Stop What You’re Doing. Watch Lamar Jackson Change Football

There needs to be a Lamar Jackson channel. I’m serious. Nothing but Lamar, Lamar, Lamar, all Jackson, all the time, 24/7. How much would I pay? How much do you want? I’m about to fork over $7 a month to Mickey Mouse for this “Disney Plus” stunt, just so my kids can see “Frozen” 900,000 more times. I’ll pay double that to watch Lamar Jackson, whenever I want.

Dude is amazing. He really is. If you haven’t yet watched Jackson reinvent his franchise, and the entire game of football, you need to do so, immediately. If you’re close enough to see his Baltimore Ravens play in person, pack some sandwiches and warm up the station wagon. The Ravens host a zippy one next Sunday, against Houston and the irresistible Deshaun Watson. If you’re supposed to get married next Sunday, postpone the wedding. I’m serious. You’re going to get married plenty of times! There’s only one Lamar Jackson.

I sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The second-year Ravens quarterback is the most exciting player in the NFL right now, and yes, I’m including Patrick Mahomes, Kansas City’s reigning MVP. Honestly, I think Mahomes—still mending from a knee injury—would probably concur. Jackson churns out eye-popping highlights with such regularity, he should be collecting royalties from Twitter and “SportsCenter.” If you have him on your fantasy football team, you’re going to name a few children and pets after him. You may already have.

The Spin happened Sunday in Baltimore’s 49-13 thrashing of Cincinnati. The Ravens were rolling in the third quarter when Jackson faked a handoff, and ran the ball himself, shaking a pair of Bengals defenders out of their cleats before encountering linebacker Nick Vigil, whereupon he turned his right shoulder hard, spun, and basically reduced Vigil (a good player!) into a melancholy human puddle right there on the Cincinnati turf.

If you saw it on TV, you screamed at the TV. It was Barry Sanders-like, from a 6-foot-2, 212-pound quarterback. Just try to spin like that, standing right where you are. If I tried to spin like that, I would knock over a table, step in a trash can and fall out a window. Jackson did it in the open field, at full speed, flawlessly.

From there, it was onto the end zone—an electrifying 47-yard TD run, the longest of Jackson’s brief career.

But that’s just one half of the experience. Let’s talk about Jackson’s passing arm, because it’s a doozy, too—he finished the Bengals game completing 15 out of 17 passes for 223 yards and three touchdowns and a perfect 158.3 passer rating. That’s the second time Jackson has finished a game with a perfect passer rating this season.

And this is a sweet thing, poetic, a bit, because if you know the story of Lamar Jackson, 2016 Heisman winner from Louisville, you know that the tired rap on him going into the NFL was that he wasn’t an optimal passer; that, if you needed a laser thrown on third-and-12, he might not be The Guy. Turns out Jackson is The Guy, and then some—and the TV yappers who sold him short simply as a runner (maybe he should be a receiver!) should now be selling corn cob ashtrays on weekends.

Jackson is 22 years old, just getting started, and yet he plays and talks like a leader. You know that college kid who quarterbacked LSU to a whomping win over Alabama the other night—Joe Burrow? Great prospect, going to be a top pick in the draft next spring, maybe even the No. 1 quarterback, and could even wind up on the Bengals (sorry), squaring off against the Ravens and Jackson for years. As the Ringer’s football writer/jacket mannequin Kevin Clark pointed out, Joe Burrow is 27 days older than Lamar Jackson.

Sheesh. He’s unfair. Baltimore looks set for a generation.