It is well known that of the three major professional sports in the United States, baseball, basketball and football, the NFL has the weakest players union.
NFL franchises ultimately have the leverage in salary negotiations. The Ravens have flexed their muscle on Lamar Jackson by franchise tagging him. The non-exclusive franchise tag affords Jackson a 32-million-dollar, one-year guaranteed contract, along with the right to negotiate with other teams for a long-term deal. However, the team choosing to sign Jackson must give up two first round draft picks. This is a heavy price to pay along with the cap hit that will be evident given Lamar Jackson’s salary demands.
Many believe NFL owners have dug their heels in on giving fully guaranteed money to any player. Jackson may be being made an example of. It could cost the dynamic quarterback a great deal of money in the prime of his career.
According to CBS Sports.com… Every year we are reminded with absolutely zero uncertainty the NFL is ~a quarterback league~. This is a non-negotiable take. You have or you have not. And even when you have, sometimes it’s not enough. Just ask the Raiders, who shuffled Derek Carr into free agency a year into a newly signed contract extension. Teams routinely pay outrageous prices in terms of current and future draft capital to move up and take a flier on an unknown commodity in the draft.
And yet, when Lamar Jackson became available for any NFL team via Baltimore placing the non-exclusive franchise tag on their starting quarterback … not one NFL team is interested?
This is a former MVP we’re talking about, one of the most electric athletes in all of professional sports, a legitimate franchise quarterback who turned 26 years old in January.
We’ve never seen a case of a quarterback being dangled like this for all of the quarterback-needy NFL to come after him. This is a cutthroat league where the margins are thin and having a quarterback separates you, not just in the ability to pursue a Super Bowl, but also in fan interest, both locally and nationally.
The Carolina Panthers are largely irrelevant on a national stage. The Panthers with Lamar Freaking Jackson? That’s a team getting multiple prime-time games every year and the immediate favorite to win the NFC South. The exact same case could be made for the Atlanta Falcons. And, my goodness, Lamar recreating Vick 2.0 in some red, white and black unis would be incredible.
We’ll be denied that aesthetic, however, because Atlanta, much like Carolina — along with seemingly every other quarterback-needy team in the NFL — just isn’t interested in attempting to even pursue Jackson. They’re not even going to check in and see what Jackson might want.
The complete lack of interest in Jackson is even wilder than Jackson being opened up to the entire league for negotiation. And the reason seems painfully obvious: NFL owners are adamant about squashing out the idea of quarterbacks getting fully guaranteed contracts.
Jackson’s predicament was created when the Browns traded for Deshaun Watson and gave him a guaranteed $230 million deal, despite Watson facing double-digit accusations of off-field sexual misconduct. As our own Jason La Canfora reported in March 2022, the deal Cleveland owner Jimmy Haslam gave Watson drew the ire of basically every other NFL owner.
The Browns weren’t really in on Watson until Haslam was willing to break rank — and precedent — and give Watson a deal no one else in the league was willing to offer up.
Watson hadn’t played football in well over a year, required multiple high draft picks to acquire, wanted a monster contract extension and was dealing with unprecedented off-field issues. Yet the Browns were in on him, as were the Falcons and Panthers according to plenty of reports.
Jackson is in the exact same spot, only he has been more productive, has a better injury history (Watson has multiple torn ACLs dating back to college), has an MVP and there’s no negotiation with the Ravens about the compensation if an offer sheet is signed.
Despite that, no less than five NFL teams very publicly leaked out their lack of interest in Jackson with an incredible quickness. Following the Ravens announcing on Twitter they were tagging Jackson at 3:02 p.m. ET on Tuesday, we got a flurry of reports from various reporters.
The Falcons — a consensus best landing spot for Jackson — let Dianni Russini of ESPN know they were out by 3:16 p.m. ET.
