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Eric DeCosta Opens Up About Negotiations With Lamar Jackson, Biggest Factor in Reaching Agreement

Eric DeCosta Opens Up About Negotiations With Lamar Jackson, Biggest Factor in Reaching Agreement


Whether he was surprised no teams pursued Jackson: “Was I surprised? Probably a little bit, but in the end, every team has to look at who they are, how they’re built, what’s important to them. I always feel like one of the advantages to free agency is when you have a guy on your team, you know exactly who he is, you know how he’s wired, you know what’s important to him. Other teams don’t know that, you know? And so that’s why in my mind, free agency is always a little bit dicey because here we are coveting other players on other teams, and we don’t know very much about them. A lot of times we try to find out, but we don’t. We know Lamar Jackson. We know how he’s wired. We know what resonates with him. We know how competitive he is. And so, for us, it was a no-brainer.”

Whether teams didn’t pursue Jackson because they thought the Ravens would match any offer: “I think the franchise [tag] is a powerful tool. I mean, anyone will say that. Agents will say that; teams will say that; the union would say that. And so that’s exactly right. I think the fact is we were having a tough time getting a deal with Lamar. Again, we respected his position and his feelings, but we were still having a tougher time. But in the end, we felt like our deal, that the deals that we had made, we felt they were credible deals, we felt they were strong deals, and we felt like we were in a position to, not that we could match every single deal, but we felt like we would be able to match most deals and that if a team were willing to do a deal that we couldn’t match would be very hard for that team to do that type of deal. Not impossible, but very difficult. We already had the $32 million as a placeholder on our salary cap. Other teams didn’t. That’s problematic for other teams. So, in the end, it’s a calculated gamble, I would say. You know, is a team going to go after Lamar Jackson? And if they do, maybe, just maybe, the deal is something we can match which makes life easier for us.”

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