After Deshaun Watson got his five-year, $230 million, fully-guaranteed contract in March 2022, Lamar Jackson came to a pretty simple conclusion.

I’ll have what he’s having.

But it wasn’t the same situation. Not even close. Watson, through the assistance of his agents, managed to create a scenario that entailed a sufficiently desperate Browns team eventually making Watson an offer he wouldn’t refuse. Jackson simply wasn’t able to create a similar scenario — especially since he wasn’t willing to set the stage for the contract to come by telling the Ravens he was never, ever playing for them again.

But Jackson wouldn’t let it go. He wouldn’t give up his quest for a fully-guaranteed deal. He rejected a five-year, $250 million offer last August, which would have paid out $133 million fully guaranteed at signing, with another $35 million flipping from guaranteed for injury to fully-guaranteed after only one season.

He wanted a fully-guaranteed deal. More recently, his camp tried to back away from that — but he still wanted a massive amount to be fully-guaranteed at signing (upwards of $200 million or more), even if every penny wasn’t fully guaranteed.

Then came the Jalen Hurts contract. It apparently snapped Jackson out of his Deshaun Watson fever dream. And it made it clear for everyone that the Watson deal is an outlier, a rarity. Something that can only be engineered by players with uncommon leverage.

Without an agent to help Jackson through the process of trying to secure an offer sheet from another team, he wasn’t able to take advantage of his opportunity to put real pressure on the Ravens. Which means he ultimately could have gotten a better deal than the one he got. We don’t know, and we won’t know, what could have been if he’d had an agent.

As we’ve said before, an agent would have both negotiated a contract and advised Jackson on when to accept an offer. Last year, Jackson needed someone to tell him to ditch the desire for Dehsaun Watson’s deal.

The Jalen Hurts contract, by all appearances, finally did the trick.

Jalen Hurts contract helped Lamar Jackson snap out of his quest for Deshaun Watson’s deal originally appeared on Pro Football Talk