Earlier this year, receiver Odell Beckham Jr. signed a one-year deal with the Ravens. He’s entering that one year viewing it as the final year of his career.
“I’m thinking like this is my last year,” Beckham said, via Dan Pompei of TheAthletic.com. “I’m going to give it my all this year. And then if something happens after that, we can go from there.”
Beckham originally didn’t want to go to Baltimore. The offer the Ravens ultimately made — $15 million plus another $3 million in realistic incentives — swayed him.
“If I’m honest, I was resistant,” Beckham said, via Pompei. “There were other places I wanted to go. I wasn’t necessarily a Ravens fan because the Ravens always whipped my ass.”
Beckham was going to have a significant role in whipping Cincinnati’s ass before he suffered a non-contact knee injury in Super Bowl LVI. It wasn’t a torn ACL because he had no ACL. Beckham spent his entire time with the Rams without an ACL. Per Pompei, only a handful of players on the team knew about it: quarterback Matthew Stafford, receiver Cooper Kupp, linebacker Von Miller, and cornerback Jalen Ramsey.
Beckham, per Pompei, told Kupp after the NFC Championship that he was glad there was only one game to play, because Beckham didn’t think his knee would make it through two more games.
Beckham initially considered calling it a career, after the knee gave out during the first half of the Super Bowl.
“I went through a lot the last couple of years, and I thought it was over,” Beckham said. “I didn’t want to get back up on the horse and do the same song and dance all over again.
He’ll be on the horse again this year with the Ravens. How it plays out will go a long way toward letting Beckham know whether he’ll be calling it a career, 10 years after he was drafted.