterback. Jackson is more of a LeBron James-style thinker regarding how to handle the team owners in his career, but the significant difference is Lamar doesn’t do intermediaries.
The fact that Jackson himself is the one negotiating can be problematic for any team GM and ownership group because the negotiation process is undoubtedly ego-bruising. How can a quarterback stand hearing all the ways the team wants to save money or devalue a player that outwardly has so much value? The answer is simple: not long.
The New Old Narrative
Take, for instance, the Atlanta Falcons.
Falcons owner Arthur Blank kept it very real while the other owners have comfortably sat on the sidelines of the new Lamar Jackson sweepstakes.
“Looking at it objectively I’d say there’s some concern over how long can he play his style of game,” Blank said to reporters on Tuesday. “Hopefully a long time, but he’s missed five, six games each of the last two years. Each game counts a lot in our business.”
Additionally, the Indianapolis Colts owner, Jim Irsay, has reservations about giving Jackson a fully guaranteed contract even though “money is not the issue,” per ESPN’s Stephen Holder.
“As an owner I do not believe in fully-guaranteed contracts,” Irsay said to ESPN on Monday. “I think that a percentage is one thing, but from what I’ve seen from the NBA and baseball, I don’t see it as a positive competitively.”
Jackson said no to the Ravens’ offer of an extension with the Ravens as it only guaranteed $133 million. Deshaun Watson got a guaranteed $250 million contract after his trade to Cleveland, and Lamar wants the same treatment.
A talent as valuable as Lamar is on offense, and even defense can miss five or six games if the messenger isn’t Lamar Jackson. But he has no proxy for the team executives to deal with. Unlike the sparse NFL head coaching pool, there is still a Mike Tomlin-style executive to provide cultural safe harbor to Brian Flores when he departs the head coaching job with the Miami Dolphins over unique differences of opinion.
Lamar Jackson is a bundle of differences from the rigid-leaning NFL ownership core.
He is a braided Black man from Florida that loves to respond directly to fans, critics, and more on Twitter and state his opinions now to audiences on social media. Lamar Jackson is not country club material in the eyes of the country club gentry, and yet he believes they would want to make a deal with him directly.
Not. At. All.
Defeat By Tweet
Additionally, his pervasive tweeting in a corporate sense is akin to working with Kanye West minus the whole anti-Semitic thing. If a conversation about his value gets ugly, he is liable to let his Twitter fingers do all the revealing, and no owner or GM will ever trust that he won’t.
So now we’re back to concerns like when he came out of the draft in 2018, and pundits suggested the Louisville star become a running back. When a top-tier franchise-altering talent is ready and available, this new narrative is just more of the same. Lamar Jackson is attempting to evolve the culture of the NFL into one similar to the NBA, and the bosses just aren’t having it.
So although Lamar can’t wait to see the world again on the hallowed grass of a professional NFL football field, he needs to understand that although the world has changed dramatically since the death of George Floyd, it hasn’t changed that much concerning the power of Black players in the very plantation-like NFL.
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