Why Ravens Fans Would Miss John Harbaugh if He’s Gone

After another crushing loss, Baltimore’s coach showed how he has kept this team competitive for 18 seasons.

John Harbaugh has consistently had his players’s backs, even after season-ending disappointments. / Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

If this ends up being the end for John Harbaugh in Baltimore, let’s remember him walking briskly up behind Tyler Loop, catching him a few long strides away from the entrance to the visitor’s locker room and putting his arm around the embattled kicker as the pair walked into the abyss (but not before getting machine gun-style videotaped and photographed by the waiting media on the way). 

Loop, bless his heart, will never forget that missed kick as long as he lives. He’ll also never get the benefit of the doubt or the proper qualifiers attached to that moment—that Acrisure Stadium in sub-30 degree temperatures is one of the four most difficult places to kick in the NFL, according to league data. That the entire stadium is a blender of howling winter wind. That the frozen turf is post-Pangea-like, chunked up and unforgiving, disallowing for proper foot placement. 

But I also think he’ll remember having a head coach who cared enough to at least try to mitigate the avalanche in his heart. 

The same as Mark Andrews last year, when the Ravens were bounced from the playoffs after Andrews dropped a critical two-point conversion ball in the end zone. Harbaugh said after the game that night in Buffalo that “There’s nobody that has more heart and cares more and fights more than Mark.” A few days later, Harbaugh said at a press conference that Andrews had a long-term future with the team, thus softening one of the more agonizing portions of the offseason, wondering whether that play would have forced the franchise stalwart to change zip codes. 

The same as Zay Flowers the year before that, when he stretched two arms out toward the goal line, trailing the Chiefs by 10 points in the playoffs and fumbled the ball. Harbaugh said after that game that Flowers had two hands on the ball when he was making his move for the end zone, which was how he was coached to do it. He told the team after that AFC championship game loss that he was proud of them. 

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Thirty seconds after a game is never the right moment to hold a career referendum on an NFL head coach. Our brains are trained to seek out patterns and just about every Ravens fan on earth decided to connect Harbaugh with every moment of heartbreak a fan of this team has experienced over the past half decade. Heartbreak being a relative term, given that there are some fan bases setting yearly records for futility—the Jets spent more than 50% of their offensive snaps trailing by double-digit points this year, by the way—while the Ravens have missed the playoffs twice since 2018, with their worst win total since then being eight. 

He is not perfect. Perhaps on this night in particular, you would have rather Harbaugh had given Lamar Jackson a chance to make a play with 13 seconds remaining and then attempted the field goal, although Jackson looked a little scattershot to me on that final drive. Maybe to Harbaugh, too. And I know I’m being short here. Wanton challenge flags. Inexplicable ebbs and flows of the run game. When you’re with a coach for so long, the resentments build up like in a 50-year marriage. 

But what happens next, what happens after the blow-up, is important. More so, I say. And we can sit here all we want and talk about the coldness and the callousness. That it’s winning and winning only, even though if Ravens fans had their pick of any active head coach in the NFL, they would be choosing someone whose primary trait is having a post-Grinchian heart three times the normal human size. Andy Reid? Nick Sirianni? Sean McVay? The zen is in how they treat people in the little moments where we aren’t able to come in and see. How they ask questions. How they find out what everyone needs to perform. And those little moments compound into critical, game-altering moments. A coach can’t get there without it. I promise. 

It matters. The way Harbaugh has handled the disappointments have set the foundation for each iteration of this team maintaining relevance, which I understand doesn’t always feel like enough but is so incredibly difficult to maintain. Despite what this year has looked like—with two starts from Cooper Rush, two more from Tyler Huntley and the rest being a buffet of Jackson games in which he had the relative health of a 50-year-old attempting pick up basketball as a New Year’s health kick—this team was a makeable field goal away from a division title and a home playoff game. 

If this is it for Harbaugh, you’ll make the argument any way you have to. That the standard is Jackson in a Super Bowl or else you riot. That losing to Patrick Mahomes again is unacceptable. That falling to Josh Allen again just can’t happen. And to that I say go out and have a look around. Chances are, when all is said and done, no matter whom you settle on to do the job a little bit better, you’ll be lucky to find half the heart. And you’ll miss it when it’s gone. 

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