The Baltimore Ravens have finished the 2019 regular season with a number of awards likely looming. Though the Ravens ultimately have their sights set on Super Bowl LIV, coach John Harbaugh is one of the presumptive nominees for the NFL’s Coach of the Year award.
While Harbaugh has a lot of tough competition for the award, here are four reasons that set him apart from the other worthy coaches.
The Ravens are the best team in the league
If we’re boiling things down to their most basic forms, Baltimore having the best record in the NFL and winning 12 consecutive games should earn Harbaugh the award. It’s not too hard to argue that the best team in the league has the best coach. But that doesn’t really do it justice.
The Ravens have been the best team in the league by a wide margin. They haven’t played a bunch of bad teams to inflate their record but taken on some of the best squads in the league. Baltimore has played six of the 11 other playoff teams this season and gone 5-1 in those games, outscoring the group by a combined 180-110.
It’s one thing to be prepared enough to beat bad teams but to regularly outcoach some of the best in the league makes Harbaugh deserving of this award.
One of the best offenses in NFL history
Granted, Harbaugh isn’t the team’s offensive coordinator and praise should rightfully go to Greg Roman for the work he’s done this year. But Harbaugh shouldn’t be completely forgotten either.
No scheme gets implemented without a head coach’s signature and Baltimore completely redid their playbook this offseason down to the language used. That’s a gutsy call to make, as is going with a rather unconventional look with a far-from-standard quarterback. And you can thank Harbaugh for not only agreeing to the changes but wholeheartedly buying into it.
And now, the Ravens have quarterback Lamar Jackson as the MVP frontrunner, an NFL record rushing attack and several franchise records shattered along the way. It’s the league’s top-scoring unit while ranking second in yards. They’ve been deadly efficient when they need to be but can still grind a game away like no other team has this season.
Baltimore’s offense will go down as one of the most prolific units in NFL history, earning a name as rich as “the greatest show on turf.” Both Harbaugh and Roman will be considered the chief architects of it.
Offseason losses
The Ravens completely revamped their roster over the offseason. They got rid of poorly performing offensive players, gutting their wide receiver corps in the process. Defensively, they saw several free agents leave to huge deals elsewhere. Guys like C.J. Mosley, Za’Darius Smith, Terrell Suggs and Eric Weddle were cornerstones of Baltimore’s league-leading unit in 2018 but wore different jerseys in 2019.
With such a huge roster turnover, everyone expected the Ravens would suffer some this season. In fact, some pundits predicted Baltimore would finish third or fourth in the AFC North and miss the playoffs completely.
To much surprise, the Ravens came out firing this season. The offense got off to a quick start, putting up huge stats in the very first game. Though the defense took a little more time and midseason free-agent additions to get back on track, they’re once again a top-4 unit in both points and yards allowed.
Any coach is really judged by how they can coach-up their roster. It’s easy to be handed a bunch of first-round picks and turn that into something competitive. But it’s another thing to develop guys into impact players who can take over for previous starters that rank among the league’s best at their respective positions.
It doesn’t go to losing teams
Harbaugh isn’t the only coach likely up for the award. One of his likely competitors is Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores, who finished the season strong. In spite of arguably the worst roster in the league and talk of the franchise purposefully tanking, Flores got his players to play their hearts out. Where Flores had likely started the season off on the hot seat after a rough start, he should be firmly in the running for the award.
Sadly, history says he has no chance. The award so rarely goes to a coach with a losing record and with Miami finishing 5-11, Flores is staring down decades of history fighting against him here. The only coach to win the award with a losing record was way back in 1990 when Jimmy Johnson finished 7-9.
In reality, the award almost always goes to the coach with the best record or the coach that surprising got his team into the postseason. As I noted above, Baltimore has the best record and very few pundits were expecting the Ravens to even win their division, much less look this dominant.
If history holds true once again this season, Harbaugh is the type of coach that usually gets the award.
