The cheers start slowly as players trickle onto the Ravens practice field on a scorching August afternoon. The kids lining the ramp from the field house, many in their youth football team jerseys, lean over the ropes and crane their necks, peering inside. Then a collective shriek announces the news across the three fields: Lamar Jackson has arrived.
In a broader sense, that reaction each day during training camp sums up Jackson’s impact in Baltimore. A franchise that was spinning its wheels through the mid 2010s received a jolt of energy upon Jackson’s arrival in 2018, and throughout the ensuing seven years, Jackson has developed into one of the city’s most iconic sports figures of all time.
For the way he has electrified the city’s fan base, steered the Ravens toward another postseason run this year as the league’s reigning Most Valuable Player and created generational impact that will long outlive his playing days, Jackson is PressBox’s Mo Gaba Sportsperson of the Year for 2024.
“Lamar’s an icon in this city,” former Ravens wide receiver Torrey Smith said. “I said it a few years ago, and everyone thought I was losing my mind when I said it, but I think he’s the biggest athlete to ever play in this city, from an iconic standpoint.”
“He’s proved it on the field,” Smith added, noting that Jackson already has won two league MVP awards and is among the front-runners for a third this year. “But even more off the field, he’s been able to be so relatable. … He’s authentic. He’s always been himself. He’s been himself in every space he’s ever been in.”
“A Man Of The People”
Talk to anyone around the Ravens facility, the people who interact with Jackson on a daily basis, and that word percolates to the surface almost every time: authentic.
“The thing about him is, it’s all him. It’s really who he is,” said tight end Mark Andrews, who has played alongside Jackson since they arrived as rookies together in 2018. “It’s organic and authentic, and that’s the best part.”
“He’s a man of the people,” Andrews added. “I think the people of Baltimore really respect that and gravitate toward him. And he deserves it, because he is such a humble person.”
Longtime Ravens equipment manager Kenico Hines said Jackson has never had any prima donna sense about him with any support staff.
“He’s just genuine,” Hines said.
Hines said he used to warm up with Jackson pregame when he was a rookie playing behind Joe Flacco. When Jackson took over as the starter, Hines assumed Jackson’s warmup routine would change.
“Nah, nah, me and you,” Hines recalls Jackson telling him. “You’re my guy.”
“He cares about people,” Hines said, “and he’s just very loyal to the people around him.”
(Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox)
Jackson is fiercely protective of his privacy, insulated among a small group of those he trusts. One of those is his mother, Felicia Jones, whom he credits with cultivating that authenticity.
“She’s the one that taught me to be myself,” Jackson said. “When I was younger, I might try to mimic someone else, and she’d say that’s not a good idea.”
“‘You’re trying to be like that person,'” Jackson recalled his mother telling him. “‘Nah, you go be you. You be the head, not the tail.’ I take that in everything I do. I just want to be genuine.”
Go be you.
Jackson entered the NFL with that as a driving focus, pushing back on naysayers who said his future in the NFL was not at quarterback.
Former Indianapolis Colts general manager Bill Polian famously said before the 2018 draft that Jackson should move to wide receiver. In 2019, as Jackson was tearing up the league en route to his first MVP award, Polian publicly apologized.
“I was wrong, because I used the old, traditional quarterback standard with him, which is clearly why John Harbaugh and Ozzie Newsome were more prescient than I was,” Polian told USA Today.
Jackson likes to say he blocks out the noise, but it filters through, and clearly at times motivates him.
After he torched the Miami Dolphins for 324 yards and five touchdown passes to beat Miami in Week 1 of the 2019 season — the opening act of his first MVP season — Jackson said his performance was “not bad for a running back.”
Yet the skepticism has never truly dissipated. Even after two MVP awards, Jackson lands below the top tier of NFL quarterbacks in various clickbait ranking exercises. Critics break down his varied arm angles, or his downfield throwing, or some other perceived shortcoming relative to his peers.
Yet that dismisses the fact that Jackson is one of just 10 quarterbacks ever to win multiple MVP awards (running back Jim Brown did as well). This past February, he came within one vote of his second unanimous MVP award. Of those 10 multiple-MVP quarterbacks, though, Jackson is the only one without a Super Bowl title.
Heading into the Ravens’ bye week in December, Jackson as a starter boasted a record of 66-24 in the regular season. His winning percentage of .733 ranks fourth best among all quarterbacks since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger (minimum 50 starts). But Jackson is just 2-4 in the playoffs, including two losses at home as the AFC’s No. 1 seed, and that remains the most potent ammunition for his critics.
Jackson’s postseason quarterback rating is 75.7, way below his regular-season rating of 100.8. There have been plenty of reasons for the top-seeded flameouts, but Jackson hasn’t played particularly well. As the Ravens work toward another postseason, Jackson remains driven by the vow he made the night he was drafted that the Ravens “are gonna get a Super Bowl out of me. Believe that.”
“That’s My Quarterback!”
Like Jackson, Baltimoreans know loyalty. They are fiercely loyal to their city and fiercely proud of its roots and its ethos. It isn’t Washington, D.C., or New York, or Philadelphia, and it doesn’t try to be. It is water, and crabs, and football, and baseball, and marble stoops, and corner stores, and hard work. Authentic.
Jackson “is real at all times,” Smith said, “and I think that’s very relatable, especially to the people in Baltimore.”
Baltimore’s love affair with Jackson began immediately after the Ravens made waves with their midnight-hour move to jump back into the first round of the 2018 draft and select Jackson with the final pick of the night.
At that point, the Ravens had been languishing. They had missed the playoffs three years in a row — a first in the John Harbaugh era — and played to a record of 22-26 from 2015-2017. The offense had oscillated between vanilla and bland, and fans’ enthusiasm had followed suit.
Then along came Jackson, a former Heisman Trophy winner and a highlight reel waiting to happen every time he touched the ball. The energy followed. He overtook Joe Flacco as the team’s starting quarterback midway through the 2018 season, winning six of seven starts to lead the Ravens to the playoffs.
Jackson has always approached the game with a youthful zeal. During one preseason game he wasn’t playing in a couple of years ago, Jackson sprinted 30 yards down the sideline and was the first to congratulate an undrafted rookie after a long run. But don’t let the smile fool you: He is ferociously competitive and can still recite the exact conditions of an interception he threw at Louisville almost a decade ago.
After Jackson’s stirring 2018 debut, Harbaugh declared that Jackson would usher in a “revolutionary” offensive system. That drew some smirks among national pundits until Jackson and the Ravens tore up the league en route to a 14-2 record, a record-setting rushing attack – including a quarterback-record 1,206 yards by Jackson — and a unanimous MVP award.
Jackson spends much of his offseason back in Florida — “He’s 1,000 percent a Florida boy,” Smith said — and each summer he hosts a kids’ fun fest in his hometown of Pompano Beach. Videos on social media show hundreds of kids at the event trailing Jackson like he is the Pied Piper.
When Ravens fans see posts of Jackson treating his “FunDay with LJ” campers at an ice cream truck, reading to students at Mount Royal Elementary School, or FaceTiming with kids in Smith’s LEVEL82 program, it brings out a common refrain: “That’s my quarterback!”
“I appreciate that,” Jackson said. “It’s just love, man. I like to see people happy. We’re put in these situations to put a smile on someone else’s face. That’s why I believe the NFL is entertainment. … We really bring joy to people’s homes, especially here in Baltimore.”
“He Looks Like Us”
“It’s more than football,” said Tavon Williams, the president of the Oldtown Gators youth football program in East Baltimore. The Gators operate teams from age 4 through 13, and Jackson’s influence runs through all of them. Whether it’s the way they wear their hair, or use RPOs and pistol formations, the players “do all the small things to be like Lamar,” Williams said. “And a lot of them want to wear No. 8.”
And in a city that is roughly 61 percent Black, Jackson’s race resonates.
“He don’t look like Tom Brady,” Williams said. “He don’t look like Patrick Mahomes. He looks like us. With … the hair, and the clothes, they see themselves in that.”
Williams said that thanks to Jackson, kids in his program know that “you don’t gotta look a certain type of way to play quarterback. When they see Lamar, and going off to college at Louisville, I think they see themselves a little bit. They see what they can be.”
Williams also said Jackson’s close relationship with his mother has an impact on players in his program.
“A lot of boys listen to that,” Williams said. “I can say something to ‘em, and it goes in one ear and out the other, but when Lamar Jackson says something, it’s kind of different.”
Sports establish deep generational roots, and talents tend to be held tightly by that generation. Oh, you never saw one like Johnny Unitas, a grandfather might say at a Hampden Thanksgiving.
Here’s a striking thing to consider: None of the 190 kids in the Oldtown Gators program, or any other youth programs in the area for that matter, ever saw Ray Lewis play. Seniors at Edmondson or Loyola Blakefield were probably in kindergarten when Lewis retired after the 2012 season. He is relegated to highlight videos. Jackson is here, now, in the flesh, running down the ramps at training camp.
Jackson will always be the “It” for this generation. Forty years from now, in a barbershop along Druid Hill Avenue or Harford Road, they will say, Oh, you never saw one like Lamar Jackson. They will speak of the runs, the throws, and certainly of the spin-cycle touchdown at Cincinnati in 2019 that Harbaugh said will be on NFL highlight reels “for decades and decades.”
Jackson shakes his head at the thought of that kind of legacy in Baltimore, but he always steers back to his singular focus.
“If they’re speaking like that, that’s dope,” Jackson said after a recent practice. “But I want them to be like, ‘Man, he won the Super Bowl.’ There’s always noise, but I want them to remember me as a champion, one of the greatest ever to play the game.”
The Super Bowl. It continues to drive him, somewhat obsessively so. Yet regardless of what happens this year, or next, or the one after that, a generation of Baltimoreans coming of age with Jackson will always remember his singular talent and personality.
“His manners, the way he carries himself with respect and how he treats people, he’s one of one,” Smith said. “The city’s lucky to have him.”
See Also: Best Of 2024: Best Lamar Jackson Moments
Photo Credits: Kenya Allen/PressBox and Courtesy of Tavon Williams
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