Congratulations to Lamar Jackson, whose season officially begins now after a 28–14 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Jackson was excellent Saturday night in an undressing of his division rival, with a 132.0 QB rating, two passing touchdowns and an additional 81 rushing yards. While I believe voter fatigue could end up costing him a third MVP award this year, that doesn’t mean he’s any less deserving.
Jackson has reached a stage of sustained excellence rendering much of what we just discussed meaningless to people who enter a more serious, almost binary stage of quarterback judgment after the initial honeymoon phase. It’s a bizarre place that many of the truly great quarterbacks enter where the regular season and the early stages of the playoffs become a blur, and the postseason becomes a hyperfixation among those charged with crafting this big idea of someone’s legacy.
Peyton Manning did not complete more than 54% of his passes in a playoff game until 2003 (he was drafted in 1998). In his first three trips to the postseason, he threw one touchdown, two interceptions and only surpassed 200 passing yards in a game once. We missed a lot, it seems, impatiently staring at our watches from his first NFL snap to February 2007 when he finally layered a Super Bowl win atop his multiple MVP awards, removing any interesting counterpoint to the statement “Peyton Manning is a great quarterback.”
Jackson has a similarly dubious record in the playoffs that Manning had at the start, though he surpassed a 54% completion rate in his third game. On Saturday, Jackson tied the number of postseason wins that Manning had through the first eight years of his career (three). It would seem the Super Bowl is just a matter of time—just like it was for Manning.
And while I wouldn’t advise postponing the finale of the Is Lamar Great debate until he actually wins one—he is spectacular and, in my opinion, will do more for football in terms of bringing new blood to the position than any other player of his generation—there’s no denying the curiosity that now attaches itself to the next game. Drubbing a Steelers team that he has now seen a third time this season, and a team that has not won a game since the first week of December, is important but not satiating. Doing the same to the Buffalo Bills in North Pole conditions? That would feel like progress.
It’s strange to step back every once in a while and consider the entire concept of raising the bar. When it comes to the NFL in particular, an ascending quarterback’s best season continues to become the floor for the next until the Super Bowl win, which exhausts many of those who feel like a player is incomplete without the line on his résumé (there is a sub category of then arguing greatness between quarterbacks with multiple Super Bowls, which feels equally tireless and somewhat impossible). Jackson can change the NFL but it’s more difficult for him to change minds.
I think that’s what made last season’s AFC championship game loss to the Kansas City Chiefs all the more disappointing. Since the arrival of offensive coordinator Todd Monken, Jackson has looked and felt far more like the dominant, multidimensional quarterback that piqued our curiosity at Louisville. His completion percentage spiked from the end of the Greg Roman years. His yards per completion, yards per game and passer rating were all befitting of a player that, Super Bowl or not, could almost transcend the typical question of quarterback greatness given the totality of what he brought to a game. But, against the eventual Super Bowl champions and one of the greatest postseason coordinators in NFL history (Chiefs DC Steve Spagnuolo), Jackson was 20-of-37 (54.1%) with a touchdown and an interception in Baltimore’s final game of last season. While the entire shape of that game could have changed with a Zay Flowers touchdown instead of a fumble, there was Jackson in the familiar posture of a head-scratching interception into triple coverage with a little less than seven minutes to play in the fourth quarter.
We could argue in a very granular way that last year’s loss to Kansas City was different from some of Jackson’s other playoff losses in which he truly looked rudderless, but we’d be wasting time due to the rigidness of the rubric.
I’m not saying it’s unfair to hold the lack of a Super Bowl, or even a dominant performance in a championship game, over Jackson’s head. In some ways, there is a clarity and simplicity to the whole thing that provides a welcome break from the head-hammering of nuance and overcomplication we add to fill our time (here, according to some, is a great example of such overcomplication and I am prone to it as much as anyone).
But I am saying that, even more so than last year, this feels like a version of Jackson prepared to make serious moves toward placing himself on the GOAT list. While we tend to forget how long it took some of the other greats to get there, it will be nice for Jackson, who has endured more doubt—and questions of skill and validity at the position—than anyone else, to get it out of the way. Before anyone has time to change the grading scale.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Lamar Jackson Looks Ready to Take on the AFC’s Other Heavyweights.