Culture
Playing for New Contracts, but Making Very Different Cases
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — With a bag of popcorn in a single hand and a milkshake within the different, the Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson on Sept. 14 instructed reporters with a smirk that he would now not talk about negotiations of his new contract. Earlier than the beginning of the common season, he and the workforce’s entrance workplace agreed to desk talks till the subsequent low season.
“Respectfully, I’m actually completed speaking about it,” Jackson stated.
On Wednesday, standing at his locker on the Giants facility, quarterback Daniel Jones gave an identical response when assessing his looming contract extension.
“I don’t assume it was ever actually my focus to show to individuals by some means,” Jones stated. “My focus was to play in addition to I assumed I may play and put the workforce able to win.”
The 2 quarterbacks, each 25 years outdated and drafted a yr aside, have reached the tip of their rookie offers. However with Jackson’s contract talks stalled and the Giants’ declining to signal Jones to an extension, each are successfully making a case for compensation — both from their present groups or a bidder in 2023 free company — by means of their play.
However when Jackson’s Ravens (3-2) go to Jones’s Giants (4-1) on Sunday, the stark distinction of their arguments might be on full show. Jackson, a one-time league M.V.P., will almost definitely command a market-setting deal, whereas Jones auditions to stay on the Giants roster beneath a brand new management regime. Each gamers are being evaluated not simply on how they carry out in a contract yr, but in addition on the breadth of their careers to this point. And the evaluation will tweak the marketplace for what beginning quarterbacks ought to be paid going ahead.
“Their most up-to-date play is most essential, however the entire physique of labor is actually an element as properly,” stated Mike Tannenbaum, an ESPN analyst and the previous common supervisor of the Jets. “You’re attempting to match how they’re enjoying to the way you assume they’re going to play.”
Jackson is representing himself with out an agent and failed to achieve a long-term extension with Ravens Normal Supervisor Eric DeCosta earlier than the season. A two-time Professional Bowl choice, Jackson will earn $23 million in 2022, the fifth and last yr of his rookie deal, a good low cost for the Ravens.
Aaron Rodgers of the Packers, Russell Wilson of the Broncos and Dak Prescott of the Cowboys every signed latest offers with annual salaries of a minimum of $40 million. Whereas the annual-earnings common is a giant driver of contract negotiations, assured cash and different bonuses are additionally essential.
Jackson reportedly sought phrases much like these of Deshaun Watson, who in March signed a five-year, $230 million totally assured contract with the Cleveland Browns, the biggest of its variety in N.F.L. historical past.
His argument for matching or surpassing the highest tier of N.F.L. quarterbacks to this point has been sound.
This season, Jackson’s efficiency is on tempo to surpass his 2019 Most Priceless Participant Award marketing campaign. He ranks third within the league in passing touchdowns (12), and the gamers who rank forward of him — Kansas Metropolis’s Patrick Mahomes (15) and the Payments’ Josh Allen (14) — earn a minimum of $43 million yearly.
Jackson has additionally been Baltimore’s most constant offensive risk for a workforce bereft of choices. His 213.4 passing-yards-per-game common is outpacing the 208.5 common he posted in 2019, regardless of the Ravens’ having traded their finest receiver, Marquise Brown, this low season. Jackson has relied totally on tight finish Mark Andrews and a revolving forged of working backs and leads the workforce in dashing yards (374).
Baltimore’s secondary has been racked with accidents for the second straight season, and the protection, which gave up probably the most passing yards within the N.F.L. in 2021, surrendered second-half leads within the Ravens’ two losses already this season, placing strain on Jackson to throw the workforce again into video games.
Jones’s contract lobbying has occurred beneath totally different circumstances. Not like Jackson, the Giants quarterback has but to win a playoff sport or be named to a Professional Bowl, and his struggles to carry onto the ball — he has dedicated 52 turnovers since coming into the league in 2019 — have coincided with the workforce’s instability.
Enjoying for his third head coach in his 4 N.F.L. seasons, Jones should impress Normal Supervisor Joe Schoen and Coach Brian Daboll, each former assistants in Buffalo who helped rebuild that franchise right into a Tremendous Bowl contender.
In April, they declined to select up the fifth-year possibility on Jones’s contract, prompting this “prove-it” season.
He’s getting an help from working again Saquon Barkley, additionally in a contract yr, who ranks second within the N.F.L. in dashing yards (533). Efficient working has opened up play-action ideas on brief and intermediate throws, high-efficiency passes that Jones is maximizing.
Jones has accomplished 66.7 p.c of his passes, the very best mark of his profession and tied for eighth-most within the league. He’s averaging six air yards per try, in accordance with the NFL’s Subsequent Gen Stats, and flinging far fewer deep balls now that the improved Giants protection beneath the veteran coordinator Don Martindale has stored opponents’ scoring totals manageable.
That’s additionally helped Jones (three turnovers this season) reverse his ball-security points.
“I believe Daniel’s completed a great job with the ball,” the Giants offensive coordinator Mike Kafka stated Thursday. “I believe he’s placing the ball in the correct spot and he’s making good choices.”
With a projected $61 million in cap house in 2023, the Giants may gauge potential free-agent suitors for Jones within the spring or look to discover a new starter within the draft. However given how Jones has performed beneath Daboll by means of 5 weeks, Tony Dungy, the previous coach of the Indianapolis Colts and a present NBC analyst, stated Jones was making a case for additional consideration.
“We’re seeing one of the best of Daniel Jones,” Dungy stated.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. With the summer-movie season here, this week’s challenge is focused on novels that went on to become big-screeen adventures. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions.
THE MÖBIUS BOOK, by Catherine Lacey
The first thing to know about “The Möbius Book,” by Catherine Lacey, is that it is actually two books. One is a novella with a hint of murder mystery. Start from the opposite side, flipping upside down — how will this work on a Kindle? — and you’ll find the other: a memoir of breakup and friendship during the pandemic, interspersed with musings on religion.
Where will bookstores put this loopy blue thing? Amazon, with unusual resourcefulness, has nested it for now under Self-Help/Relationships/Love & Loss (though I’d wager the author’s core audience avoids Amazon).
One has come to expect such formal experiments from Lacey, especially after her bravura “Biography of X”: not a biography of anyone real, but a footnoted, name-dropping, time-melting fourth novel that made many best lists in 2023.
There are plenty of names pelted into “The Möbius Book,” too — author friends like Heidi Julavits and Sarah Manguso, and many others — but one notably missing in the memoir part is that of Lacey’s ex, which gentle Googling reveals is yet another writer, Jesse Ball. Here he is referred to as The Reason: the literary-circle equivalent, maybe, of The Weeknd.
He is the “reason” why she has become a visitor to, rather than a resident of, the house they bought together, after receiving an email he sent from another room, composed on his phone, telling her he’d met another woman. (At least not a Post-it?) He is also, or so she believed, a pillar of masculine rationality. With tattoos.
The Reason has control and anger issues. He noticed when Lacey, or her memoiristic avatar, put on weight and advised her how to take it off. After they split she found it hard to eat for a time.
The Reason, unreasonably, refused to use a laptop, so she had done most of his paperwork, participating “in the long lineage of women licking stamps for their geniuses.” He once called her “a crazy, sexist autocrat” when she wanted to leave a light on in a stairwell for a female guest. Sometimes he would surprise her — “playfully,” he insisted; unpleasantly, she felt — with a smack on the rear. When not threatening or cold, he seems a little absurd in this telling, playing funeral hymns on a shakuhachi.
There was a time when such narratives were lightning bolts cast down on the world of letters, causing considerable shock waves. (I’m thinking of Catherine Texier’s 1998 “Breakup,” about the dissolution of her marriage to Joel Rose, and even Rachel Cusk’s 2012 divorce memoir “Aftermath.”) But Lacey isn’t scorching earth — she’s sifting it, flinging fistfuls of dirt and thought at us.
With characteristic keenness she notes how “The Reason’s name had burrowed into everything, like glitter in shag carpet.” How mundane language pops out with new meaning in the fog of post-relationship grief (“Even the copy on a jar of peanut butter tried to offer advice — Separation is natural”). She reflects on her religious childhood and her once-authoritarian, now-infirm father. She consults — and sometimes curses — Simone Weil, Seneca and William Gass. She hooks up with a new fellow she dubs, naturally, The Bad Idea.
Lacey runs the same list of acknowledgments and credits at the end of both novella and memoir. There are similar themes, but also an element of “Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” in their juxtaposition. The fiction is shorter, noirish and elliptical. Was yoking it to the fiction an organic, creative act — whatever that is, we’re maybe meant to consider — or a clever packaging solution for two not-quite stand-alones?
A woman named Marie welcomes a friend, Edie, into her grim apartment on Christmas, noticing — is this a nightmare? — a pool of blood spreading outside a neighbor’s door. They both write it off as “just paint” so they can sip mezcal, eat crustless sandwiches and talk about failed relationships, some mediated or complicated through another, friend, Kafkaesquely called K.
They are both reputed in their circle to be in some kind of “crisis.” (Marie’s Crisis happens to be an excellent piano bar in the West Village of Manhattan, but, as Lacey writes, “no one cares about anyone else’s coincidences.”) Their interlocked stories drip with aphorism (“it is a fact that when one living thing rests its chin on another living thing, everything is fine”), defy summary and might all be a fever dream anyway.
“The Möbius Book” invites the reader to consider the overlaps between its two parts, an exercise both frustrating — all that turning back, forth and upside down — and exhilarating, because Lacey is imaginative and whimsical when considering reality, and sees truth in make-believe. The curving strip is like Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. Both halves share a broken teacup. Twins! A violent man. Bursts of sarcastic laughter. A dying dog (God?) with important spiritual wisdom to share.
Depending on how you twist, this book — defying the linear story, homage to the messy middle — is either delightfully neo-Dada or utterly maddening.
Or, as Lacey puts it: “Symbolism is both hollow and solid, a crutch, yes, but what’s so wrong with needing help to get around?”
THE MÖBIUS BOOK | By Catherine Lacey | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 240 pp. | $27
You can hear a reading of this poem, and play our game, at the bottom of the page.
Poetry teems with charismatic beasts, from Shelley’s skylark to “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” A comprehensive anthology of zoological verse would be fat with doggerel and birdsong, limericks and nursery rhymes, nightingales, foxes and toads.
But let’s slow down and take it one creature — and one poem — at a time. Consider the turtle, as captured by Kay Ryan.
Turtles may not have the charm or charisma of other beasts — they don’t dominate the human imagination like eagles or lions, or domesticate it like dogs or cats — but they have a notable presence in literature and myth. They are symbols of wisdom and longevity; their shells are sturdy enough to hold up the world. The cosmos, in one famous account, consists of “turtles all the way down.”
In Aesop’s fable, the turtle (traditionally called a tortoise, which is a type of turtle) is a winner, a perpetual underdog who defeats the arrogant hare. The tortoise’s slowness turns out to be a virtue.
In Ryan’s poem, the turtle’s physical attributes — her cumbersome shell and short legs, above all — seem only to be liabilities. That armor may have evolved as protection against predators, but it’s a lot of baggage for a poor, halting herbivore to lug around. Her patience isn’t going to win her any races: It’s her best response to a tough break; a way of making light of a heavy situation.
But at the same time, the poem’s mood and manner, its sense and sound, defy the constraints of turtleness. To read it a second time — or aloud — is to note how nimbly and swiftly it moves.
Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Hearing a poem can make it more memorable. Listen to A.O. Scott read this one:
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four–oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck–level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.
Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below. Start on easy mode, and
when you’re ready, try hard mode.
Question 1/7
We’ll take it one step at a time.
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four–oared helmet,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Question 1/7
Strap in.
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four–oared helmet,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
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