Lamar and Aaron’s path to new teams…

So Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers had a lack of communication. Didn't see that coming. Lamar Jackson hasn't received a $250 million guaranteed contract from an NFL owner.

Didn't see that coming. Will Brinson, senior NFL writer at CBSSports.com. Pick 6 podcast maestro. Alright, sir, let's start with Lamar Jackson, who apparently on March 2nd requested a trade from the ballgame.

The Baltimore Ravens that we just found out about yesterday, which was what was yesterday the 27th find that hard to believe that it was kept secret all this time. Maybe. I guess that's probably on Lamar. No agent. He's got no agent, right?

Nobody to leak the nobody to leak it out. The Ravens were going to leak it out. First of all, the Ravens are not trading him. Why would they trade him? Well, I don't think they will trade him. I think that he could be.

Well, I will say this. I think there's a here's here's how you get traded. I think one or two things can happen. Either he is going to be given an offer sheet by a team, but one of three things is going to happen. He's given an offer sheet by a team, another team and from there either.

I don't think the Ravens will. It becomes tricky. Now that he's requested a trade that we know about because now it's like do the Ravens match and he's going to be given an offer sheet by a team. If he wants to leave, right?

Why wouldn't they match? Because then you basically have locked down a guy who doesn't want to be there for five years. Well, I think he does want to be there.

Like it's not the same thing. Sebastian Ajo wanted to be with the Hurricanes. He needed the Montreal Canadians to give him an offer sheet so he could just get to the finish line with the Hurricanes. He wanted to be here. Didn't want to go to Montreal, but he knew that the Hurricanes would match the offer.

Boom here. I think Lamar Jackson does want to be there. I think the Ravens don't want to be the ones to give him the contract that he's demanding. And if somebody else gives it to him, the Ravens will just match and just say, hey, we didn't give him the contract. But then why not give him the contract?

Because they don't want to be the ones to do that. Does Jimmy Haslam have any friends in NFL circles? No, not right now. Right. Because of the contract. Not because Jimmy Haslam is some unscrupulous businessman, because there's tons of them. He is. He was investigated by the FBI for supplying Jimmy. But that's not why they don't like him.

Right? Yes, he is quite an unscrupulous businessman. Of course he is. Half of them are.

Let me ask you this. So the Ravens offered him, according to Lamar, a three year $133 million fully guaranteed contract that would pay him like $44.5 million per year on average, which is right below. Now, look, that's below Rogers, Russ, Murray, Watson, Mahomes, above Josh Allen in terms of average per year. But it would make him the second highest fully guaranteed number, which is all that really freaking matters. That's what is so frustrating that these players and the agents are culpable in it too. The teams love it because it's like, sure, if you want to talk about average annual value, by all means do it.

And if you want to talk about like most new money, go for it. Like all we care about is the fully guaranteed money. But I think Lamar, now that the trade request is out there, it is possible that we see something like the Colts jump in.

Because you heard diversity and it sounded like diversity. He said it last night in speaking with any reporters at the owners meetings, but he it sounded like he it sounds like he prefers the draft method, but he also is sort of putting Chris Ballard on notice the GM. And he's saying, you know, this 2023 needs to be good. And for you, you're not in control of who you're getting from the quarterback class. In fact, you could get sniped if somebody trades with the Cardinals. So, but you can go sign, you can't go get Lamar Jackson. And I think if you're the Ravens and the Colts said, I'll send you an offer sheet. And they could also do a sign and trade, by the way, they can say, Hey, look, that would be complicated because Lamar has no agent. Just figure out the deal.

Everyone has to trust each other. And as many people may know, Baltimore stole the Colts from or sold the Colts from Indianapolis to begin with. So not a lot of love lost in Indy for, for, uh, well, no, it's the other way. Indy stole Baltimore. And you stole the coat and the Baltimore stole the coats from Baltimore. The Brown Baltimore stole the Browns from Cleveland, Cleveland. You're on the clock.

You need to steal somebody from somewhere. The Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there's no lakes and the Salt Lake and the Jazz moved to Salt Lake city where they don't allow music of any kind to borrow a line from a line for baseball. But yeah, the point of the thing is like, I think that like the Colts and the Falcons, if they wanted to, the Panthers obviously are going to do it now. They moved to number one. I mean, like there's some teams that I think would be interested in that.

My mock draft is up on cbsports.com. I tried to wrote something else. Wow. It's you writing demon. Um, yeah, I know. Right. All right. So I'm actually just somebody who never just pinged me. He's like, Hey, you want to write some more stuff?

I'm like, nah, I have to really just fire with the minimum. Uh, yeah, I traded Lamar. I traded Lamar obviously to the Colts. Um, that's my, that's my thing, man. I trade, uh, I trade veteran quarterbacks in my drafts.

It's my, I'm the godfather of it. For one second, I don't believe the relationship between Lamar and the Ravens is so bad that Lamar doesn't want to be there and that they don't want him there. Um, if I mean, I could be wrong.

You're way closer to it than I am. And if you say that, uh, it is either approaching there or it's there where that relationship is unsalvageable, then they probably will. But I still get back to this because we can call it collusion and call it anything that it doesn't even have to be colluded. I don't believe there's another owner in the NFL that wants to give Lamar Jackson a guaranteed $250 million contract. And that's the contract he wants. He wants to Sean Watson's contract plus one or plus whatever.

And that isn't happening. I mean, I'm looking at quarterback. I mean, like, you know, this is just what I do for a living quarterback contracts. Right. And like the Deshaun Watson deal is, and I mean, dude, it is not freaking close.

How much of an outlier it is. When you talk about total guaranteed money in NFL quarterback contracts, number one is Deshaun Watson at $230 million. Number two, Russell Wilson at $165 million. That is $70 million in fully, fully guaranteed money. Actually, in fact, I'm sorry, if we do fully guaranteed, Russell Wilson is second at 124. So he has over $100 million in his contract, which is valued at more than Deshaun Watson's in total. If you take the full deal, it's $100 million less in fully guaranteed money. I've said it before, man, and I've said it a ton.

I wrote about it. These owners are not going to allow this to become the norm. They do not want that. And they will not. That's why no one is going to give Lamar Jackson Deshaun plus one, because then Justin Herbert and Joe Burrow are going to get Lamar plus one. That's how these quarterback contracts work.

And they do not, do not, do not, do not, do not want that to happen. Correct. Which is why I don't see the point in a trade because another team will be in the exact same position and they will have seeded all leverage if they trade to Lamar Jackson, trade for Lamar Jackson, and then have to try to sign him to a contract.

Right. But I mean, because of the non-exclusive thing, if you, I think any trade would be a, like it would be a sign and trade. It would technically be a tag sign and trade where, and that has to happen before July 17th, where the Ravens would, Ravens have tagged him. He would sign the tag. The Ravens would sign him to the contract that the other team had agreed upon and then they would make the trade.

All right. So let me ask you this because I want to get to Aaron Rogers stuff here. Most likely scenario this year.

I'll give you three choices. Lamar Jackson plays for the Baltimore Ravens. Forget about, forget about what the contract is, right? He plays for the Ravens. He plays for any of the other 31 teams or he doesn't play. This is an Omar Jackson thing, not an Aaron Rogers thing.

No, this is Lamar Jackson. We'll get to Aaron Rogers next. I think that the most likely scenario is he plays for the Ravens on the tag. I don't think he's going to do that.

I mean, I, I think that maybe I should have offered that as an option. I think he doesn't play. I think that is the most likely scenario. I hope he plays.

I hope that he understands that he's not getting that contract. But so here's the issues. Um, and I'm going to, let me do the math really quick on this. So $32.4 million, 32,400.

It's pretty good. Divided by 17, we get 18 weeks. So it's really more like, yeah, 1.8 million.

He can sit out the first 10 weeks. But if you do that, you are, again, I'm apologize to anyone listening who thinks that I was good at math before that. You're giving him $18 million. Um, so that's a lot of money.

Yep. And if you sit out the whole season, which you can also do, we seem to be able to do that. You would not, you know, you would have to deal with getting the tag coming back around next year. So I mean, I think it's almost like, you know, then this is the problem with again, like not having an agent. You know, the Ravens knew what the deal was with the market when they put the non-exclusive tag on Lamar Jackson.

Sure. Lamar with an agent would have been much more likely to drum up interest from other teams, etc, etc. In which he's able to then force the Ravens hand where they put the exclusive tag on him, which then causes a bigger salary cap crunch, which then becomes 120% of that next year, which then becomes 144% of that 120% the following year after that. It's like, it's just, there's just a lot of downsides to not having an agent in this scenario. I understand why he's doing it. He wouldn't be trying to get this contract if he had an agent, he would have taken something less because the guy would want his cut and he would have talked Lamar to getting paid.

But yeah, I mean, it's just, it's a, I think it was a very unique situation in which the every all this group of NFL owners are going to do whatever they have to do in order to walk back this fully guaranteed deal that Deshaun Watson got. And whether they're, whether you want to call it collusion or, or just, they don't have to collude. They all, they all feel the same way about it. They can, it can be unspoken. My, my, my good, my good friend in, uh, in, in smart legal mind car, uh, was when I were talking about the actual collusion, he was like, do you think they're actually colluding? I was like, well, I don't know if they're like on a text thread.

Like you were like in a room saying, we're going to do this. It's like, they're, they're all of the same mind and they've all, it's all been discussed in a way that probably isn't like, can't be proven as collusion. It doesn't need to be, but like, they're just, they don't want, they are not going to allow these guaranteed contracts to happen.

Cause they all tried to kill Jimmy Haslam, I'm sure, which tell everybody knows how everybody feels about this. My feeling is if some owner for whatever team, uh, I don't know the jets. If Woody Johnson says, you know what? We're not giving the Packers two first round picks for a 40 year old quarterback. We're just going to sign Lamar Jackson to that contract. Uh, if the jets were to do that, a, it would be on them that they broke, you know, through the whatever paradigm. If they broke ranks and the Ravens would match the deal because the rate, I don't think so.

I think they would, because we don't think that we don't want to do that. I mean, it's, that's not worth taking two first round picks, uh, for Lamar Jackson. By the way, worth remembering too, like in 2011, um, the 2011 NFL season was an uncapped year because of the way that the CBA worked back then. The NFL PA exercised a clause in the CBA that allowed them to void the final year of the CBA and the salary cap was gone. There was no salary cap in 2011. People forget this pepper signed this crazy deal before the season.

And there was 2010 or 2011, whatever it was. Um, and the owners all agreed in secret that we are not going to go above the actual salary cap number that we thought it was going to be. But of course, to the two morons, Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder went bananas and like spit like crazy and front-loaded all these, all these contracts. So that way, and the NFL came back and fined them for something that wasn't even a rule. It wasn't even in place. It was like a secret rule that they colluded on the NFL. So it's like, like charge them like 10% docket.

Like, yes, the owners are more than willing to collude and it would not be unusual. All right. We have, uh, 60 seconds on this. We probably don't even have 60 seconds. We might have 10. Um, Aaron Rogers is going to be traded for less than a first round pick, probably conditional pick. He will go to the jets.

It will happen soon. And you will have met your favorite quarterback and your old team in the same place. And you have to refer the jets again. That's what the answer to your question was going to be.

Oh, wow. Um, I'll, I'll make one correction on the other side, uh, but I appreciate you anticipating the question correctly, uh, because you are Will Brinson, senior NFL writer, cbssports.com, pick six podcast, Maestro. By the way, you have the first pick for the Panthers, correct? It is Bryce young, CJ Stroud. If he was as good as Bryce young, it would be a slam dunk, but it's not, uh, you're the man, man. I'll talk to you later. That's Will Brinson, senior NFL writer, cbssports.com, pick six podcast guy.