Projecting what a Tyler Linderbaum contract extension might look like for the Ravens

We wish we could have been flies on the wall. Imagine being in the Baltimore Ravens' 1996 NFL Draft war room. There had to be a few high-fives when Round 1 led to the selections of Jonathan Ogden (taken fourth overall) and Ray Lewis (26th).

Every team hopes it drafts future Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees, and right out of the shoot, the Ravens landed two of them. Seven players were added to the family during that draft. The fifth-rounder, Jermaine Lewis, went on to become a two-time Pro Bowler and a two-time All-Pro (1998 and 2001).

It makes you think that a coup of that type can never be topped. Maybe it won't, but Baltimore may have come close. On the first night of the 2022 NFL Draft, they landed Kyle Hamilton at 14 and Tyler Linderbaum at 25.

Both have already shown they have HOF potential. The Ravens picked up Hamilton's fifth-year option and wasted no time signing him to his long-term extension. His four-year, $100.4 million deal reset the market for NFL safeties. Linderbaum's fifth-year option was declined, but the expectation is he'll reset the market with a record-setting deal of his own.

Spotrac shares what Tyler Linderbaum's extension might look like.

There isn't a journalist or die-hard fan who doesn't know about Spotrac. It's one of the better reference points for contract info, free-agent lists, and everything related to the financial side of football. Recently, they took a stab at guesstimating Linderbaum's market value.

His current contract expires after this season, and it pays him an average salary of $3.3 million. They estimate his market value at around 4 years and $69,704,356.

Thanks to the NFL-NFLPA collective bargaining agreement, exercising his fifth-year option would have paid him somewhere around $23.4 million in 2026. That would have eclipsed Creed Humphrey's salary by more than $5 million.

Humphrey is currently the game's highest-paid center. It seems inevitable that Linderbaum will land something slightly behind him with a payday of his own at some point, but if exercising the fifth-year option wasn't feasible, it seems less likely that Baltimore will cough up the cash to place a franchise tag on him.

Elite centers are hard to find. Just look around the NFL. Can you even name five to ten? If the Ravens don't make this work, their two-time Pro Bowler will have no issues with finding interested suitors.

And, then, there's that angle. What if Tyler Linderbaum tested free agency for interested teams in an attempt to create some bidding war? We're a ways away from this becoming front-page news, but you can best believe that Eric DeCosta already has this in the back of his mind, and this is a real conversation.

This article originally appeared on Ravens Wire: What will Tyler Linderbaum make this offseason in a contract extension