Lamar Jackson is doable for Washington

March 13, 2023

by Steve Thomas

I have a confession to make: this column was originally titled, “Lamar Jackson isn’t coming to Washington – here’s why”.  My goal was to demonstrate why Washington couldn’t afford Jackson.  If you listen to this week’s episode of It’s Just Business, recorded before I wrote this, you’ll hear me say something similar.   However, in going through the exercise of analyzing contract options, I realized that Washington could pull it off if they wanted to do so.  I don’t think they actually will, mind you, and it may or may not be a wise thing to do, but the point is that it turned out to be possible.  Let’s discuss.

I like Lamar Jackson.  I enjoy watching him play football, and there’s no doubt that he’s been successful in his five years with the Ravens, his playoff performances notwithstanding.  In his career, Jackson has played a total of 70 games, with 61 starts, and has made 1055 completions in 1655 attempts, for a 63.75 completion percentage, 12,209 yards, 101 touchdowns, 38 interceptions, and a 96.7 quarterback rating.  In addition, he’s had 727 rushing attempts for 4437 yards, for an average of 6.1 yards per carry, and 24 touchdowns.  Jackson won the league MVP award and earned First Team All-Pro honors in 2019, and was selected to the Pro Bowl in 2019 and 2021.  One can make a legitimate argument about the limitations of his pocket-passing abilities, and it’s true that he’s not the greatest quarterback around at things like accuracy and reading the field.  Then, there’s his injury history – any quarterback who runs as much as Jackson, who’s on pace to become the leading quarterback rusher in NFL history if he keeps up his current rate of ground production, most likely isn’t going to stay healthy.  In fact, Jackson has never played a complete season in his five year career.  That notwithstanding, there’s no doubt that Jackson is an elite talent, and he both expects and deserves to get paid like one.

The Ravens placed the non-exclusive franchise tag on Jackson, which means that if he plays the season for Baltimore on the one year tag contract, he’ll earn $32.4M.  This category of tag means that Jackson is allowed to negotiate a contract with other teams, and the Ravens hold the right to match that contract.  If Baltimore chooses not to match the contract, then the gaining team must send two first round picks to the Ravens.  That’s the first hurdle – Washington needs to believe that Jackson is worth surrendering two first round picks.  You, the reader, may not believe he’s worth that much, but Washington conceivably could.  If the team gets past that, how much would Jackson actually cost?

The problem here is that Jackson allegedly wants a larger contract than the one the Browns gave to the NFL’s resident creepy weirdo, DeShaun Watson.  That contract blew the doors off of the NFL’s contract system, as it was for $230M over five years, fully guaranteed, including a $44.965M signing bonus, which is approximately 20% of the total contract value.  The size of the signing bonus was intentional.  It was designed to minimize his cap hit in 2022 at $9.4M, but at the same time both equal out the annual cash flow to Jackson at a little under $55M per year from 2022 to 2026 and make the cap hits in 2023 to 2026 all equal $55M.

If Washington had to increase the total contract value a little bit over Watson’s $230M, for example, to $235M, then matched the structure of that contract, that would put the 2023 cap hit at approximately $10.5M.  That’s doable, right?  Washington apparently signed Daron Payne to a four year, $90M contract with $60M guaranteed.  Prior to that deal, the team had around $15M in cap space for the 2023 season, without taking the rookie draft class into account.  At the time of writing, I don’t know the details of Payne’s deal, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that his contract most likely doesn’t increase his cap hit over the amount of the franchise tag, which was $18.9M, at least not by much.  It may actually free up some space.  Therefore, at a minimum, it seems probable that Payne’s deal won’t have a negative effect on my projected $15M in 2023 cap space.  Therefore, realistically, the team may need to make a small cut or two in order to make year one work, but it’s in the ballpark.  That’s something they may do anyway.

The problem is that such a structure would cause the cap hits for 2024 through 2027 to be $56M, which is under all circumstances is a huge number for a team that’s still pretty far away from being a Super Bowl contender.  Is that possible, though?  Right now, Washington only has about $126M obligated to the cap in 2024, and if the cap rises somewhere around $10M to $234M in 2024, that means that Washington currently has approximately $108M in available cap space without taking Daron Payne’s contract into account.  That also doesn’t include dead cap hits, but it’s without taking 2023 rollover cap space into account, which always adds a few million to the cap.  A sizable portion will also be eaten up by the 2023 and 2024 draft class, as well as free agency, but the point is, $56M in 2024 is currently possible if they so choose.  At a salary cap of $234M, $56M is a little under 24% of available space.  That’s a big number – in 2023, only the Browns and the Chiefs are above 20%  –  but it’s not completely unrealistically large.  For example, right now, Washington’s defensive line group occupies a little more than 30% of the cap.  Washington’s management could make the choice to invest around that much, or maybe a little less, in the quarterback group by making some hard choices in other areas.

Washington could also structure the transaction to at least somewhat reduce the cap hits in 2024 through 2027, although the 100% guarantee imposes limits.  The main option would be to increase the amount of Jackson’s signing bonus.  I don’t think it would be wise at all to overpay a signing bonus on a fully guaranteed contract, but for the sake of this exercise, let’s assume that Washington would be willing to go double the 20% outlay the Browns made to Watson.  At 40%, Jackson’s hypothetical signing bonus would rise to $94M on a $235M contract.  I’ll spare you the mathematical gyrations, but if Washington wanted to again minimize the 2023 cap hit as much as possible, in that circumstance, the cap hit would be approximately $20M.  The team could structure 2024 through 2027 in a variety of ways, but the cap hits in those four years would average a little less than $54M per year.  That’s not much of a savings on average, but the team could stack the cap hits in the later years to ease the pain until the salary cap is significantly higher later in the contract term.  Either way, it would slightly reduce the percentage of the cap allocated to the quarterback group.  The only way to get that number down a significant amount would be to drastically increase the signing bonus, but that would be a colossally dumb thing to do, in my opinion.

In all cases, with a fully guaranteed contract, Jackson’s dead cap hit would prevent him from being cut without laying waste to the team’s salary cap position.

Of course, the best thing that could happen is for Jackson to eventually realize that a fully guaranteed five year contract isn’t realistic.  The truth is that the NFL owners absolutely do not want to normalize a 100% guarantee.  The three principal impediments to Jackson’s lack of offers are his contract demands, his lack of an agent, and the fact that his unique play style requires a specific offense to be build around him.  In my view, the 100% guarantee is the biggest of those three.  If Jackson could be persuaded to either take a lower guarantee percentage or a 100% guarantee on a shorter contract, then his cap hit numbers could come down pretty significantly.  Derek Carr signed for four years, $150M, with $60M guaranteed at signing (40%) and another $30M in practical guarantees, and Daniel Jones’ contract with the Giants was for four years and $160M, with $82M guaranteed at signing (51%).  There isn’t a circumstance where Jackson would or should accept less than that, so any Jackson contract would need to beat both, assuming Jackson is willing to back off of the 100% guarantee demand.  At that point, the team would have options on both the cap and the dead cap.  For context, the cap hits for years two through four for Jones and Carr range from $39M to $56M.  A fifth year would reduce those numbers even more.

So, in the end, I actually proved myself wrong.  Washington could do this if the team wanted to do so.  Mind you, I’m not saying that they’ll being willing to sign up for this, for a variety of reasons, but it is possible under the salary cap if a few hard choices are made.  If the team hypothetically was able to fix its terrible offensive line – which would be mandatory for a quarterback like Jackson who uses his running ability as a weapon – at a low cost, this could maybe work.  The team already has offensive weapons: Terry McLaurin is locked down, and Jahan Dotson and Dyami Brown are on rookie deals, as is Brian Robinson, Jr.

The conclusion?  It’s possible.  Would it be a smart thing to do?  Probably not.  Is it likely?  No, particularly not in Ron Rivera’s fourth year.  What’s your opinion?  Let me know in the comment section below.