Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson wants a new contract. Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti wants to give him one, before the start of free agency.
In theory, it shouldn’t be difficult. In practice, it was a struggle the last time around.
In early 2023, Jackson had no existing contract. The Ravens, after months of failed negotiations, eventually extended a five-year, $262.5 million offer. It made him, at the time, the highest-paid player in the league, with an annual average of $52.5 million.
Since then, the market has moved (as to new money) to $60 million per year (if we ignore the new-money analysis regarding Josh Allen’s latest deal). And so the goal presumably will be to get Jackson beyond Dak Prescott’s current high-water mark.
Jackson has two years and $104 million left on his current contract. To get to a new-money average of, say, $61 million, the Ravens would have to offer a three-year extension at $183 million.
But there are no actual “extensions” in the NFL. The old contract gets ripped up, and a new one takes its place. With the two remaining years at $104 million, the Ravens could offer five years, $287 million. That would boost the new-money average to $61 million, even if the true average from signing would be $57.4 million.
Getting the right structure would be the issue. Last time, Jackson got a signing bonus of $72.5 million. If he receives $80 million up front on a new deal, his cap number (coupled with a minimum salary of $1.3 million) would be $17.3 million plus the $22.5 million in 2026 allocation from his prior contract. That’s $39.8 million — creating cap space of $34.7 million in advance of 2026 free agency.
They’d also have to figure out how much of the new contract would be guaranteed. In 2023, he wanted all five years to be fully guaranteed. He ultimately agreed to a deal with three years of full guarantees.
From a big-picture standpoint, there’s a fairly simple path to get Jackson under contract for five more years, to make him the highest-paid quarterback again (based on the new-money fiction), and to fully guarantee all pay in 2026, 2027, and 2028.
The question is whether Jackson wants to leapfrog Prescott by $1 million per year, or whether Jackson wants to push the bar even higher. The deeper into the sixties Jackson wants to go, the trickier it becomes.
If all else fails, the Ravens (as Bisciotti said Tuesday) can exercise their right to restructure the deal again, kicking the salary-cap can down the road.
Regardless of where it goes, the Ravens eventually will be taking significant cap charges whenever the relationship with Jackson ends. Currently, they have him under contract for two more years. (After that, he’ll become a free agent; he has a no-tag clause in his deal.) Whether the two sides extend it beyond that remains to be seen.
