Jeremy Conn, 105.7 The Fan

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BetUS, where the game begins! The way that they went last night. And all I said last night was, with all the crazy reports and the ambiguous reports, and the conflicting information, and what you hear from Lamar via Twitter, and what you hear from the Ravens publicly, is that I don't think it's likely that Lamar Jackson gets a deal done this offseason. And I do think it's inevitable that he's going to be traded. Now, you may not like that opinion, because if I'm a Ravens fan, I'd be like, screw this guy. I get it. Because you want to see Lamar Jackson be the quarterback of the Ravens for the foreseeable future.

But whenever you talk about people's football teams, they get very, very sensitive, especially when you give them what I think will end up being the truth. So let's go to Baltimore right now. Hema, welcome in a friend. I don't know if you could say he's a friend of mine anymore. After all these people are telling me I'm the worst person in the world from Baltimore, that is the co-host of the Big Bad Morning show from 6 to 10 a.m. on the fan in Baltimore. That, of course, is Jeremy Khan. Jeremy, how you been?

I'm good, man. Put some respect on Baltimore's name when it comes out your mouth. You got your first dose, or at least maybe it's the first recognition you had from, we call him Bob in Parkville here in Baltimore. But he's been calling shows here for, god, probably 30 or 40 years. Now, he reminds me a little bit of Omar in Brooklyn on the fan now. Omar is not as old as Bob, but Omar will just call you and yell and you'll have no clue what he's talking about.

Yeah, Bob does that quite a bit. I've had a couple of run-ins with him. He's a really, really nice guy.

Really passionate about whatever the topic is, especially some of his icons growing up. But growing up in Baltimore, I didn't have a football team. They left when I was four years old, and I became a college football fan, so I was a huge Peyton Manning fan, and I just happened to say, whoever drafts him, that's going to be my football team.

Meanwhile, while he's in college, the Ravens come to town, the Browns come to town. The rest is history, and I'll never forget what he said to me, because we got an argument over Peyton Manning, and he told me I was riding side saddle for him. So, I don't know what that meant at the time.

I was trying to look it up, but I kind of have an idea where he was going with it to bust my chops a little bit, so don't feel bad. It's all right. I didn't take anything personally. I actually liked him. I liked the phone call, because it was fun, it was different, and it was this guy.

I'm 86 years old, I love Johnny Unitas, and you're disrespectful to Baltimore, mister. I thought it was funny. It's great. I always love when, excuse me, the local callers we hear.

We've got a couple of really interesting ones that I'm sure you guys get all the time, but when you hear the local guys go national, it's funny to everybody here. Jeremy Kahn here with us. So, a few weeks ago, it was like 200% that they believe Lamar Jackson is still their franchise quarterback, and Harbaugh kept on speaking positively about him. Then you have these conflicting reports. He was involved in the offensive coordinating search. He may have not have been, and then there was that other report out there when talking about Lamar Jackson that they can't even guarantee that he's going to be on the team next year.

What do you think the truth is of that situation? Because this is a frustrating part for me, and I'm sure Ravens fans as well. There's one thing being discussed, but there's like six or seven reports about that one thing. Well, Baltimore radio is kind of like Groundhog Day, isn't it? We wake up hearing Sonny and Cher, and we talk about whether or not Lamar is signing, where he's going, if they would trade him, all these things that are going on. To be honest, I don't know that anybody really has a grip on it because we've heard so many different conflicting reports. We had the one out of CBS saying that Lamar wasn't involved in that offensive coordinator search.

Then a local reporter said, yeah, they let it be known that he can be involved in it multiple times, but he didn't say whether or not he showed up for those or if he had any input to it. I really don't know what's going on. The only thing that we know is that the Ravens have five picks going into next year's draft. If Lamar is drawing a line in the sand, which I can't even say that he's done that as far as what he wants guaranteed money-wise, and if the Ravens aren't going to give it to him, I think it makes total sense to trade him.

You know how it is. If you're a team that doesn't have a franchise quarterback, you're sorely missing one, and you'll do anything to find one. I fully expect that the Ravens do trade them, but they get a huge haul back, a couple of first-round picks, and maybe even more. How likely do you think it is that he gets traded this offseason? I'm a betting man. If you ask him to bet, I would say he gets traded. I don't have any inside knowledge of it, just by seeing what's going back and forth.

We've talked about the Instagram messages that have been put up, some of the things that people read too much into. There was a lot of brushback by fans that thought he should have been back sooner from the injury, and maybe it wasn't diagnosed properly when it was supposed to be one to three weeks. Was there any placating with his contract? I don't think there was that he was holding out because of that, because he wants to be out there and he wants to win.

There's a lot to it, and I feel like there's layers here as far as the guaranteed money goes. I'm sure the NFL doesn't want him to get that type of deal, but I'm sure the Players Association would love it. The other part about this too, when they first tried to do this extension three years ago, I understood why he didn't take it, Lamar.

He already won a unanimous MVP. You've got to see what Josh Allen was going to get at the time. We thought Baker Mayfield was going to get an extension too. Last year, it didn't make sense to me why they didn't get a deal done, and then you hear the things from the Ravens, it's up to Lamar. When he wants to get a deal done, Lamar shows up, he's like, yeah, I'm ready to get that deal done. If they don't get the deal done this offseason, and this is a third go-around when nothing happens, then I don't think they'll ever get the deal done, Jeremy.

I don't think there's a possibility for that because you look at it, they're going to give them the exclusive tag, right? So, that's $45 million. If they've got to go another 25% higher than that, and plus, it seemed like he was a little disgruntled that he didn't get the deal that he reportedly wanted with all the guaranteed money in it. And then you see guys like, I mean, for the longest period of time, we were going, okay, who signs first?

This is how long ago this was. Baker Mayfield, Josh Allen, or Lamar. Because all three of them were up for contracts, and then we saw Josh sign, Baker fell apart, and everybody's going, but what's going on with Lamar? Now we're getting to the point where other quarterbacks are coming up. So, does Herbert get an extension? We just watched what Jalen Hurts did, what happens with Joe Burrow. So, there's a lot of guys in this kind of vicinity, and you have to pay the market value for a quarterback, and I think we're getting to that point. But I'm just wondering if there is something else behind the scenes that we don't know about because we haven't got a definitive answer from one side or the other saying, yes, we want him back.

He will be here. We're working towards this. The other thing to me, and it doesn't appear like they're anywhere close, but when I saw the report last week when we were on Radio Row at the Super Bowl, Jeremy Kahn's here with us, they're $100 million off. That seems to be way too impossible to believe. Yeah, I can't imagine that, and I think that maybe there was something to be said if you're looking at they want to sign him to a five-year deal and he wants a seven-year deal. If there's something to that effect, and again, I have no knowledge of that, but that's the only thing when we discussed it on our airwaves that kind of made sense is if the years were off and that's where you're talking about the money. We always knew the guaranteed money was off, but that was always going to be an issue, and I really do believe a team like the Ravens who I think are one of the better franchises in the NFL when you start looking at how they're run, Steelers, Patriots, Packers. There's these groups of teams that you would look at and say, hey, their knowledge is being run very well. If they gave a fully guaranteed deal, what that would mean to the rest of the league, especially some of these other quarterbacks coming up. All bets are off.

I don't know that it'll happen. Well, that's a good point that you bring up, but we talk about the Ravens. They usually get the benefit of the doubt. Are fans at all starting to turn on the Ravens because they say, hey, we want to keep Lamar Jackson, and maybe they are low-balling him on an offer? Yeah. Well, the past three years it's been, or you can say two years plus, it's been, is it the offensive coordinator? Is it the system? Is it the players? What's going on? The Ravens need a wide receiver, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All these things, and everybody wanted to know what the problem was. All I know is that I'm not a guy that puts wins and losses by quarterback saves, but when I watch him play, if there was anybody I was going to do it that carries the bulk of what the offense needs to get done, it's that guy. And if I've ever seen a franchise, I think he's way better than people give him credit for running. The one thing I'll acknowledge is the past two years you've been hurt, and that's not good going into what you want to get in a guaranteed deal, but I really think Lamar could play. So it'd be nice to see them get something done, although I don't assume it will. Is it a disservice to Lamar that they haven't got him a bona fide number one wide receiver in your opinion?

Yeah, I mean they've been trying. So the Hollywood Browns, and of course going out and getting Rashad Bateman, there were rumors that they were in on DeAndre Hopkins, but what were you offering if Arizona got him for a second round pick and a washed up running back? Was it an autographed Joe Flacco Super Bowl helmet or something? What were you offering that was less than that? Yeah, that's not an elite price if you're giving up a Joe Flacco Super Bowl.

Pun intended by the way. It is funny to just think about this because people here really like Bateman, and they traded away Hollywood, and I think it was a great trade for them because he didn't want to be here, and then you get a first round pick back for it. So they've got to figure something out there though. Here's what I don't get about the Marquise Hollywood Brown thing, Jeremy Khan. He wanted out multiple times, and it seemed like the Ravens were honest with Lamar throughout that process, and then you get to draft night, we didn't know all that stuff, and you see Lamar clearly annoyed on Twitter. It's like, why go there if they kept you in the loop on all this stuff? Yeah, well he said he would when he tweeted out, and I remember the comment he was talking about that he had sent out that it had nothing to do with Hollywood at that point in time because Hollywood was already in Arizona.

We were all going, when the heck did that happen? Nobody here had any idea that any of that was going on, so they did keep it under wraps, but I feel like there's some sort of disconnect with the team and him. Again, no inside information on that.

They don't seem to be on the same page when a message is being put out. So do you believe, Jeremy Khan, that the injury was why he did not play this year in the playoffs, or is there more there just because it was weird? I've never seen a player be the one to announce that he wasn't going to be playing in a playoff game.

Yeah, I mean look, I'd like to believe that he was hurt, so I'm going to roll with that, and knowing his character and seeing what he's done here for years, I don't think any differently than that, but it is kind of a tough call and it's a bad spot because some fans were yelling that and they believed that he was holding out because of the contract. The way how quickly the Roquan Smith extension did play out, is that a message to Lamar in any way? Well, the even funnier part of that is that Roquan Smith doesn't have an agent and he did it himself, and the whole big thing about Lamar was, you've got to have an agent to get it done. And then here comes this guy, it's like, yeah, I'll take that.

What do I sign? And he wraps it up. So I think something had to get done because the Ravens want to be left holding the bag with one franchise tag and two free agent players that you have to decide to keep, and we all know they would have kept Lamar if they couldn't have found a way to move him for something. Well, Jeremy Khan, I appreciate you trying to tell all the folks in Baltimore to kind of like just lay down a little bit and not just absolutely destroy me or continue to destroy me, and I appreciate you coming on today.

Absolutely, man. Anytime, and hopefully I didn't muddy the waters with the Lamar talk because we still don't know what the hell is going on down here. Yeah, you know what, you did something that was very intelligent on your behalf, and that's why you're the local host in Baltimore, and I don't have that experience being here from afar. You kept on just going on out there and saying, like, I don't have the inside information. I think there's a lot of Baltimore fans that are annoyed with the media because they're talking about this and presenting it as if it's facts. Yeah, and nobody knows. Nobody's heard anything.

So, I mean, there are some people on the inside that have information, but I don't know if it's like, you know, fully telling everybody what's going on. Well, Jeremy, I appreciate the time. Thank you. Have a good night. Anytime. There you go. Jeremy Kahn joining us on the Zach Gelb show.