A Lot Was Said During Ravens OTAs. Here's What We're Not Buying

Spring football is for the eternally hopefully.

For the last month we’ve seen and heard from the most prominent Ravens players and coaches and there have been no shortage of platitudes and proclamations about improvements and learning from the past and embracing all the new concepts and ideas being installed by the first new coaching staff in Baltimore in nearly 20 years.

And, as we’ve chronicled here on a daily basis, we are buying a lot of this. The defense will ger back to its standard. The schedule sets up well. Vegas is high on this group and while we’re not quite that bullish on the Ravens, this should be a playoff operation. But, you know, we always keep it real, and some of what’s being peddled out at Owings Mills had us looking sideways or shaking out heads.

Things got a little overboard talking about Roquan Smith, and there’s been a lot of words said about Lamar Jackson’s lingering contract situation – the occasional word salad from general manager Eric DeCosta and Lamar himself – that is mostly hogwash as these two head toward what could be a nuclear summer between the player and the franchise – again.

Reflecting back on the Organized Team Activity sessions, here’s what we just couldn’t let slide, and where we are calling some BS on what was said.

Lamar’s Contract

Lamar did all he could to skirt this massive issue when he reported foe the second week of OTAs, and I get precisely where he was coming from with some of this – especially being cool with playing out 2026 on his current deal (which yields him complete leverage in 2027).

But when he acted like some of the texts between him and DeCosta were from a place and time detached from reality, with no relevance to their current state (yet another impasse), he lost me. We are aware of these texts because of discovery from the NFLPA’s collusion case, and everything that’s happened since 2022, when they tried to figure out his first contract extension has continued to give Jackson extreme power – another MVP and a no trade and a no clause.

So, yeah it matters that he wanted a fully-guaranteed contract then (and not just for a couple of years like the Ravens were offering), and it’s relevant now. And now that Patrick Mahomes just got another massive payday – what amounts to $64M a year starting in 2027 and going through 2030, as I hear it – things could get even more complicated..

"What year was that? 2022?” Jackson quipped, sounding incredulous. “That conversation is in 2022. This is 2026. We [are] going to leave that conversation in 2022. We're going to leave it in 2022."

Jackson still represents himself, like in 2022. And, again, he has even more leverage now. And all of these is absolutely interconnected.

The Center Situation

Jackson doesn’t have much choice, outwardly, but to embrace the shortsighted situation at center that’s been foisted upon him. Rotating some journeymen who aren’t really NFL starting centers and a recently un-drafted prospect (who has been injured the last few weeks) while installing a new offense with a rookie coordinator doesn’t make sense.

No one who has joined me on “The Daily Flock Show” – Marty Hurney, Brian Baldinger, Bucky Brooks – thinks it makes any sense, because it doesn’t make sense. First of all, you can’t even evaluate the position this time of year, honestly, and to be rotating people this time of year is even odder.

So when Jackson says: - "Those guys are competing well. They're doing a pretty good job, to me. I'm liking our choices, for sure." – it’s not doing much for me. They got way too cute about the need for a third safety and a pass rusher last year and it bit DeCosta bad; they are tempting fate here.

Rookie head coach Jesse Minter was doing some prime equivocation too, when he was asked about rotating centers and tried to equate it to evaluations being made all over the roster. Nah, this is a one-of-one when it comes to critical starting positions on this depth chart.

“We just want to give those guys a bunch of different reps with our offense,” Minter said, “a bunch of different reps with the different interior linemen that they're playing next to, different quarterbacks that they're handling, cadences and things like that. And so, I think there's a multitude of positions where we're really trying to rotate a lot of pieces."

Nope. Just center.

Marlon’s Spectating

Minter downplayed the fact that $19M corner, coming off a season in which he was unquestionably bad. He was one of the worst starting corners in the NFL, and he’s battled injuries and might be headed to the slot. He should be headed to the slot.

You have to wonder if the Ravens, even though they already picked up his roster bonus, will get tough about the contract, and that has something to do with his absence. Humphrey was held out of mandatory mini camp as Minter put it, but this situation ain’t passing my sniff test. Stay tuned on this one.

How could they pay him what that contract stipulates? How weird has this gotten/could this get with Humphrey representing himself (see: above item on Lamar)?

As for Humphrey not really taking part in team drills – which again these were not anything close to full sessions – Minter offered the following:

“Yes, he's great. He's been really engaged the last two days. It's great to have him here. I think sometimes when guys are away, you want to be really careful with them from a physical standpoint. The goal today was to get through practice and get everybody through healthy. There were some considerations there across the board to make sure that we got through to the end of practice healthy, and he certainly was able to do that."

Very interested to see what this contract looks like when players report in late July and how quickly they will be to pivot if this looks anything close to 2025.

John Harbaugh’s Exodus

We were fairly captivated by how compelling and revealing young kicker Tyler Loop was in the aftermath of his missed 44-yard field goal in Week 17, that ended up to be the end of Harbaugh’s long tenure in Baltimore.

Everything Loop said about his process and what he wants to flush and learn from in that kick felt sincere. But his ability to compartmentalize the correlation between the outcome of the biggest kick of his life and the coaching staff being almost entirely cleaned out, I’m not sure that was as clean a part of this process as Loop implied.

“We talk about focusing on what you can control, and all I can control for myself is my process, taking care of my mentals, getting close to the people that care about me, being close to my teammates and just continually being my best,” Loop said. “All I was focused on afterwards was, 'How can I be my best moving forward?'"

This kid seemed pretty tough minded and I wouldn’t bet against him bouncing back from the miss in a big way. But that kick will always be tied to the end of an era that did bring a Lombardi Trophy to Baltimore.

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