ESPN Thinks Lamar Jackson Can Get $70 Million a Year. The Current Record Is $64 Million.
Dan Graziano called a $70 million annual contract for Jackson 'not an overreaction' after Week 1. That would break Patrick Mahomes' mark by six million a season.
Baltimore opened the season with 41 points, and by Monday the most interesting number attached to the Ravens was not on the scoreboard. ESPN's Dan Graziano, running his Week 1 overreaction column, took up the claim that Lamar Jackson could command $70 million per year on his next contract and declined to laugh at it. "Lamar Jackson could get $70 million per year on his next contract," the entry reads. "Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION." For scale, the current high-water mark in the sport belongs to Patrick Mahomes at $64 million a season.
Useful next steps
Six million dollars a year is not a rounding error, but neither is it the leap it would have been two seasons ago. Quarterback compensation has been climbing steeply enough that Baker Mayfield reached $55 million this offseason, which resets what the middle of the market looks like and drags the ceiling up behind it. A projection of $70 million is therefore less a claim about Jackson's Week 1 than a claim about the direction of the entire position, with Jackson as the next person in line to test it.
We were all on point, from the play-calling to the execution. I've been dialed in since OTA. We all have to stay locked in like this. I've got a ton of confidence in these guys that they can do that.— Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens quarterback
Jackson himself has said nothing about money, and that quote is about as far from a negotiating posture as a quarterback can get — it is all process and teammates. But it is also, read coldly, the thing that makes the projection credible. A quarterback whose team scores 41 points in a head coach's first game, and who talks about being dialed in since the offseason programme, is a quarterback accumulating leverage whether or not he ever mentions it. The reporting around his situation is blunt about the timeline: he enters this season without an extension, and a new deal may now wait until 2027.
The numbers behind the take
Lamar Jackson could command $70 million per year on his next contract.
Verdict: "NOT AN OVERREACTION."
Patrick Mahomes, at $64 million per year.
Baker Mayfield reached $55 million this offseason.
Jackson enters the season without an extension; a new deal may wait until 2027.
Baltimore scored 41 points in its opener.
That delay is the actual story, and it cuts both ways. Every week Jackson plays at this level without a signature raises the number, which is why the Ravens would have preferred to have this settled already. But it also transfers risk onto him in the most literal sense available in this sport — seventeen games of exposure between now and the leverage he is accruing. The counterargument to Graziano's verdict is not that Jackson is not worth $70 million. It is that contracts of that size are signed by players whose next twelve months go well, and nobody gets to know that in September. There is a version of this where the projection ages perfectly and a version where it reads, by January, as a monument to one good Sunday in Baltimore. Both versions are live right now, and the column is honest enough to be making a claim about a market rather than a promise about a signature.
The projection is defensible arithmetic on a rising market, which is a very different thing from a deal, and only one of those two things is actually in anyone's hands right now.
The Take, Judged
Market direction. With Mahomes at $64 million and Mayfield at $55 million, $70 million is an extrapolation of a visible trend rather than an invention.
The timing. Projections of this size assume the next twelve months go well, and a September column cannot know that.
Whether anything gets signed before 2027. Every week without an extension moves the number, and it is the one variable both sides are actually watching.
Around the site
Sources: ESPN — Judging the biggest overreactions to NFL Week 1, Yahoo Sports — Jackson gets bold $70M contract projection, ESPN — Breaking down Lamar's contract situation