After hitting an impasse in contract talks this off-season, the star quarterback Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens reached an agreement in principle on a five-year deal on Thursday, Jackson announced in a video posted on the team’s Twitter account.
“For the last few months, there’s been a lot of ‘he said, she said,’ a lot of nail biting, a lot of head scratching going on,” Jackson, 26, said before announcing that he would “light up” the Ravens’ home stadium for the next five years.
Financial terms of the deal were not immediately announced by the team.
Jackson won the league’s Most Valuable Player Award in 2019 but entered the 2022 season with one year remaining on his rookie contract. Uncertainty had hung over Jackson’s future in Baltimore as he and the team were unable to agree on terms for an extension, and contract talks were paused until the off-season. In March, still unable to agree to terms, the team gave Jackson the nonexclusive franchise tag, which is worth about $32 million annually and allowed him to negotiate with other teams.
Jackson said on Twitter last month that he requested a trade in early March, because the Ravens had “not been interested in meeting my value.”
Other quarterbacks around the league signed new deals or found new teams via trade, including Aaron Rodgers’s move from Green Bay to the Jets earlier this week, while Jackson’s situation with the Ravens seemed to be locked in a stalemate — until the team’s announcement Thursday, hours before the start of the N.F.L. draft.
The Ravens selected Jackson with the final pick of the first round in the 2018 N.F.L. draft. He took over as the team’s starter midway through his rookie season, after an injury to Joe Flacco. He led the Ravens to the playoffs in four of the past five seasons, though he sat out the team’s wild-card game in January after suffering a late-season knee injury.
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