If You Are Worried About Jesse Minter Being Too Close to The Harbaughs, Stop It. Here's Why

There are plenty of areas of concern with the Ravens’ largely-novice coaching staff. But one of the narratives to emerge from the franchise’s first coaching search in nearly 20 years should be of no concern.

It’s just noise.

I was trained to evaluate these staffing processes by studying coaching family trees, and why they succeed and why they fail. And at a time when John Harbaugh was finally discarded – justifiably so – some are wringing their hands over the fact that Minter is so close to both Harbaugh brothers. He’s just like them. If you fired Harbaugh, why hire his protégée? We’re still rolling with this ‘Play Like A Raven’ stuff?

Fact is, that’s actually a positive here.

Fact is, Harbaugh clearly wasn’t as out to lunch and out of touch as some would have you believe, otherwise so many Ravens free agents wouldn’t have landed with him in New York. Fact is, while he was too loyal to many assistants, and mismanaged the defensive coordinator spot, and maybe was losing his game-day fastball, and had become too detached from some realties (we aren’t Super Bowl or bust; last year was his best coaching job) and the Ravens clearly needed a change ... from Monday through Saturday you could do a helluva lot worse than him (and Jim Harbaugh for that matter).

Familiarity, In This Case, Is An Advantage

And plenty of that rubbed off on Minter in Baltimore and Ann Arbor and Los Angeles. And that should serve him well right away. He rode shotgun as Jim Harbaugh changed programs on the fly. That should serve him quite well here, now.

Much needs to change in Owings Mills, but it’s clear that while this offseason was a rebuke of Harbaugh and his staff, the way the Ravens operate isn’t changing dramatically and as much as ownership ultimately understood Harbaugh had to go, not everything about the way he thought and led and comported himself was no longer valid. They wanted someone who understood their past and their processes, and who could embody some of that by osmosis, but with a different voice and different skillset (fix the damn, defense, please, ASAP!).

If you are freaking out because Minter might inadvertently drop a “Mighty Men” bomb here or there, or come off sounding hokey at times, well, that didn’t fare too badly around here before for the most part. Some of that is in him, because he is a substantial part of this coaching tree. That stuff, while in a different package and with a modern twist, worked out pretty damn well for Mike Macdonald in Seattle. I suspect Minter will understand how to integrate some of the familiar vibes and ethos and jargon – to a veteran team that embraced it for a substantial period of time – while also cultivating his own voice.

Minter was worthy of a head coaching position and it was always going to be here. The process was set up to validate what the men running the show – general manager Eric DeCosta and team president Sashi Brown – knew they wanted all along. The problem Minter may find, just as Macdonald did two years ago, is that the degree of competence, let alone brilliance, just might not be there on the other side of the ball.

The composition of the offensive staff might not be up to snuff. The level of checks and balances and dissenting opinions required to raise an organization to the pinnacle of the sport may still be lacking. The front office might keep getting too much wrong, far too often, in assembling talent, and Minter’s immediate deference to any and all things on this front was far more of a red flag to me than his Harbaugh roots.

Minter, the individual, being too close of a facsimile of a Harbaugh is probably just drivel. Minter, unbuttressed from the necessary infrastructure on his staff, and with a slumping front office fighting for its reputation - that’s worth worrying about. If Minter fails, it won’t be because of who his coaching mentors are, it will be because the totality of his staff wasn’t good enough, and the personnel department couldn’t identify the right talent to turn the fortunes of the franchise.

If ‘Playin’ Like A Raven’ can lead to a few more playoff wins, let him say it all he wants.