What Happened to Harbs? Once Aggressive Coach is Suddenly Conservative

History was repeating itself four years later. Fifty-nine minutes into a highly entertaining early-season Sunday Night shootout against a marquee AFC opponent, the Ravens were holding on to a narrow lead and facing a fourth and short near their own 40-yard line. The options: Let your high-flying offense decide the game, or let your defense try to stop one of the most dynamic quarterbacks to ever play the game – who they were unable to stop all night -from simply getting into range for a game-winning field goal.

Yes, there were three yards to go instead of one, and there were about twenty more seconds on the clock, but the ethos remained the same. In both situations, the analytics also overwhelmingly said to go for the first down. John Harbaugh had the chance to recreate one of the best moments of his career when his decision to go for it on fourth down sealed a 36-35 victory against the Chiefs, one of the best wins of Lamar Jackson’s career.

Instead, he punted to Josh Allen.

A Slip Into Conservatism

Harbaugh’s decision to punt did not come in a vacuum; rather, it encapsulated a multi-year reversion from his previous status as one of the most aggressive coaches in football.

Harbaugh had long been an outlier when it came to fourth-down aggressiveness, going all the way back to 2014, the first year in which direct fourth-down analytical data existed on the RBSDM website. But his real breakout as an analytical darling came in 2019, when Aaron Schatz, perhaps the most influential mind in the history of football analytics, lauded Harbaugh as “the prince that was promised.”

Harbaugh finished first that season in Schatz’s fourth-down aggressiveness index, as he consistently pushed one of the greatest offenses the sport has ever seen to get seven points instead of three. Much of the league followed suit, with fourth-down aggressiveness becoming the expectation instead of the outlier.

But just as the revolution that Harbaugh helped spearhead started to take hold, he turned in the other direction. His aggressiveness has severely waned over the past couple of years, ranking 31st in Schatz’s aggressiveness index in 2023, and 17th in 2024. The Ravens were kicking or taking delays of game in situations in which they previously would have been aggressive. And while it is worth it to point out the hypocrisy of the many Ravens fans who spent years complaining about Harbaugh’s aggressiveness and are now complaining about his conservatism, the reality is that he has gone from helping the Ravens to hurting them with his in-game decision-making.

A Lack of Thought

Part of what made Harbaugh such a revolutionary in using analytics as a coach is that he did not just blindly trust the numbers, but rather took the time to understand the logic behind them and how they would practically help the Ravens have a better chance of winning football games. Take this quote after a Week 3 matchup against the Chiefs in 2019, in which Harbaugh continued to go for it on fourth down and also went for multiple two-point conversions that at the time were unconventional but are now commonplace (via ESPN).

“Getting it to nine gives you a much better chance of winning than taking it into overtime, and you still have a chance to do that with the second 2-[point conversion]. And if for some reason they happen to kick a field goal or score a touchdown, it also enhances your odds. So, while you may think getting it to 10 is the thing to do, it’s the thing to do if you want to go into overtime. It’s not the thing to do if you want to win the game in regulation, and that’s what we were trying to do.”

Now compare that reasoned, thought-out answer to his quote from last night about the decision to punt the ball away.

“I did think about going for it. Fourth-and-3, if you don’t get it, they’re in field goal range. I think punting is probably what most people would do there.”

This completely misses the fact that, considering the Bills would be likely to score either way, having them already in field goal range is an advantage because it gives the Ravens a better chance of getting the ball back. But perhaps the starkest part of the explanation is when he says, “punting is probably what most people would do there.”

John Harbaugh is a coach who will likely wind up in Canton because he has been on the cutting edge of so many different fronts across the NFL, finding success in many other areas beyond just fourth downs by doing the exact opposite of what most people would do. This is the coach who fired Offensive Coordinator Cam Cameron late in the 2012 season with his team in first place, and went on to win the Super Bowl. This is the coach who moved on from a successful and popular Defensive Coordinator in Wink Martindale to bring in Mike Macdonald and change the structure of the Ravens defense to react to the high-flying offenses in the AFC, a defense that is now being copied across the league. And this is the coach who changed the entire structure of his organization to support a vision he had to build around a young quarterback out of The University of Louisville that some other NFL teams wanted to try out at receiver.

But now, his defense for his decision-making is that he was just going with the flow.

One of the biggest advantages of being a consistently aggressive fourth-down team is the way it creates a coherent organizational philosophy. If being a couple of yards short of a first down is not a drive-ender, that changes how a coordinator calls plays and a quarterback makes decisions. While most teams usually have a decision made before a set of downs on how close they need to be to go for it on fourth down, having that knowledge during the week and throughout the year changes how you structure different parts of your playbook for various situations.

But as evidenced by the wild year-to-year swings in Harbaugh’s aggressiveness ranking, there simply seems to be no consistent team doctrine. After all, within this stretch of conservatism Harbaugh also last year went for it on fourth down from his own 16-yard line against the Chargers, becoming the first NFL coach to do so in the first half since 2012, according to ESPN Stats & Info. The Ravens eventually scored a touchdown on that drive.

Do Not Always Trust the Defense

Even if analytics are completely out of the equation, there is simply no “gut feel” that should have supported punting on fourth down Sunday night. Even with the caveat that Lamar Jackson said he was cramping, lining him up in shotgun with the offense spread out and then handing the ball to Derrick Henry and asking him just to get three yards would be a better option than punting. After all, as nice as it is to say that you trust your defense, they may not always be holding up their end of the bargain as a trustworthy unit. And if they are playing poorly and an MVP quarterback on the opposite sideline has put on the Superman cape, the coach’s job is not to prevent the opponent from scoring, but to prevent them from touching the ball. Harbaugh seemed to understand as much in that game in 2019, when Patrick Mahomes had his way with the Ravens defense.

“The whole thing, we just felt like it was more of a possession game, Harbaugh said at the time in a profile in The Athletic. “We wanted to make sure every possession counted, so if we could extend ours, that was really gonna be important at all costs. We didn’t care about the length of the field just because of how Mahomes was playing at the time and all that.”

But in Monday’s presser, Harbaugh took a much different tone.

“I’m not shying away from putting my defense out there, he said. “I trust our defense and I’m going to trust our defense this year in a lot of big situations because our defense is going to be really, really good.”

While almost everyone across the league would agree that the Ravens will have a good defense, that does not mean you should always trust them if they have struggled to get stops and are exhausted, as was the case Sunday. Moreover, the decision to go or punt does not have to be a referendum on the defense. It is not as if Harbaugh did not trust the 2019 unit that finished fourth in defensive DVOA. Rather, it is a reflection of the fact that sometimes, when a quarterback is playing the way Allen was that night, there is simply not much they can do.

Not only are the Ravens good enough to win the Super Bowl, but they should be the best team in the NFL, as they showed for much of the night. And there are many factors, both in and out of the coaching staff’s control, that contribute to them blowing games in increasingly ludicrous fashion. But a coach’s job is simply to put the players in the best position to maximize their chances of winning – no more, no less.

And with his recent fourth-down decision-making, John Harbaugh has been doing the exact opposite. He’d better change and change soon, because let’s be honest: we are tired of writing these types of articles, and you all are tired of reading them.

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2025/09/09/street-talk/harbaugh-conservative/