Will Lamar Ever Win The Big One?

Regular Season Lamar v. Postseason Lamar

Lamar Jackson has a huge fan base, but he also has his detractors, many of which are diehard Ravens fans who are no longer dazzled by his regular season excellence but instead, dismayed by this postseason failures.

Lamar Jackson’s winning percentage as a starter is genuinely elite — second only to Patrick Mahomes among the top active quarterbacks. He sits meaningfully above Allen and Hurts despite carrying the burden of leading a team that has had significant depth challenges in multiple seasons, and despite missing significant time to injury. One caveat worth noting: wins are a team stat, and all of these numbers are influenced by supporting casts, coaching, and strength of schedule. But on the raw ledger, Jackson’s record is among the most impressive in the modern era.

Regular season W-L records (career) per Pro Football Reference:

• Patrick Mahomes: 95-31 → 75.4%
• Lamar Jackson: 76-31 → 71.0%
• Jalen Hurts: 57-25 → 69.5%
• Josh Allen: 88-39 → 69.3% (from earlier PFR data)
• Brock Purdy: 31-15 → 67.4%
• Dak Prescott: 83-55-1 → 60.1%
• Joe Burrow: 43-33-1 → 56.6%

To support their argument that Lamar is a regular season stud but a postseason dud, detractors will point out the fact that Jackson is the only multiple MVP winner who hasn’t won a ring.

Let’s go through them.

Peyton Manning — Five MVP awards. Two Super Bowl rings. But here’s what the “Lamar can’t win it” crowd conveniently forgets: the Colts lost in each of Manning’s first six trips to the playoffs — including once to Tom Brady and the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game, but four other times in Indianapolis’ first postseason game. Six consecutive postseason eliminations. For years, Manning’s inability to win the big one wasn’t just discussed — it was the defining narrative of his career. He was the greatest regular-season quarterback alive and still couldn’t shake it. Sound familiar?

Manning’s first playoff debut came on January 16, 2000, going 19-of-42 for 227 yards and no touchdowns in a divisional-round loss. He didn’t win his first Super Bowl until February 4, 2007 — a 25-of-38, 247-yard performance that led the Colts to a 29-17 victory over the Chicago Bears. That’s nine full seasons before his first ring. But if you think about it, that’s the season the Ravens should have gone to the Super Bowl after a 13-3 regular season behind Steve McNair and the conference’s No. 1 seed. Think about that 2006 team taking on Rex Grossman and the Bears.

But I digress…

Aaron Rodgers — Four MVP awards, one Super Bowl. Rodgers was a Super Bowl champion and Super Bowl MVP before he won his first league MVP crown, leading the Packers to victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers to conclude the 2010 season. But after that singular title, he racked up three more MVP trophies — 2014, 2020, and 2021 — without ever getting back to the promised land. Four MVPs. One ring. Nobody’s calling Rodgers a failure.

Brett Favre — Three MVPs, one Super Bowl. Won it all in 1996. Never returned.

Tom Brady — Three MVPs, seven Super Bowls. Fine, Tom is a unicorn. We’ll spot you that one.

Now, of every multi-MVP quarterback in NFL history, how many never won a Super Bowl? Of the active quarterbacks with multiple MVPs, both Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes have captured the award twice. Mahomes has won three Super Bowls. Jackson has not yet won one.

But Context Is Everything

Here’s what StatMuse tells us about Lamar Jackson in the postseason: Jackson carries a career playoff passer rating of 84.6 with 1,753 yards, 10 touchdowns, and 7 interceptions in 8 career postseason games. Are those numbers good enough to win a Super Bowl? No. Has he been inconsistent in January? Yes — and that’s a legitimate criticism.

But before you engrave his failure in stone, let’s look at something else StatMuse is telling us. Over his last four postseason games — spanning the 2023 and 2024 seasons — Jackson posted a 105.8 passer rating with 853 yards, 7 touchdowns, and just 2 interceptions. That’s a quarterback trending in exactly the right direction.

Now let’s zoom out to the regular season, because the disparity between Jackson’s body of work and the “he can’t win in the postseason” narrative is getting embarrassing. Jackson is the NFL’s all-time leader in career passer rating at 102.648, climbing ahead of Aaron Rodgers. He is also, per Pro Football Reference, the all-time single-season rushing record holder for a quarterback with 1,206 yards in 2019.

In the 2024 season alone, per StatMuse, Jackson posted a 119.6 passer rating with 4,172 yards, 41 touchdowns, and just 4 interceptions in 17 games. And per his Wikipedia entry sourced through NFL records, he became the first player in NFL history to throw for more than 4,000 yards and rush for more than 900 in the same season.

After Week 2 of the 2025 season, Next Gen Stats reported that since the start of 2024, Lamar Jackson had thrown 32 touchdown passes over 10 air yards — 10 more than any other quarterback in that span.

What we are watching is not a limited quarterback. We are watching the most prolific dual-threat in the history of professional football at the absolute peak of his statistical powers.

The “MVP Curse” Is Real — And It Cuts Both Ways

Here’s a historical wrinkle that the doom-and-gloom crowd never touches. From 1997 to 2021, nine AP NFL MVPs led their teams to the Super Bowl and were defeated each time. This went on for 23 consecutive years until Mahomes broke the MVP Super Bowl curse at Super Bowl LVII in 2022.

So, the same crowd that blamed Lamar for not winning a Super Bowl in his MVP seasons would have had to blame Peyton Manning twice, Tom Brady twice, Cam Newton, Matt Ryan, Rich Gannon, and a parade of others who fell victim to the same historical quirk. MVPs losing Super Bowls isn’t a Lamar Jackson character flaw. It was, for two-plus decades, essentially the rule.

The Manning Parallel Is the Most Instructive One

The Peyton Manning comparison deserves its own spotlight because it is the most instructive precedent in this entire debate. After Super Bowl XLVIII, Manning’s playoff record sat at 11-12, with more losses than wins in NFL championship games. Despite his five MVP awards and innumerable statistical records, Manning’s postseason failures led many to question whether he could ever be considered among the game’s true greats.

Sound familiar? The same script, different era.

The loss following Manning’s dominant 2005 season — when the Colts started 13-0 before finishing 14-2 — was particularly jarring. Despite being the best team in football, they were eliminated early in the postseason. Critics sharpened their knives. His legacy was declared incomplete. The “can’t win the big one” label was affixed to him like a scarlet letter.

And then — eventually — it didn’t matter anymore. Manning won his first Super Bowl in 2007 and his second in Super Bowl 50 with Denver. He finished as a two-time champion and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. The people who declared him incapable of winning it all slipped sheepishly from the conversation, pretending never to have made the accusation.

“He can’t win the big one!” is Pure Hyperbole

Lamar Jackson has played eight seasons for the Ravens, thrown for 22,608 yards and 187 touchdowns, made four Pro Bowls, and won two MVP awards. He is 29 years old.

Per Next Gen Stats, Jackson’s +162.2 expected points added in 2024 placed him atop the entire league’s leaderboard, making him the first player in NFL history to throw for more than 4,000 yards and rush for at least 900 more in a single season.

The postseason concerns are real and they are fair game. His overall playoff passer rating is below what you’d want from a franchise quarterback, and the fumbles and interceptions in critical January moments have been costly. Those are facts, not narratives. But here is what is also factually true: every multi-MVP quarterback in the Super Bowl era eventually silenced the noise. Manning did it after nine seasons of postseason futility. Rodgers did it once. Even Brady endured his share of postseason agony before becoming the greatest winner the sport has ever seen.

For Jackson to reach the tier of an all-time great, he will need to achieve greater postseason success — but at 29, he has significant time to do so.

To say Lamar Jackson will never win a Super Bowl is not analysis. It’s not even an educated opinion. It’s the same declaration that was lobbed at Peyton Manning after six consecutive playoff exits — and history rendered that verdict ridiculous.

The man holds the all-time record for career passer rating. He holds the all-time record for quarterback rushing yards. He has the two most recent seasons of his career trending sharply upward in January. The AFC is more open now than it has been in years.

“Never” is a big word to pin on a 29-year-old generational talent who’s just now entering the most dangerous chapter of his career. The history books don’t support it. The numbers don’t support it. And frankly, if you’re a Ravens fan while borrowing from the team’s namesake inspiration, consider using “never”, nevermore.

Instead, try “not yet”.

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2026/06/24/lombardis-way/postseason-lamar-jackson/