BALTIMORE - Inside the Ravens’ facility in Owings Mills and amid a $20 million renovation this past offseason, a pair of 110-inch television screens grace two matte charcoal walls in between a pair of slick glass doors that lead to an airy and light-filled training room adjacent to the team’s locker room. At any given time, the day’s practice is replayed on them with cutaways to the afternoon’s leaders in hyper-specific categories.
EXPLOSION PLAYS, BLOCK DESTRUCTION, BALL SECURITY, to name a few of the half-dozen or so “impactful” metrics being charted, the results blasted throughout the sanctum for players to unavoidably see where they stand on the leaderboard that tracks daily progress, from every practice and each game.
“We haven’t accomplished what we want to accomplish,” coach John Harbaugh said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun ahead of the 2025 season. “We need to find a way to do it better.
“The word we came up with was intentionality. We need to be intentional,” he adds, leaning in, eyes widening, voice deepening, “about everything … at the highest possible level. Turnovers in the playoffs have been something, so let’s start with that.”
First, start with the man in charge of the operation.
Staying power
Born in 1962 to Jack and Jackie and with football in his blood, Harbaugh is actually an anomaly in today’s NFL, where the average age of this year’s head coaches is just 47.7, the lowest mark in a quarter century.
Entering his 18th season at the helm in Baltimore - which makes him the second-longest tenured coach behind only Pittsburgh Steelers rival Mike Tomlin in a league whose acronym often stands for “Not For Long” - Harbaugh will turn 63 on Sept. 22.
Yet, he persists.
It’s not by accident nor necessarily undeserved.
Since owner Steve Bisciotti tapped Harbaugh (his second choice at the time) to replace Brian Billick in 2008, the Ravens are 172-104 in the regular season, have reached the postseason 12 times (including in six of the past seven years) and finished with a losing record only twice. In that span, only the Kansas City Chiefs’ Andy Reid and former New England Patriots czar Bill Belichick have won more games.
Baltimore has also made it to the divisional round 10 times, appeared in four AFC championship games and reached the Super Bowl once, capturing the organization’s second Vince Lombardi Trophy in February 2013 with a victory over the San Francisco 49ers and Harbaugh’s younger brother Jim.
There’s also a noticeable blotch on the otherwise impressive resume: The Ravens are 13-11 in the playoffs under Harbaugh, which includes two painful if not familiar playoff defeats each of the past two seasons and just a 4-7 mark in the postseason since their last Super Bowl appearance.
So while Harbaugh, Bisciotti and general manager Eric DeCosta retreated to Bisciotti’s Jupiter Island home in South Florida for their annual debriefing in the weeks after a brutal loss to the Bills on a patch of snow-covered turf in Orchard Park, New York, in January, some wondered about the future of Harbaugh, who was set to enter the final year of his contract.
Owner and coach had come too far, though, and in late March the winningest coach in Ravens history signed a three-year extension that will keep him in Baltimore through 2028, though perhaps with a caveat.
“I want to win now,” Bisciotti, who hasn’t spoken with local reporters since the spring of 2022, told the team’s website during this year’s NFL owners meetings just days after extending Harbaugh. “I want to win with these guys.”
Most notably, Harbaugh and quarterback and two-time NFL Most Valuable Player Lamar Jackson.
“We’ve got a window with Lamar,” Bisciotti continued. “I know what we can do. I know that we worked to put ourselves in position to win. We all get credit for that. That’s all you can do.”
‘Keep it movin’‘
A big part of why Harbaugh has survived this long with the same team - aside from his closeness with Bisciotti and savviness as a coach - is his malleability in a landscape that has continued to shift.
In his early years, he guided the Ravens to success and eventually a championship with a balanced, pro-style offense that played to quarterback Joe Flacco’s strengths and paired with a defense that was as punishing as it was complex in its use of multiple (read: confusing) looks and pressures.
In 2019, a year after the Ravens drafted Jackson, Harbaugh replaced offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg with Greg Roman, a master at scheming up a potent rushing attack who was able to maximize the quarterback’s unique abilities as a runner. Baltimore went 14-2 during the regular season, and Jackson was named the league’s Most Valuable Player.
Then, in 2023, with the need to modernize again, Harbaugh parted ways with Roman and hired Todd Monken, the architect of one of the most prolific offenses in college at Georgia, where he helped the Bulldogs win a pair of national championships. Jackson won his second MVP Award, led Baltimore to the AFC title game then and followed that last season with career highs in passing yards and touchdown passes to earn first-team All-Pro honors.
“It starts with our scheme,” Harbaugh said when asked how he has tried to avoid his voice becoming stale. “You gotta keep it movin’. There’s a lot of coaches that can coach a system, coach a scheme, have success for a few years. This league is unforgiving. People catch up with you. So you’re always going to be chasing the scheme, evolving it or re-volving it, going back to something you did before.”
Not afraid to change
Once again this offseason, Harbaugh needed to pivot.
After the Ravens ranked 31st in passing yards allowed per game, Harbaugh fired longtime assistant and pass game coordinator Chris Hewitt and parted ways with senior adviser Dean Pees, whom he’d brought in five games into last season to stanch a leaky secondary. He also let go of inside linebackers coach Mark DeLeone after just one season, too, unhappy with the way the middle of the field was also getting scorched.
In their place, he brought back longtime assistant and former Colts coach Chuck Pagano, who was Baltimore’s defensive coordinator in 2011 when the Ravens ranked fourth in pass defense, as senior secondary coach. His long experience, he figures, should pair well with second-year defensive coordinator Zach Orr. Harbaugh also hired rising college assistant Tyler Santucci as his inside linebackers coach, hopeful that his knowledge and attention to detail can have a similar impact as it did at Georgia Tech and Duke.
Other changes have permeated as well.
After a league-high 140 penalties last season - more than 30% of which came before the snap - Harbaugh over the spring and summer harped on the problem. He did so by having the team often begin practice by focusing on the mechanics of the operation - substitutions, communication, snap count, checking the play, defensive adjustments - without actually running the play.
On the personnel side, Baltimore beefed up its secondary with the additions of rookie first-round safety Malaki Starks and free agent cornerbacks Jaire Alexander and Chidobe Awuzie with an eye toward perhaps more aggressive man coverage as opposed to the bend-but-don’t-break Tampa 2 zone. The Ravens also drafted talented but controversial edge rusher Mike Green, who fell to the second round amid two sexual assault allegations, to wreak havoc on opposing quarterbacks, something Harbaugh is optimistic about.
He also had to navigate the sexual misconduct allegations from more than 15 massage therapists against the team’s longest tenured player and the most accurate kicker in NFL history, Justin Tucker.
In the end, the voluminous and disturbing accusations were too much to bring him back. Though the Ravens publicly called Tucker’s release in May a “football decision,” the organization’s brain trust was aware of the challenges of bringing him back. Tucker was also being investigated by the NFL and was later suspended for the first 10 games of the season.
And, of course, there has been that focus on not turning the ball over, particularly when the stakes are at their highest.
“We’ve been very good about protecting the ball [in the regular season], but in these last two playoff losses, it has not been a successful formula for us,” Harbaugh said. “So we know we’re not doing something intentional enough.”
Pressure’s on
Not long after speaking, the 110-inch television screens behind Harbaugh spring to life with the day’s latest practice report, each day tabulated to show who’s leading as well as each category.
“It’s the details that matter,” tight end Mark Andrews said. “It’s the details that win games.”
A Raven since 2018 and the target of a pass from Jackson on a 2-point conversion with 93 seconds remaining on that cold evening in upstate New York in January, Andrews knows this perhaps better than most in the locker room.
So does Harbaugh - it goes with the job description, after all - which is why, after a dozen years since the Ravens’ last Super Bowl appearance and perhaps the best roster in football at his disposal, he recognizes what’s ahead.
He despises a Super-Bowl-or-bust notion. But at this point, that’s all there is.
After an offseason spent recharging in the hills of Montana, at the beach in North Carolina and watching his daughter finish her college lacrosse career at the University of South Florida, followed by another training camp and adapting once more, the pursuit is upon him. He hopes that what he has implemented will, at last, pay off.
“We built that - the impactful things - into everything we decided,” Harbaugh says. “And we try to make sure we make those the important things to the highest level, every day.”
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