Baltimore Is Building Around Lamar Jackson. The Roster Suggests They're Not Quite Ready to Compete With Him.
Eric DeCosta said the quiet part out loud on Wednesday: a contract extension with Lamar Jackson is within reach, likely before March. That's the right move, and nobody serious disputes it. Jackson is the franchise. The question worth asking — the one the offseason roster construction actually answers — is what kind of team Baltimore is building around him, and whether that team is capable of contending while the ink is still wet.
Start with the receiver room, because the numbers there are the most clarifying. Zay Flowers posted 1,211 receiving yards and five touchdowns last season across 17 games, and Baltimore locked him up to a four-year, $140 million extension in August. That's the star-power move, the one that signals ambition. But Flowers is the depth chart's third-listed wide receiver, behind Chris Moore — a 33-year-old producing well below what a starting wideout should — and Rashod Bateman, who cleared active status on August 29 but whose legal situation remains unresolved. The Ravens have one reliable receiving weapon at the position, and that weapon just got expensive. Everything else is a question mark or a liability.
The offensive line story I've been tracking all summer has only gotten messier. The first-round investment in Vega Ioane was supposed to signal a new seriousness about protecting Jackson. Then Hakeem Adeniji retired. Then Kendall Lamm retired. Then Danny Pinter tore his patella tendon and is done for the year, leaving Ethan Pocic — signed to a one-year deal — as the starting center by necessity rather than design. That's not depth. That's a chain of contingencies masquerading as a plan. A franchise quarterback extension signed against that backdrop carries real structural risk.
On defense, the picture is similarly built on recovery and hope rather than proven health. Nnamdi Madubuike returning to practice after ten months away from a career-threatening neck injury is genuinely encouraging, and Michael Barrett's arrival addressed a linebacker room that last season ran almost entirely on Roquan Smith alone. But Calais Campbell is 40. John Jenkins is 37. The Ravens traded away C.J. Okoye for a 2028 seventh-round pick right before final cuts, thinning a defensive line that was already old and short on viable depth behind the starters. My read: the team is leaning heavily on health holding and recoveries completing, which is a different thing than building depth.
None of this means DeCosta is wrong to pursue the Jackson extension, or that Baltimore is making irrational decisions. The Ravens won 14 games in 2023 and 13 in 2024 — they know how to build a contender, and they know Jackson is the engine. But the 2025 collapse to 8–9, driven in part by an offensive line that couldn't protect the pocket consistently enough to win at home, should have produced a more aggressive reconstruction. Instead, the offseason reads as a series of patches: a first-round guard who can't snap, a veteran center filling a hole left by injury, receiver depth that depends on a legal situation resolving cleanly. The franchise is betting that depth and health will be enough. Lamar Jackson deserves to sign his extension into a team that's betting on more than that.