Lamar Jackson’s Perfectly Timed Tweets Sent a Very Clear Message to the Ravens

His posting coming out during the NFL owners meetings asking to be traded turned up the volume on his negotiation, and now it’s up to Baltimore to quiet the situation.

John Harbaugh sat down at 7:45 a.m. local time at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, with his quarterback presumably on the other side of the country, a gaggle of media crowding his table at the NFL owners meetings, and his Ravens facing as much uncertainty at the position as they have in a decade.

Three minutes later, Lamar Jackson hit send on his Twitter account, and turned the volume up to full blast.

The timing of Jackson’s missive, tweeted at 7:48 a.m., was about as much of an accident as the Ravens’ putting the franchise tag on their quarterback 20 days earlier. It was direct, and clearly meant to send a message, which, to me, was twofold, beyond just the news he broke that he asked for a trade on March 2, five days before Baltimore even put the tag on him.

One, it illustrated where things stand—from Jackson’s perspective—in the negotiation (not a good place). Two, it emphatically showed that Jackson and those around him—after weeks of being depicted as aimlessly wandering through the offseason—could be just as cold and cunning, and tough, too, as NFL teams would be on the other side of the table.

Baltimore Ravens: Playing Lamar Jackson over Joe Flacco is best option

You can start with the two sides simply being here in the first place. Sometimes, with a Kirk Cousins or a Daniel Jones, you get a bumpy path to a life-changing contract. But arguments in those cases weren’t over at which level a team wanted to hitch its wagon to the player. It was whether the team should do it at all. In Cousins’s case, that led to consecutive franchise tags in Washington, then free agency and a three-year, fully guaranteed $84 million deal in Minnesota. In Jones’s case, it meant the Giants paying a heavy tax for waiting a year and eventually agreeing to a four-year, $160 million contract that could wind up as much as $195 million.