Everyone wants to be judged by the quality of their best work — and has a part of their résumé that they’d rather have their next employer skip.

Jesse Minter made a sprint from the Baltimore Ravens’ defensive backs coach to head coach in six years, primarily on the strength of his achievements with the University of Michigan and the Los Angeles Chargers, where he ran elite defenses that helped keep dangerous playmakers in check. But there’s one job that doesn’t match the profile:

Defensive coordinator at Vanderbilt, 2021.

On paper, it is a tenure so forgettable that it is confined to a single line in Minter’s official bio on the Ravens website: “In his lone season at Vanderbilt (2021), Minter served as the defensive coordinator and safeties coach.” While his tenures with the Chargers, the University of Michigan, even Georgia State are bolstered by statistical benchmarks showing how accomplished his defenses were, his Vanderbilt year is conspicuously without such data.

On closer inspection, you would have a hard time pulling a number that makes that stretch look flattering.

In 2021, the Commodores were 2-10 and had finished 119th in points allowed out of 130 FBS teams and 118th in yards allowed. They gave up 6.8 yards per play, and there was only one SEC game Vanderbilt didn’t allow at least 31 points — and they still lost, 21-20, to South Carolina.

If Minter was a salesman, that would be the year when he couldn’t get out of his slump. If he were a portfolio manager, that would be the year when all his investments turned out to be losers.

When Minter called his year at Vanderbilt — which he left to coach at Michigan with better players and a higher budget — “a great part of my journey,” it might sound like a whole lot of spin.

“It was definitely a major part of me being prepared to be in this situation now,” Minter said at his introduction.

Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea was Minter’s boss back then, and while he’s not about to sugarcoat the 2-10 season that opened his tenure in Nashville, he also isn’t surprised that it has led to bigger things for his former DC.

“He helped make our guys better, and then he got an opportunity at Michigan that he could not turn down,” Lea told me recently. “I understood it. He went and made the most of that. The difficult things galvanize you. I really admire the way he handled himself in a really difficult year. He really evolved over the course of the season to give our team the best possible chance to win.”

That chance, to be clear, was never good. Vanderbilt has historically been one of the conference’s lesser programs, and it has taken Lea a lot of work to get to a 10-3 record this past season. That first year, he said, was frustrating.

For Minter, Vanderbilt represented a chance to put some of the lessons he learned with the Ravens into practice in his own schemes. But based purely on results, it was not an auspicious return to the college ranks.

The worst loss of the season was a 62-0 smashing by the future champion Georgia Bulldogs (with an offense led by Todd Monken). The last game of the year saw them give up 45 to Tennessee. The two leading pass rushers for the Commodores that year had two sacks apiece — and one of them was a cornerback.

“We weren’t always successful for reasons that we didn’t have a ton of control over,” Lea said. “But we were needing to problem solve as fast as we could to keep things moving in one direction.”

Lea and Minter both have reputations as cool-headed coaches, but behind closed doors, there were heated discussions. Lea’s background is also on defense and he had come off leading impressive units at Notre Dame. He and Minter hadn’t worked together before, which led to friction: “Sometimes,” Lea said, “I would judge his worst days off my best days as a defensive coordinator.”

What made Lea respect Minter, however, wasn’t that he simply took criticism. He actually held his own in these confrontations. He pushed back. Lea said that the relationship taught him a lot about delegating as a head coach.

“Sometimes if you don’t agree with someone, your relationship burns out really fast,” Lea said. “But Jesse is really skilled at confrontation behind a closed door. He’ll say exactly what’s on his mind, and he’ll say that to coaches, he’ll say that to players, he’ll say that to ownership, he’ll say that to whoever.

“For me, that gives way to really healthy collaboration,” Lea added. “It can be really tough but ultimately rewarding.”

How rewarding? Extremely. You’d think that two coaches who didn’t know each other before a 2-10 season, took lumps, then parted ways after a year probably wouldn’t take too much out of that experience.

But you’d be wrong. Lea and Minter are closer now than they were in 2021.

When Minter got his job with the Chargers, Lea estimated that he visited Minter four times in L.A., picking up bits of wisdom about what Minter had learned at Michigan and what he was doing back in the NFL. Lea had decided to call his own plays on defense, and after seeing Minter’s streamlining of his calls with the Chargers, Lea took some of that knowledge back to Nashville and significantly overhauled his own playbook.

“Foundational aspects of our package are directly borrowed from the time I spent with Jesse and the way he did things in L.A.,” Lea said. “At Michigan he arguably had one of the best college defenses to ever do it. We’ve been wildly collaborative since he’s been gone. There’s a lot you can draw from what he’s done.”

The line that doesn’t fit the rest of Minter’s résumé could have been a rut. Instead, it was a slingshot.

Two years after getting kicked in the teeth week after week by SEC offenses, Minter’s Michigan defense was No. 1 in both points allowed (10.4) and yards allowed (247).

And far from never looking back, Minter acknowledges his Vanderbilt tenure as much as any piece of his career — although he’d probably rather never look back at the tape.

If true character is only revealed in times of adversity, his brief, unheralded stint as a Commodore might say more about Jesse Minter than any other stop. While the results weren’t what anyone wanted, the imprint it left on him — and his continued influence on Vanderbilt long after he left — speaks volumes.

And it tells us a lot about how the next head coach of the Ravens faces down a challenge.