Ravens Running Out Of Time On Lamar Jackson Extension?

The Ravens have certainly had a busy offseason to start off the 2026 season so far, and some aspects of their offseason have been more successful than others. The franchise felt a need to reset their coaching staff and landed a promising, young defensive-minded coach much like the Super Bowl-winning one they let leave two years ago. The team saw holes on defense and the offensive line and added some strong options in free agency.

On the flip side of things, the expediency with which John Harbaugh found a new job set high expectations for the team that was willing to let him go. Additionally, a number of free agents priced themselves way out of Baltimore, while former staffers in both New York and Los Angeles poached away several other names that many expected to return. But the single biggest failure of the Ravens’ 2026 offseason so far, as laid out by Sports Illustrated’s Jason La Canfora, is the team’s inability to come to an agreement with star quarterback Lamar Jackson on a new, record-setting extension.

When the Ravens finally landed Jackson to his first record-setting extension in 2023, many expected that the star dual-threat passer would never even sniff the final years of his contract. With how quickly the quarterback market constantly readjusts with inflation, it was thought that it would be insulting if the Ravens didn’t see fit to make sure their best player remained in line with the rising market periodically. Especially when teams like the Chiefs and Bills had demonstrated some unique ways to accomplish this for everyone to see, Baltimore was sure to follow suit.

Instead, the issue has frequently been pushed by one party or the other to the back burner. What’s worse, this is not new for the Ravens, who similarly squeezed every ounce of value out of Jackson’s rookie deal even after seeing him win an MVP award in his second season with Marquise Brown, Willie Snead, Seth Roberts, and Miles Boykin leading his receivers room. According to La Canfora, “there isn’t anyone in the industry” who believes Jackson will be a Raven after this year if the team can’t extend him by the start of the season, and after the team restructured his deal, there’s belief that he holds more leverage than ever.

La Canfora also commented on the recent reports that Jackson was offered fully guaranteed three-year deals back when he was seeking his first extended contract. He asserted that not all fully guaranteed deals are equal, focusing on some of the language that was crucial to Jackson in those negotiations. Jackson was seeking a five-year, fully guaranteed deal, something the Ravens did not intend to offer. Instead, they made their three-year offers in the range of $50MM to $55MM per year.

While that still seems like a decent offer, La Canfora reports that it didn’t come with the “no trade” and “no future franchise tag” clauses that Jackson needed to see. He offers that teams only tend to include language like that when the contract guarantees long-term rights to the player’s services, and with Jackson’s insistence on a fully guaranteed deal, a long-term offer wasn’t coming. It became clear that those clauses were more important to him than the guarantees when he eventually agreed to his record-setting extension without full guarantees but with those clauses.

Those clauses essentially guaranteed that, no matter what, Jackson would be hitting the open market again just as he turned 30 — that is, unless he were to receive an extension before then. Jackson had some notion of where the big money would be and put himself in position to cash in at the best moments. The Ravens have had plenty of opportunities over the years to stretch a couple dollars now to avoid even bigger costs down the road, but they’ve continuously come up short, unable to meet Jackson’s demands. Now, they may be in a race against the clock to get a deal done before the start of the season or risk having to reset at quarterback just as they did at head coach. They saw how quickly Harbaugh went.