For Lamar Jackson, there are very few things remaining to accomplish that he hasn’t already as the Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback. Winning the Super Bowl is the big one, by far, but there’s another thing he is working on. Going into his eighth season, he wants to develop into the leader his team needs him to be.
While his play speaks for itself, Jackson admits he doesn’t naturally know how to use his voice as others do. It’s an element of his game he knows remains a work in progress, having grown virtually every other element to excellence. That’s not to say he feels he lacks leadership, but he wants to nurture the vocal kind.
Lamar Jackson recently spoke with Kevin Hart, of all people, for the Laugh Out Loud Network, for some reason. I’m not going to pretend I watched the entire 15-minute segment, quite frankly, so a hat tip to Michael David Smith of Pro Football Talk for translating the relevant bit. He admitted that becoming a vocal leader has been a hard adjustment “because I’m not really not outspoken”.
“Being vocal with my guys, like ‘Let’s do this and that’ with a great motivational speech, I don’t have that. I just pretty much lead by example. I’m going to go out there, I’m going to work hard and I expect that out of you”, Jackson said, “but as I’ve been growing in the league it’s like ‘No, you got to talk to the guys.’ Coaches like to tell me, ‘You’ve got to talk to the guys.’ I’m like, all right, I’ll talk to them one-on-one. Certain things I’m seeing, I’ve got to voice it more, voice my opinion more to those guys”.
In truth, I don’t know the extent to which vocal leadership matters from quarterbacks. I think perhaps what matters more is a different kind of language—body language. You’ll hear Ben Roethlisberger’s teammates talk about his composure in the huddle instilling the confidence that they’ll score, but rarely what he actually said, if anything at all. Lamar Jackson certainly has the buy-in from his teammates, but having oratory skills isn’t a bad thing. Any wonder why I’m a writer and not a podcaster?
Since entering the league in 2018, Lamar Jackson has won two MVP Awards, and arguably should have three. He’ll probably never lead the NFL in passing yards, but he has led in touchdown passes. With running such a big part of the Ravens’ offense and his own game, he just doesn’t have that kind of volume. But he has shown, especially in the past two years, that he can sling the ball when he needs to. He put up some truly stellar efficiency numbers last year.
Still, the Ravens once again fell short in the postseason, and Jackson’s backbreaking turnovers didn’t help. He was far from being the sole source of blame, but no amount of vocal leadership would have changed that. And it’s probably not going to win them a game any time soon, unless he starts threatening people who drop balls.
