Lamar Jackson’s secret superpower

A bigger kid watches from the sideline before wandering over. Room for one more, he asks? Tall and lean, he’s in plaid shorts and a white T-shirt, a green hat covering his braids.

“Everybody says I’m a running back,” he says.

Instead he winds up at quarterback, and he stands in the shotgun before dropping back for a bubble screen. Then he scans the field before tucking the ball and scrambling to the 7-yard line. Then, on the third play, he finds an open receiver in the end zone.

Boom. Touchdown. Suckers walk.

There’s something familiar about all this, which compels a 6-year-old to stare.

“You play for the Buffalo Bills?” asks the boy, who’s swimming in a No. 8 Baltimore Ravens jersey.

His famous teammate smiles.

“Look at your jersey,” he says.

THERE’S A MOVIE ON REPEAT in Lamar Jackson’s mind. It drives him. Animates and unsettles him. It helps explain why teammates and friends wonder if he’s somehow suspended in perpetual youth.

Can you see it? He can.

Some memories are so clear, he says, it’s as if he’s watching himself. He’s 11, quarterback of the pee-wee Raiders, and there he goes down the sideline, a little blur on his way to the end zone. The ref blows his whistle. Bring the ball back, because little man stepped out of bounds.

“They were calling all the touchdowns back,” Jackson says now, his elbows pumping as the mental projector hums. Sixteen years after a loss in a regular season youth game, he swears that ref was the Fort Lauderdale coach’s cousin. “I’m on the field crying like I just lost someone I love most. Snot, boogers and tears, I’m like, ‘They cheated us!’”

Do you remember this feeling? The power of being 11, vulnerable and free, with a mind uncluttered? There may be doubt and fear, but nothing in your head suggests something is impossible. No right or wrong, just intuition and dreams. If somebody won’t let you play, or do it the way you like, you can walk away.

Almost everyone loses this eventually. Years pass, rules and cultural expectations sink their teeth in, and the pressure builds to trade it all away. For acceptance, validation and success. It’s not like Jackson never faced these crossroads. He just always said no.

“Like a savant kid,” says Tee Martin, the Ravens’ quarterbacks coach. Martin doesn’t compare Jackson to Patrick Mahomes or Michael Vick or Tom Brady. Martin believes Jackson’s mind works like that of Jay-Z or Lil Wayne, artists who refused to conform. “Everybody started off thinking they were crazy. Everybody started off thinking something was wrong with them. You can’t understand them.”

But among those who accept Jackson as is, he’s a social pulsar with his own gravitational pull. His self-belief may be polarizing, his commitment to certain boundaries frustrating for some in the NFL ecosystem, his refusal to conform a threat to the status quo. It’s just who he is.

“He don’t give a damn about who don’t care about him,” Martin says.

He may see the world simply, but there’s nothing traditional about him. In a sport that historically has preferred Black players line up anywhere but quarterback, Jackson is changing the game with his accomplishments — which now include two NFL MVP awards — but also with the uncompromising way he looks, thinks and speaks. And, perhaps most notably, how he conducts his business: eschewing most marketing opportunities and negotiating his own contracts.

“When people just giving me s---, like, ‘Oh, he needs to get an agent’ — I know what the f--- I’m doing,” he says. “I knew what I was doing all my life to get in this situation, so how the f--- I’m not going to know now?”

As impressive as his legs and right arm are, coaches and teammates say, those aren’t what may end up breaking the league’s paradigm. That would be Jackson’s confidence and emotional intelligence.

“His story is not like every other quarterback. He’s a guy who many people said isn’t a quarterback,” Ravens Coach John Harbaugh says. “Lamar didn’t fit that vision, and it’s a societal thing; it’s a human-nature thing.

“If the quarterback position doesn’t look the way I thought it did, maybe there’s some other things in our society that don’t look the way I thought they should. Maybe my vision is a little small. It’s greater than just winning a Super Bowl. We’re changing more than what the quarterback looks like.”

Now, at 27, Jackson has come to another crossroads. A championship is the one thing he hasn’t felt. He is accomplished, rich, maybe the most exciting player in football. But is his journey antithetical to his grand prize? Doing it his way got himself this far, but can it get him over the top?

He believes it can, and his career to this point is proof of concept.

A few weeks after that youth game against Fort Lauderdale, Jackson’s Raiders faced the same team in the championship round. They called it the “Super Bowl.” Jackson urged his teammates to play with swagger; to just be themselves. They won, 14-6, the last time Jackson won a championship.

He says he knew they would win even before the coin toss.

“Oh yeah,” he says, “we’re going to kill these boys.”

IN ANOTHER ONE, HE’S 7. Just woke up in a silent apartment. Surrounded by crying because Big Lamar, Jackson’s dad, died the night before. He was 31, gregarious and popular. He was a Pompano Beach legend — Lamar Jr.’s first hint of fame.

“He made everybody smile,” Jackson says now.

His first taste of nosiness, too, because whispers soon swirl, fusing into mythical stories about what happened and why. Later that same day, his mother approaches. Grandma Doris died, too.

“Don’t say nothing,” Felicia tells her sons, preferring they keep family matters private. She doesn’t cry. Neither should they.

The movie keeps rolling, “sharp and very vivid,” he says, like some of his most important memories. But then, telling the story in a hallway of the Ravens’ practice facility, Jackson abruptly ends the sneak peek. That’s more than he has ever shared about the day his life changed and the anger he felt amid the gossip.

“I don’t really care about other people’s stories,” he says. “I got my own.”

No more than a few people know what actually happened to his dad. Some reports say a car accident, others a heart attack; there is no public record or death announcement.

Jackson says this was the first time he faced a life-altering choice. Felicia had been left to raise her children alone, and she couldn’t be everywhere. Lamar could skip school, blow off responsibilities, adapt to the crowd in a part of Florida that the U.S. Justice Department had identified as a “high-intensity drug trafficking area.”

His decision?

“I got to do something,” Jackson recalls thinking. “I got my little brother watching me. So I can’t go out and do bad stuff in the neighborhood, and I’ve got to respect my mom because she didn’t raise me that way.”

Neighbors and even family members liked to whisper, he says, and making his mother look bad was motivation enough.

“They’re going to say, ‘Where’s his parents? What is his mom doing? Oh, that’s what she’s teaching him?’” he says. “F--- no, my mom’s teaching me to be a doctor or something. I got all this on my mind.”

So instead, he imagined a different way. Lamar played quarterback on his youth team, and even at 7, he had an unusual gift for spotting openings and exploiting angles. His speed and agility were breathtaking. He won his first championship in first grade, and that’s when his teacher assigned students to write what they wanted to be when they grow up. An NFL player, Lamar wrote, and he still remembers that teacher’s name. Because when you’re 7, it matters less if a grown-up sees your vision — as long as they support it.

Felicia took her older son on hellacious runs over the Intracoastal Waterway, and when they got home, they would lift weights and run drills. No two-hand touch in their backyard, because Felicia came wearing pads, ready to hit. Then they would go outside and race each other in the street. Back then she could smoke him.

As Lamar grew, repeatedly betting on himself and winning, friends started disappearing. Some went to jail, he says, and others to the grave. He sometimes heard what happened, but knowing whisperers are unreliable, he ignored them. Tried to, at least.

One day he was walking home with a man who went by Mr. James. Lamar can see it now, both of them with their pants sagging. This man was his friend, but when he saw Felicia, he cinched his pants before ratting out Lamar.

And that was the last time he walked home with Mr. James.

“I got to get from around all y’all because I don’t need that attached to my name,” Jackson says. “I know I’m not doing s---, and if somebody messes me up, I’m not going to be the person that I want to be. It’s easy to get in trouble and hard as f--- to get out.”

IN THIS ONE, HE’S ALONE, 18, waiting on Louisville’s practice field. The ball is a dot in the sky, dropping now like a missile. Jackson catches it and runs, sidestepping one tackler, then another.

His elbows pump and legs churn all the way to the end zone. He continues off the field, into the tunnel, gone. His first and last collegiate punt return.

“I ain’t doing that s---,” he remembers thinking.

Not 10 minutes later, a Louisville assistant walks up to coach Bobby Petrino on the field. Felicia just called, Petrino says. This isn’t what they had discussed. Lamar plays quarterback.

“It was made pretty clear,” Petrino says, “that he wasn’t returning punts.”

For decades on a football field, this kind of pushback simply wasn’t done. Coaches were staff sergeants, players the infantry, and a kid’s mother didn’t often figure into the chain of command. But Louisville had promised Lamar and Felicia that they saw something the other programs didn’t: He wasn’t a receiver or running back or an “athlete,” a catchall term for prospects — almost always Black — who have the speed, agility and instincts to play multiple positions. He was a quarterback, and Petrino had looked Felicia in the eye and promised that was where he would play.

Fielding a punt was an experiment, Petrino says now, not unlike what Joe Theismann did early in his career.

But that’s precisely the point: Lamar isn’t Theismann, and this wasn’t 1974. That’s back when Black players routinely got paid less than White ones, even those playing the same spot. This became known as “position segregation,” and quarterbacks tended to have lighter skin tones than ballcarriers and pass catchers. As recently as a quarter century ago, the NFL’s workforce was 70 percent Black and 90 percent of quarterbacks were White. Even now, there’s just one Black quarterback in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Warren Moon, enshrined nearly two decades ago.

Moon, Randall Cunningham and Doug Williams opened the door for Daunte Culpepper, Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick, and those guys cut new paths for Cam Newton and Russell Wilson. Those players could expand the pocket, extend plays, take off running if the coverage held.

But pushing back on the coach? Refusing to accommodate his vision?

“You would lose your job or not get a job,” says Martin, who is Black, and who was Tennessee’s starting quarterback when it won its only national championship in 1999. “You couldn’t tell your coach, ‘This is stupid,’ because you’d probably get cut.”

This being a new age of football, with systems that relied more on the run-pass option and players’ ability to read defenses and exploit the field’s geometry, Petrino allowed it. Jackson played 12 games as a freshman and became the Cardinals’ starter, playing no differently than he had as a kid on the patchy Florida grass. Relying on his vision and speed, he would abandon a pass play and jet through an opening.

After Louisville beat Texas A&M in the 2015 Music City Bowl, Jackson told the Cardinals’ coaching staff that he wanted to become a real quarterback. He arrived at the facility each morning to study film and talk concepts. He learned to spot gulfs in coverages, flip the pass protection, check down to receivers. Everyone in this orchestra had a responsibility, Jackson learned, and there were more weapons than he had realized.

He relied on teammates, and they learned to rely on him — on and off the field. His predecessor at Louisville, Reggie Bonnafon, had been standoffish, Cardinals teammates say, unwilling to mentor young quarterbacks. Jackson went to dinner with recruits and their families, and once teammates arrived on campus, they noticed how quickly and easily he connected with strangers. His childlike sense of humor, goofy charm and self-deprecating way. Not everyone made it into his inner circle, but if you did, he seemed to have two rules:

1. Don’t be fake.

2. The circle stays tight.

“He can sense bulls---, and he’ll tell you, ‘I know you’re bulls---ting,’” says Malik Cunningham, a Cardinals quarterback during Jackson’s final season. “He can see who’s with him and who’s not. One time you mess up that, or if some people tell him something and then tell him something different, then it’s over for you.”

This, like so much about Jackson, isn’t something that’s widely discussed. But those who know him say the circle has further narrowed in recent years.

By Jackson’s second year on campus, he could visualize the entirety of Petrino’s complex offense as an exploded-view diagram. Petrino wonders whether Jackson has a photographic memory.

“You tell him once,” Petrino says, “and he’s got it.”

In the team’s 2016 season opener against Charlotte, Jackson accounted for eight touchdowns. The next two weeks, against Syracuse and in a 62-20 beatdown of second-ranked Florida State, five apiece.

“Lamar Jackson 5x better than what I was at V-Tech….Enough said!!” Vick tweeted after the latter game.

Louisville averaged more than 63 points in its first four games, though Jackson couldn’t will the team past Clemson for a shot at the College Football Playoff. Still, in early December, he was invited to New York as a Heisman finalist. He had accumulated 3,390 yards passing, 1,538 rushing, 51 total touchdowns, and when he was announced as the winner of sports’ most prestigious individual award, Jackson dropped his head.

“To my mother,” he started to say before his voice cracked.

He said he had vowed not to cry. It was the closest he came to failure all year.

PLEASE HOLD. TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, as Jackson seems to have vanished. The next scene in Jackson’s mind is … somewhere.

Where is he?

It’s the 2018 NFL scouting combine, and Jackson is 21. It’s only been a few weeks since longtime NFL executive Bill Polian compared Jackson to Terrelle Pryor, the former Ohio State quarterback-turned-NFL wide receiver, sparking media backlash and generating controversy before the draft. Now, after he throws at the combine, a Chargers scout encourages Jackson to perform receiver drills. This seems to have spurred the disappearance, and Jackson refuses to run the 40-yard dash at the combine and Louisville’s pro day. He skips the bench press, vertical jump and agility drills.

Some teams view him as a multitool, but when those franchises call Jackson or his mom, they ghost them. Reporters and agents have no better luck. A few try, but word circulates that Jackson will conduct only the interviews Felicia approves. She does none (including for this story, for which she declined to be interviewed through a Ravens spokesman). Jackson, with his distrust of outsiders, considers representing himself rather than hiring an agent to steer the draft process and negotiate his first contract. This is highly irregular in the standardized NFL, whose establishment tends to reject mavericks and —

Hold it.

“You got to be part of this,” he recalls telling his mom. “I’m not having no agent.”

Felicia is hesitant. She is neither a lawyer nor a contract adviser certified by the NFL players union. But a stranger’s a stranger, the circle not accepting new members.

“I don’t trust people. I’m not fixing to trust them to have my best interests,” Jackson says he told his mom. “I only trust you. We had parent-teacher conferences, you had my best interests, right or wrong. You’re going to try to defend me. I’m going to say, ‘Yes ma’am, I did that,’ get my ass whooped when I get home, but you still got my best interests.”

She agrees to be her son’s manager. He hires no publicist, no social media manager, no marketing team to push him toward endorsements and an expanded portfolio. Even now, Jackson does almost no publicity. In the past, he has appeared in ads for Oakley and Nissan, but compared to Kansas City’s Mahomes and Travis Kelce? Last season, according to the advertising analysis firm iSpot.tv, the Chiefs quarterback accounted for 294 minutes of commercial time. Retired players Kurt Warner and Ryan Fitzpatrick combined for more than 70 minutes apiece.

Jackson? Zero.

He invested in a Pompano Beach soul-food restaurant in 2022 and has a youth empowerment foundation called Forever Dreamers.

“Everything has got to be right. The writing has to be right. It’s got to be language I can comprehend and understand, and it can benefit both of us.”

He shakes his head.

“I don’t know how people go; I don’t care how people go,” he says of other players’ more lucrative brand deals. “It’s my life. I worked hard to get here, so I’m not fixing to let you f--- this up for me.”

Before the 2018 draft, the Ravens, holding the No. 32 overall pick, hold no combine or pro day meeting with Jackson. That’s by design.

Baltimore’s front office notices media coverage and league chatter about how Jackson’s supposed weaknesses may push him out of the first round. An anonymous coach insisted Jackson couldn’t read defenses or make important throws. An anonymous NFL scout attacked Jackson’s intelligence, citing his Wonderlic score of 13 out of 50.

“They don’t understand us, for one, as people,” says Martin, the Ravens quarterbacks coach, referring to Black quarterbacks, “and they don’t respect us. When you don’t understand or respect someone, you can say stupid stuff like that.”

Baltimore schedules a secret meet with Jackson, and Harbaugh and members of the team’s front office assure him they view him only as a quarterback. Not a Wildcat guy or a trick-play specialist. They ignore his Wonderlic result, understanding the test’s history of cultural bias. Instead, they study the NFL’s Player Assessment Test, a psychological evaluation introduced in 2013 that measures motivation, stress tolerance and leadership ability. Jackson’s scores, Ravens General Manager Eric DeCosta says, were “unusually high.”

After meeting Jackson, Harbaugh is sold.

“We saw the vision,” he says. “We have an opportunity to, just maybe, uncover a little gem here.”

In the first round, four quarterbacks — all of them White — are selected before Jackson. Then, with the 32nd pick of the opening round, the Ravens take Jackson. Among those who went earlier, Josh Allen is a two-time Pro Bowler and Buffalo’s franchise quarterback.

But Baker Mayfield and Sam Darnold have since played for four teams each, and Josh Rosen is out of the league.

THERE’S A MOVIE ON REPEAT in DeCosta’s mind, too. It’s April 25, 2023, and he’s at home, trying to decompress by watching his favorite basketball team. The Boston Celtics are blowing it.

The NFL draft starts in 48 hours, both the end and beginning of a grueling process. Story of the previous two years, really, considering the Ravens and Jackson remain locked in a bitter contract dispute. They have repeatedly tabled negotiations, raising the possibility that DeCosta might need to draft Jackson’s replacement.

“He’s very strong-willed,” DeCosta says now.

Ozzie Newsome, the team’s legendary former GM, had done Jackson’s first deal, which was simplified by the league’s rookie wage scale. Jackson, representing himself, had researched slotting and associated guarantees. He had started the 2018 season as Joe Flacco’s backup. Then, with the team 4-5, Flacco hurt his hip, and Harbaugh called his dad to vent. The season was going nowhere. Harbaugh was ready to start the kid.

“Already?” Jack Harbaugh asked. Maybe he should sleep on it. That’s the same thing Newsome suggested.

John Harbaugh didn’t need to. The team needed a spark, and that’s what Jackson is. Besides, other than a few blocking tweaks to give Jackson autonomy during power rushing and counter plays, the playbook was set. The team was ready. So was Lamar.

During the next seven games, the Ravens went 6-1 and reached the playoffs. Jackson passed for 1,201 yards and ran for 695 more. The next season, Jackson led the league in touchdown passes and broke the quarterback record with 1,206 yards rushing while leading Baltimore to a 14-2 record. His recall and spatial awareness astonished coaches, and tasked with operating an NFL offense, he rarely took notes.

After turning 23 in January 2020, Jackson was named MVP, the youngest since Jim Brown in 1957, but the top-seeded Ravens lost to Tennessee in a shocking upset in the divisional round.

Jackson’s rise nonetheless came at an important moment: the age of the quarterback megadeal. After the league and the NFL Players Association agreed in 2020 on a new collective bargaining agreement, the salary cap — and, more notably, the salary floor — increased, meaning franchises had more money to spend. Mahomes signed a massive extension that came with a fully guaranteed $63 million. A year later, Buffalo extended Allen and included $100 million in full guarantees.

Then the dam broke.

Deshaun Watson, who had been accused by more than 20 women of sexual misconduct, inked a landmark deal with Cleveland. Every dollar of the $230 million contract was guaranteed. Jackson, with no history of controversy, wanted a similar extension. “A legacy deal,” DeCosta calls it.

When negotiations started, things were friendly enough, with Jackson referring to Baltimore’s GM as “EDC.” His initials, sure, but with a double meaning for Jackson: “Every Dollar Counts.”

Because Jackson had no representative to explain the details of the team’s proposals, DeCosta says, the Ravens’ front office emailed him each spreadsheet. DeCosta then followed up with a second email that explained each of the terms, line by line, and compared them with other quarterbacks’ deals.

Months passed, with owners adamant that another fully guaranteed deal like Watson’s couldn’t happen. But Jackson stood his ground. In March 2023, with the draft approaching, he went all-in and issued a public trade request, tweeting that the Ravens weren’t “interested in meeting my value.”

Harbaugh thought it was kind of cool, though he couldn’t say that publicly or in his own building. “I just respected what he was doing,” the coach says now.

That April, Philadelphia signed Jalen Hurts to an extension with $110 million fully guaranteed. DeCosta drafted one more proposal, then another explainer email, firing off both to Jackson’s inbox. It was a five-year extension worth a maximum of $260 million, with $135 million fully guaranteed.

Then he sat down to watch the Celtics, who melted down and made DeCosta’s night that much harder.

“Man,” he says, “I was in a dark place.”

But then his phone buzzed.

“EDC,” the text read, “I’ll sign it tomorrow.”

DeCosta just stared at the display. His son asked what was wrong.

“I think we just signed Lamar Jackson,” he said. Then he poured himself a celebratory drink.

THERE IS, OF COURSE, SOMETHING MISSING from Jackson’s field of vision. It’s blurry, but can you see it? He can.

“I’m on the grass,” he says. “Just standing there, looking at the confetti.”

In the Super Bowl of his imagination, he’s not on the field. Jackson is on the sideline, watching as the seconds click away, feeling the excitement and satisfaction rise. It’s something he has fantasized about for a long time. The colors and sounds in his mind are so vivid, he says, it’s as if he’s there.

“Damn, finally,” he says. “I don’t get emotional.”

But his eyes glisten. His voice cracks.

“I really want it,” he continues, imagining the moment aloud: “‘I finally got it. We won it. We f---ing got it done.’”

By last January, he felt so close. The Ravens’ first-year offensive coordinator, Todd Monken, had devised a scheme that made Jackson the centerpiece. It relied on creating open space with receivers, some of whom were assigned decoy routes to create openings for others, with less emphasis on Jackson’s abilities as a rusher. A real NFL quarterback, in other words, with quick drops and more targets.

Jackson shattered his previous career highs in passing attempts, completions and yards. While he was still a threat to run, his yards per carry was the lowest since his rookie year. The Ravens finished 13-4 and entered the postseason as the AFC’s top seed. They walloped Houston in the first round, but the AFC championship game was different. The Chiefs took away the run and passing windows in the center of the field, challenging Jackson to throw outside.

He finished with just eight rushing attempts, in part because that was Kansas City’s defensive emphasis but also because his legs were cooked. He had entered the season at 215 pounds, down from the previous season’s 230, but the load had worn on him. He was sacked four times, looked tentative in the pocket and had his worst passing game of the season.

Then, in the fourth quarter, he ripped a deep pass into triple coverage. One of his receivers, meant to be a decoy to draw a safety in, ran the wrong route. It was still a throw Jackson never should have made.

Interception. Ballgame. Jackson flung his helmet.

And there, in a single game, is the joy and pressure of being Lamar Jackson. Imagine getting this far, accomplishing so much by doing it your way, kicking down all those doors without ever following a script. From the youth field in Florida to being one of the best in the world.

Then imagine that not being enough.

The Vince Lombardi Trophy is the cruelest, most tempting siren, requiring you to ask more of yourself than you ever have. Mahomes, naturally gifted as he is, became more open-minded as defenses caught up. If it extended a drive, he would throw the ball two feet, and this has won him three championships in five years. Peyton Manning won his two by accepting that, rather than winning with video game numbers, he could rely on his defense and rushing games. Brady won seven because he was willing to sacrifice everything and everyone else.

Jackson’s vision got him here, to the cusp. But after two decades of challenging the game to change, is he willing to adapt and do whatever it takes? If he can’t have both, which would he rather be: a champion or a revolutionary?

Can he see it? Of course he can, but seeing it isn’t enough.

“I want to feel it,” he says. “I want the ultimate award of what I’ve been busting my ass to do all my life.”

He chuckles.

“How I’m feeling right now,” he says after a practice in June, “I wish I was feeling like this, body-wise, in the AFC Championship. We would have won the game. I would have been able to move around for my guys. With me just hurting and can’t move, I know if my legs were good, we would have won that s---. We wouldn’t have even had to throw the ball. F--- throwing the ball.”

He’s still sitting here, inside the Ravens’ facility during one of several interviews for this story. But in his imagination, he’s someplace else:

“Lamar’s just going to run it. He’ll be a running back this game,” he says. “That would be the only time they could say I was a running back, because I would run the f--- out of the ball.”

SURROUNDED BY KIDS, back in Florida where it all started, Jackson stands amid a setting sun. The pickup game is tied, 7-all, and the next score wins.

“Y’all ready?” he says.

He swings a toddler in a Spider-Man tank top, drapes an arm around his 9-year-old center, offers his green hat to a starstruck 7-year-old. When Jackson was this age, one of his dreams was meeting an NFL player. Brady, Vick, anyone. When you’re 11, nobody suggests you can’t do something. But in places like this, where Jackson visits each summer for his foundation’s annual Funday, it matters more when somebody insists that you can.

That’s why, just a few miles from Jackson’s old neighborhood, he’s not a Heisman winner or the MVP. He is possibility. Around here, nobody cares if that pee-wee Super Bowl is the last championship he ever wins. So long as Jackson keeps showing up, making eye contact, reminding everyone there’s another way.

“I was one of those kids,” he says. “The kids need it. I’m just trying to put a smile on their face.”

For now, Jackson is on defense, adapting to what his team needs. He’s trimmer now than he has been lately; at 205, Jackson is the lightest he has been since his Heisman season. Quicker, too, so he starts at safety before shading forward and blitzing — though not at full speed — the opposing quarterback, who gets the pass away. It lands in a young receiver’s arms, and nobody touches him down until he reaches the 5.

Two more plays. A touchdown wins it.

Nobody rushes the passer this time, and the quarterback lofts the ball toward the end zone. There’s a receiver waiting, but an instant before he catches it, one of Jackson’s teammates steps in front.

Interception! Going the other way!

Jackson is screaming, arms raised, sprinting after the teammate as little man blurs toward the end zone. The boy is running as fast as he can, elbows pumping, and with Lamar Jackson trailing him as lead blocker, there’s not a thing in the kid’s vicinity to possibly get in his way.