The commentariat at Football Outsiders is a knowledgeable and interesting set of cats. Excellent discussion in the comments on their articles. One guy whom I respect comments there frequently, under the handle "theslothook". He posted this, as part of a wide-ranging discussion after Josh Allen's contract extension was announced:
Ill ask you as a Ravens fan, are we so certain we KNOW that John Harbaugh is a good coach? On the face of it, it looks absurd but if you peek at his predecessor, you see almost the same kinds of teams Harbaugh was fielding prior to Lamar.
Since the begining of the cosmos until very recently, the Ravens have had the same combination of
1) Great Defense,
2) Great Special Teams,
3) Sometimes great run game
4) Cover your eyes awful passing games.
And its instructive to see under Harbaugh's watch, the passing game go from ok to horrible and stay that way. I am genuinely curious if Ravens fans can look at this and wonder, does any of this go beyond the coach? Because it sure does for me.
As you might imagine my reply is way, way, WAY too long to be appropriate for a comment thread. I put it here instead – maybe he'll read it. 🙂
are we so certain we KNOW...?So, "know" and "certainty" are question-begging words to use in this context. If you're going to ask for a standard of terms of statistical certainty & p-values and stuff, I have to admit that we don't "know" with "certainty" that Harbs is a "good" coach. I think from an exclude-the-null-hypothesis standpoint, we don't KNOW that Belichick is a head coach. We have to use much lower standards for "certainty" and "knowing" than the statistical/scientific fields: small samples and no control group etc.
I'm sure you know all this, but the tone of your question makes me think it's a good idea to go back and touch second.
Another thing I want to point out is, I think I detect an assumption in your line of questioning, that "good coach" = "great offensive tactician". Like the only model for the "good coach" is the, uh, the Bill Walsh / Sean Payton / Sean McVay model. (Andy Reid, Kyle Shanahan.) But that's bullshit. There have been plenty of good & successful NFL head coaches who fit the "defense, toughness & execution" model, like Bill Parcells & Bill Cowher & Tony Dungy.
There's a "What even is coaching, anyway?" subtext here. We as fans tend to speak as if coaching *IS* Xs-&-Os tactics. But that isn't true. I follow a basketball coach named Brian McCormick, his twitter & other writings – been following him since I coached my stepdaughter's 7th-grade basketball team a decade or so ago. One of the big things to emerge is that Xs-&-Os and game-day are very, very much the tip of the iceberg when it comes to "coaching". When we look at the NFL, by the time game one rolls around in Sept, coaches will have been working with players for months. Offseason lifting program, rookie minicamp, OTAs, mandatory minicamp, training camp. That stuff carries enormous cumulative weight.
Here's something I stumbled upon, from the Apple Daily podcast with Seth Wickersham. On Kyle Shanahan:
"Kyle is a coach. Y'know: he loves being alone in his office, looking at film, trying to unlock any weakness in the defense."
So first of all, that's exactly how I imagine Kyle Shanahan. Obsessed with Xs-&-Os, and finding tendencies and all that. But what's interesting is:
(1) That first statement is exactly what I'd say about John Harbaugh: "Harbs is a coach." Son of a coach, brother of a coach, a true lifer, eats/breathes/sleeps everything about coaching.
(2) But if I had to guess, I'd guess that what Harbaugh loves is to be ON THE FIELD with his team at practice. I'm sure Harbs does the requisite other work, grinds the necessary film – obvsly if you don't have an appetite for tactics or scheme, you won't succeeed at all – but I bet on-the-field is where he comes alive.
Back in 2013, Kevin Van Valkenburg did a piece documenting Harbaugh's week. It's interesting reading:
Ton of meetings; lots of stakeholders to touch base with. What percentage of what he's doing is Xs-&-Os tactics? Pretty low, right? Now, he can do that because he has a full-time OC and DC; does not have the play-calling responsibilities that say Kyle Shanahan or Sean Payton have. But which part of what Harbs is doing is "extraneous"? Turning the question around, if your head coach is a whiz-kid offensive genius like K Shanahan or Payton, designing the game plan and calling the plays: then which things that Harbaugh does is your head coach neglecting?
Over the years I have come to the position that – well, say there are two coaches. Coach A is what I'll call a caricature of Kyle Shanahan before he got the Niners job and showed us he was very well rounded: a whiz-kid offensive mind, young, a friggin GENIUS at offensive tactics, but NOT good at managing a staff and designing an offseason program and putting together a spec teams unit and relating to players etc. There's probably somebody among the new-wave of hot young coaches that've been hired recently who could serve as the template for this thought experiment: Zac Taylor, Kilff Kingsbury, Matt LaFleur. Coach B is a caricature of, I dunno, someone along the Vic Fangio / John Fox lines: an old-school fuddy-duddy who excels at managing his staff and getting guys into the weight room and instilling a "culture" blah-blah-blah, but couldn't diagram a "mesh" spread play to save his life. He's the complement of Coach A: has all the strengths Coach A lacks, but none of what Coach A actually does have.
Neither of these imaginary crippled coaches is going to be awesome. But I have come to the position that, while Coach A might have one good year, his teams will quickly fall apart. Coach B will be slow & steady, and will ultimately have more "staying power", more long-term success, even if he never reaches the greatest heights. Maybe he maxes out at 9-7; but his teams will consistently plug along at "pretty good".
Owners and fan bases get impatient with that, and those coaches get fired, but I think that tends to be a mistake. Those things that Coach B are attending to are important. I think their cumulative weight makes them MORE important than the X&O tactical stuff. But that's not where we focus, when we talk about "coaching".
its instructive to see under Harbaugh's watch, the passing game go from ok to horrible and stay that way.I reject the premise.
For the Harbaugh era *before* Lamar became the full time starter (so from Flacco's rookie season in 2008 thru Lamar's rookie season in 2018), over those 11 seasons the Ravens median rankings are:
- offensive DVOA: 13th
- passing DVOA: 16th
- points-scored: 12th
- passer rating: 16th
None of that is "horrible". Their lowest finish in passing DVOA was 27th: two times, the last two years leading up to them drafting Lamar. Seven of the eleven seasons were 18th or better: nothing Drew Brees would be especially proud of, but not close to "horrible" either. The two seasons Lamar has been the full-time starter, they – well, in 2019 they were 1st across-the-board (2nd in passer rating). Last year, the "down" year, they were:
- 11th in offense DVOA
- 17th in pass DVOA
- 7th in points-scored
- 14th in passer rating
That's not league-leading or anything; but obviously it's nowhere near "horrible" either. The Ravens have been a LOW VOLUME passing team with Lamar. But they have absolutely *not* been a horribly inefficient/unproductive passing offense with Lamar. Their red-zone and third-down numbers are good. It's just wrong to imply that they've been comparable with, say, the Jets or Redskins or whoever.
if you peek at his predecessor, you see almost the same kinds of teams Harbaugh was fielding prior to Lamar. Since the begining of the cosmos until very recently, the Ravens have had the same combination of
1) Great Defense
2) Great Special Teams
3) Sometimes great run game
4) [not league leading] passing games.
...does any of this go beyond the coach? Because it sure does for me.
This is fairly well understood in Baltimore. Ozzie Newsome was GM 1996 to 2018, and he had a distinctive approach to team-building. For one thing Ozzie completely bought in to the Bill Walsh dictum that offenses can compensate for lack of talent with initiative (they know where the play is going) & execution & scheme; but defenses can NOT. On defense there is no substitute for talent.
Ozzie played for Bear Bryant and entered the NFL in 1978. He had old-school ideas of positional importance, that John Madden & Joe Gibbs would have fully endorsed. QB, LT, and CB are the three most important positions on the field. Build the lines. If you studied the rosters of Super Bowl teams from the 70s to the early 00s, the least-common position to find a Pro Bowler was – well, it was spec-teamer and FB – but after that, it was WR. Super Bowl teams most commonly had Pro Bowlers on the OL and in the secondary; least commonly had Pro Bowlers at WR. Which leads to the conclusion that great individual WRs are not that important to a championship team; most champs win with a WR-by-committee approach (including some of the Patriots championship teams). Modern analytics has come to a different conclusion about WR value, and maybe that's right, but Ozzie operated under another theory.
Ozzie was also the most hard-core value investor this side of Warren Buffett. Ozzie refused to "overdraft" a player. If a given pick was driven by need, Ozzie would trade down until the need intersected with the value of the pick. The most characteristic Ozzie move in the first round was to catch a falling good player. Offensive players tended to be "over-valued" in free agency and the draft, so Ozzie tended to load up where the value was. Year after year in interviews he would repeat to reporters the mantra "right player, right price." He also was disciplined about letting players leave, under an 80/20 rule: if a young guy on the roster could give you 80% the production of a departing veteran, for 20% of the price, then sayonara veteran.
Ozzie was cheap.
But! He would pay home-grown Pro Bowlers. The flip side of the let-players-go philisophy was, if you earned a contract, you got it. This did lead to some albatross contracts (Joe Flacco & Ray Rice), but generally he juggled expensive players under the cap very well (Ray Lewis, Terrell Suggs).
For all his success, Ozzie never drafted a Pro Bowl wide receiver. It's interesting, bc he played WR in college and made the HOF as a receiving TE; but he didn't "see" that position effectively as an evaluator. His first-rd WRs were Travis Taylor, Mark Clayton (2 picks ahead of Aaron motherfucken Rodgers!!!) and Breshad Perriman. 4th-rounder Brandon Stokley once had a thousand-yard season as Peyton Manning's #3 WR in Indy. 2nd-rounder Torrey Smith had an 1100-yd season once (for the Ravens!); also was 2nd leading receiver for the 2012 SB team, and later a valuable contributor to Philly's 2017 SB team. Those represent Ozzie's biggest successes at receiver. Also Darren Waller was an Ozzie draftee.
(Ozzie sure as shit knew a linebacker when he saw one, though.)
You can see how the cumulative effect of these roster, uh, biases would tend to lead to a squad better prepared to win games 17-13, than to lose games 31-35. Welcome to Ravens football. Brian Billick chafed at it sometimes, and bitched about critics who didn't understand the "profile" the Ravens needed to play with. Harbaugh seemed to embrace it more – he joined an organization that had already won a SB – but also has been more effective (flexible, creative) in working in & around it.
It's also interesting to note that, though both of their 21st century HCs turned out to be "leader types" rather than "offensive genius" types, the Ravens tried to hire offensive geniuses both times. Billick's resume was as offensive genius; but his first book was a leadership book. Their first choice to replace Billick was Jason Garrett! Garrett turned down the job to say on as the OC in Dallas, so the Ravens went with their second choice, Harbaugh. It would be an interesting alternate-history experiment, to visit the timeline where the Ravens fired Billick after going 6-10 in 2005, and hired Sean Payton. Would Payton & Ozzie have butted heads over draft prioritiesm and failed to work together productively? Or would their strengths have perfectly complemented each other, and combined for them to take over the league?
Having suggested above that Ozzie crippled the Ravens passing offense, I want to point out that it looks like Ozzie's team-building philosophies were right; or at least, effective. In the 21st century, the Ravens have the 5th-best regular-season record in the NFL. The other members of the top 6 all have featured HOF QBs for most of that period: Brady, Roethlisberger, Favre/Rodgers, Peyton M, Brees. To win that consistently WITHOUT a HOF QB, an organization has to be doing a lot of stuff right.
Ozzie stepped down after 2018 (and drafting Lamar!). His replacement Eric DeCosta seems to have a different theory of team-building. I've heard him say in interviews (from back when he was Ozzie's assistant) that he thinks, in the modern NFL, an offense needs mismatch threats, players that the defense has trouble matching up with. Those players could come in multiple sizes/shapes, from Gronk to Tyreek Hill; but a good offense must have some players that the defense has trouble accounting for.
He's put his money where his mouth is. In just three drafts, he's already spent a TON of capital on WRs: two 1sts, two 3rds, a 4th and a 6th. One overt goal seems to be putting a lot of speed around Lamar, to punish defenses. Marquise Brown is stupid-quick. Miles Boykin is a 99th %ile athlete for the position. Devin Duvernay ran a 4.39 at the Combine. Rashod Bateman ran 4.4 with a 3-cone time under 7 secs. Tylan Wallace "merely" ran 4.5 in the forty, but aso was under 7 secs in the Three Cone. James Proche is the worst athlete of the draftees; he was 9th in in the league in yards-per-punt-return last season, and seems to be a technician / possession guy who catches everything. These investments haven't paid off yet; but WRs usually take a bit of time to develop. Anyway, it's a huge about-face in philosophy from Ozzie.
(BTW, DeCosta has also shown a very different tolerance for risk in the draft, from Ozzie. Ozzie tended to be risk-averse in the draft, esp in the first round (with some exceptions, like picking Jamal Lewis coming off knee surgery). DeCosta seems to DEVOUR risk in the first round. Marquise Brown rehabbing a Lisfranc injury. Patrick Queen with not even one full season as a college starter and only 20 yrs old on draft day. Odafe Oweh with zero sacks his final year in college. These are not "conservative", prudent draft picks. These are moon shots for upside. Not the same ol' Ravens front office.)
For a lot of Ravens fans, Harbs is a game manager / CEO who does nothing in particular to help the team win. In this view, Harbs rode the coattails of Ray Lewis & Ed Reed to the Super Bowl title, and hasn't done shit since they left. He's a joke.
For those fans I want to point out that, since Ray & Ed left the Ravens after the 2012 season, Harbs has gone:
- 75-53 (.586) with 2 div titles and 4 playoff appearances in 8 seasons
For reference:
- Bill Parcells' career win pct is .569 with playoff appearances in 53% of his coaching seasons.
- Chuck Noll's career win pct is .566 with playoff appearances in 52% of his seasons.
- Marv Levy's career win pct is .561, playoffs 47% of seasons
- Jimmy Johnson's career win pct is .556
- Tom Flores career win pct is .527
- Hank Stram's career win pct is .574 (a little over half of that in the AFL)
Obviously this is not apples to apples. Those guys above are not in the Hall for their career win pct: they have multiple titles to their names. Parcells took on multiple rebuilding jobs; Jimmy Johnson & Tom Flores also took on a second, difficult challenge. But I *am* saying, the idea that Harbs has done POORLY post- Ray & Ed, is bullshit.
Concidentally, this stuff on Wins Above Replacement came out recently:
I can't read it, don't have a PFF sub, but Harbs is pretty prominent in the free part. PFF's Tej Seth followed up with some tweets about this stuff as it relates to Harbaugh:
- https://twitter.com/tejfbanalytics/status/1422550543055130633
- https://twitter.com/tejfbanalytics/status/1424070904049512450
- https://twitter.com/tejfbanalytics/status/1423627218639544323
Parentheticaly, I don't agree with Tej Seth that Harbs already has HOF credentials. I did some work last year on trying to replicate PFR's Hall Of Fame Monitor, but for coaches. Develop a scoring model that is somewhat predicitive of how the Hall voters will treat coaches. That's hard; and you have to ignore Belichick, because he destroys everything. (Shula & Halas also are model-breakers.) Harbs' resume is light compared to HOF norms for a coach. One factor is that he has fewer division titles than his other stats would suggest he "should": the constant competition with the Steelers & Tomlin depresses that total.
But if Harbs ever wins another SB, that changes the discussion. He'd be one of a very small number of coaches ever to build champs around multiple QBs. I don't have that factored into my model, but I think it would be major for the Hall voters. Also Harbs can rack up more division titles and winning seasons; those were the biggest difference between his resume and Andy Reid's last year (before Reid went to another SB). One hypothetical HOF track for Harbaugh: say he gets 6 more winning seasons, with 3 more division titles and one more Super Bowl appearance, losing. I estimate that would push his overall resume up to Marv Levy / Bill Cowher territory. Those aren't implausible targets for Harbaugh at all. Seasons like that would also give Harbs other boosts in my model: a couple of 2-1 playoff runs to the conf title game, even losing there, would bump up Harbs' playoff win% over .600. Another great regular season like 2019 would also give him some bonuses.
Harbs also has a solid shot at 200 wins. Only 8 coaches in NFL history have hit that number, but that group could swell in the next decade. Tomlin, Pete Carroll & Sean Payton are all at about 145. Tomlin is the youngest of those three – absurdly young, he's not even 50 yet! – and with an organization famed for stability, so I might give him the best odds of eventually hitting that number. Although I think Payton is probably the better coach and certainly the better developer of QBs. Harbaugh started just after those two, and he's right behind them in career wins: he needs 71 to hit 200 on his career. He's averaged 9.9 wins per year so far. Seven years at 10-wins-per seems very achievable, if Lamar stays healthy. Harbs turns 59 next month; I don't know how far into his 60s he will want to work, but he seems to have a huge appetite for football. His daughter just started college, so there's not a "spend time with the grandkids" motive yet. No health scares (knock wood); the only obvious concession to age so far is that Harbs has started to use glasses.
The 200 wins mark has not been a magic Hall pass all by itself. Marty Schottenheimer has 200 and isn't in. Dan Reeves has 190, Chuck Knox 186. The Hall voters haven't particularly treasured longevity in a coach. But also none of those coaches have a championship. Andy Reid is the only coach in the 200 club with only one championship; but obviously Reid has an excellent chance to get more rings. If Tomlin & Payton & Harbs all hit 200, it'll be interesting to see how the Hall voters treat them. 200 career wins with a championship might prove to be too solid a combo to keep out.
Point being, I disagree that Harbs already has Hall credentials, but I *do* think he has good Hall chances.
So then where is Harbs weak? I think it is instructive to look at three Ravens losses, to illustrate when Harbs gets outcoached:
- Ravens @ Pats, 2014 playoffs
- Saints @ Ravens, 2018
- Chiefs @ Ravens, 2019
Each was a very competitive game, but the opposing coach sprung a surprise tactic to break their offense out of doldrums and get key scores that led to a win.
— In the Pats playoff game, Ravens twice took 2-TD leads, and they were doing a decent job of holding Brady & co in check. But Brady found a weak link in the Ravens secondary, Rashaan Melvin, and exploited him relentlessly. And then – here's what the game's remembered for – the Pats dug deep into their arsenal and produced the eligible/ineligible stuff, which the Ravens defenders were too "well coached" (robotic) to adjust for, and they got key TDs out of it. This was still a one-score game at the 2-min warning, Ravens driving, but Flacco threw a clinching INT for the 35-31 final.
— In the Saints game, some Saints beat reporter wrote later that Sean Payton prepared super extensively for it. He thought the challenge of winning IN Baltimore was formidable, and he came up with some wrinkles specifically for the game. One of the wrinkles was, the Saints went for it on 4th-down 3 or 4 times on the OPENING DRIVE. On the day they converted 4 times on 4th down. The final margin was a single point: Justin Tucker missed a PAT with 24 secs left.
(The look on his face – !)
— In the Chiefs game, Ravens were doing a good job of holding down the Chiefs thru 1. Then the Chiefs made some kind of adjustment, and exploded in Q2 for 3 TDs and a FG. Ravens re-adjusted, and were able to fight back in the game. The final score was 33-28: a 5-pt margin in a game where the Ravens missed three 2-pt conversions.
This is the club that Harbs doesn't have in his bag. Offensive wrinkles for a single opponent / in-game adjustment that breaks things open for the offense to get key scores.
Related, sometimes there's an issue of offensive "urgency" right from the opening gun. For this I want to mention a 4th game, Ravens @ Pats from this past season. That game, the weather forecast called for a big storm to sweep in around halftime, basically a monsoon. The Pats coaching staff included that in their game planning: they threw out all the stops in the first half (trick plays, 4th-down tries etc) to take the lead into halftime. The Ravens seemed to play a somewhat casual first half on offense; they looked confident that their normal stuff would eventually get untracked and be enough to score. Maybe under normal circumstances it would have. But the monsoon *DID* sweep in at halftime; the second half was miserable, with poor visibility, bad snaps, etc. Moving the ball was difficult; and the Ravens offense never really got on track. The Pats staff had planned for the situation better than the Ravens had.
Probably there's no shame in getting out-tacticked by Belichick or Payton or Reid. All this stuff sounds like a reasonable argument that Harbs is good, but a little behind those guys, and that's utterly plausible.
BUT!
What's interesting to me is, Harbaugh *does* pull out tactical wrinkles on his opponents, to break open a tough game: but he does it on spec teams! Against the Redskins this past season, he had punter Sam Koch run a fake, passing to Miles Boykin for the first down.
(Koch is the Ravens all-time best passer: career 7 of 7 for 82 yds [11.7 yds-per], for a passer rating of 115.5.)
In the Super Bowl Harbs ran a fake FG . That play didn't convert for a first down; but the Niners were so backed up that when they punted, the Ravens got great field position and scored the TD on the next drive. The attempt "worked" even without the first down conversion; the second half of the argument that coaches should go for it more often on 4th down. Also Harbs took the intentional safety on game-ending punt to clinch the SB. Against the Chiefs last year, got a KR TD to bring the margin back to a one-score game, when the offense was flailing.
The in-game tactical tricks to help the team out at critical moments are there; it's just that they're not where we as fans are conditioned to expect them (on offense).
In the playoff loss to the Pats mentioned above, Pats attempted to kneel out the clock, but Harbs did something clever with his timeouts (I don't remember what) to save a little bit of time at the end, thus creating two scoring chances. The chances were low-probability, but they weren't zero either: Pats had to punt to Jacoby Jones, and then Flacco got a Hail Mary shot from midfield. Again, not high-probability chances, but nothing the opposing team could take for granted either. Harbs was extracting extra (though small) winning chances for his team.
Philosophically, Harbs (esp with Greg Roman) reminds me a little of Joe Gibbs. Gibbs was hired as an "offensive genius" type of HC; but he coached the whole team, and for a passing guru in the age of Joe Montana & Dan Marino, he emphasized the run an awful lot. He wasn't the type to break out a fancy X-&-O innovation or trick for one particular matchup; his teams were just better prepared and more sound than yours. Harbs wins in a similar way.
(See Ravens over Pats, 2009 Wild Card)
Random Harbs odds & ends:
For me, one of Harbaugh's best coaching jobs came in the catastrophic 2015 season, when the Ravens lost Suggs and Flacco and a cast of thousands, and finished 5-11. That team was outmanned and far from contention; and they played their asses off all the way to the end of the season. That year won't be part of any HOF case for Harbs, but it was impressive in its own way.
Another interesting thing about Harbaugh is that he evolves more than I'm used to seeing a HC evolve. He started out as a fairly old-school coach; his adoption of such analytics concepts as 4th-down aggressiveness is pretty thoroughly reported. He also showed some chops in two-way communication with the famous "mutiny" incident from the Super Bowl season. The way the Ravens have incorporated more college concepts into their offense, with Lamar Jackson, has some similarity to the way Andy Reid started to incorporate more college stuff after he arrived in Kansas City. It's common for coaches to preach about constantly striving to get better; but that shit is usually for the players. Harbs seems to apply it for himself too. He has over the years added more tools to his repertoire. Not in a dramatic transformation way, but in a slow & steady kind of way. He is literally a better coach 2018-20 than he was 2008-10. Learns & grows (some).
Harbs has been heavily involved in the competition committee. One thing that came from the Ravens staff is a new standard for interpreting "what is a catch", that seems to be more sensible & helpful for refs, and more intuitive for fans. There was a game last season where Harbs got an overturn from the refs on something initially ruled incomplete, based entirely on his deep understanding of the new catch standard and the language to use with the refs.
Three QBs have been drafted under Harbs and developed to become "playoff QBs": Flacco, Lamar and Tyrod Taylor. That might seem a random & questionable "credential": Harbs record as a QB whisperer certainly isn't Bill Walsh's. But compare with Harbs' peer Mike Tomlin: Tomlin's number is zero. Tomlin inherited Big Ben from Bill Cowher, and is still using him to win games.
Ill ask you as a Ravens fan, are we so certain we KNOW that John Harbaugh is a good coach?
Yeah, we're pretty damn certain that Harbaugh is a good coach.
The real question is whether Harbs is "merely" a very good coach – say Marty Schottenheimer with better postseason luck just one time, where Marty got Marlon McCree fumbling the INT but Harbs instead got Rahim Moore missplaying a bomb – or whether Harbs is a HOF-caliber coach, somewhat like Bill Parcells in that he's more associated with team culture & execution & resilience rather than any one scheme or tactical innovation.
The years of the Lamar era should settle that.
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