A previously unseen sadness marked John Harbaugh’s face as he tried to make sense of the game that turned out to be his last as Ravens coach.

Was he just wrung out after watching a tortured season end on an anguishing miss by his rookie kicker? Or did he sense he had come to the end of his 18-year run in Baltimore?

At the end of his post-defeat news conference on a chilly night in Pittsburgh, I asked Harbaugh: “I know it just happened, but are you feeling like you want another shot with these guys?”

He had promised defiant resilience after past high-stakes losses, so I wondered if the same old fire burned in him at that moment.

“Yes, I love these guys,” he replied, understandably sounding a little tired. “I love these guys.”

Those became the 63-year-old coach’s last official words after leading the Ravens through eras of vaulting triumph and gutting disappointment.

Reflecting on his time is difficult to do, because it stretched so long and ends in the wake of crushing disappointment.

But we should not forget what drove his success: Harbaugh adapted.

To understand why he lasted nearly two decades, why his achievements ultimately went far deeper than the Super Bowl he won with a great, veteran team, you have to start there.

There will be those who cheer his departure, believing it opens a gate to the Ravens finally achieving their highest potential in the Lamar Jackson era. And it is impossible to sum up Harbaugh’s tenure without noting this hard truth: He could not get his most recent great teams to play their best when it mattered most.

His harshest critics will see those failures — the blown double-digit leads, the painfully nervous playoff performances against Tennessee and Kansas City, the crippling mistakes last January in Buffalo — as his legacy.

But it’s an ungenerous, and frankly wrongheaded, way of assessing a coach who thrived far longer than anyone is supposed to in one of America’s most cutthroat professions.

If not for Harbaugh’s clarity in understanding when and how to rebuild his football operation around Jackson’s unique gifts, we might be talking about the Ravens’ last eight years in very different terms. He had to make them great — in a completely different way than they had been when they won the Super Bowl in February 2013 — before we could deem them wildly disappointing in the big moments.

Choose to dismiss Harbaugh’s role if you will, to say anyone could have won with a quarterback as sublime as Jackson. But then look around the NFL and recognize how many coaches have mucked up such franchise-defining transitions.

“You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse,” Harbaugh said at the end of a 2019 season in which the Ravens had blitzed to a 14-2 record as a 22-year-old Jackson won his first Most Valuable Player award. “Bo Schembechler had that mantra when I was a little kid: If you try to stay the same, people are catching up on you, they’re overtaking you.”

His eager embrace of change in his 12th season with the Ravens led to him being named NFL Coach of the Year.

Harbaugh wasn’t owner Steve Bisciotti’s first choice to replace Brian Billick back in 2008. That was Jason Garrett, who opted to stay in Dallas as the Cowboys’ head coach in waiting. But Bisciotti, who’d honed his eye for leadership talent while building one of the nation’s largest private hiring firms, spent 15 hours with Harbaugh during the search process and came away convinced.

“Do I like a guy that has to earn his résumé?” the owner said at his new coach’s introductory news conference. “Absolutely. I’ve made a living on guys with thin résumés for 25 years, and it’s worked out well for me. You have to be willing to do things the masses would never do. That’s how you separate yourself from the masses.”

It was the beginning of a relationship that would become one of the most important in both men’s lives.

At that point, Harbaugh was defined mostly by the coaches he had worked for and by the legacy his father, Jack, and younger brother, Jim, the star quarterback, had created around the family name.

By his own admission, he had never been a remarkable athlete, topping out as a one-time letterman defensive back at Miami of Ohio. Special teams coordinators don’t register with fans unless something goes terribly wrong, so it wasn’t like he’d stood out on Andy Reid’s Philadelphia Eagles staff.

To guess who Harbaugh would become as leader of the Ravens, you had to study the older men who had shaped him, starting with Schembechler, his dad’s old boss at Michigan.

I studied them, too, back in 2008 to write a story for The Baltimore Sun about what his past told us about Harbaugh’s likely future as a coach. This is what I predicted.

“He’ll be optimistic and passionate but won’t tolerate those who fail to meet his standards. He’ll ask his team to hit hard and do basic things well, during the week and on Sunday. He’ll have a purpose for every moment of practice and excel at communicating those purposes to players. He won’t have much interest in explaining himself to reporters or other outsiders. He’ll defer leadership to assistants and veterans but will remain the clear and final voice on every important decision.”

Harbaugh was so steeped in the cult of Schembechler, a hard-assed motivator of the highest order, that he handed out copies of Schembechler’s book as introductory material for Ravens staffers.

“He was like Moses,” Harbaugh told me for a Baltimore Sun story on his origins that published the day before his Ravens debut, a 17-10 home win over the Bengals highlighted by rookie quarterback Joe Flacco’s 38-yard touchdown run.

How did Schembechler believe a new coach should introduce himself?

“When you take over a new operation, some people will tell you that you ought to lie low and look around before you do anything,” the old coach wrote. “But that’s not me — because I just don’t think it works. I say whatever your philosophy, whatever your standards, whatever your expectations, you establish those on Day One. Don’t waste a second! Let them adjust to you, not the other way around.”

That inherited philosophy would both serve Harbaugh well and lead to creative friction between him and some of the brilliant, wildly independent, players he inherited. Ray Lewis and Ed Reed were already Hall of Fame bound. Why should they depend on the wisdom of some fresh-faced authoritarian from a Midwestern coaching tree?

Harbaugh had to reach accommodations with those towering figures, and it wasn’t always pretty. Midway through the 2012 season, when total derailment seemed a more likely endpoint than the Super Bowl, a near-mutiny, led by Reed, forced the coach to choose empathy and flexibility over wrath and stubbornness.

Reed has told the story many times of how, after the Ravens held on to beat the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XLVII, he and Harbaugh ended up on the last team bus leaving the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. In those moments, with Harbaugh flanked by his family and Reed still clutching a champagne bottle, they shared an appreciation for the glorious complexity of their relationship and where it had all led.

That victory will be in the first line of Harbaugh’s obituary, and it marked his maturation as a problem solver. But the next five years, during which the Ravens missed the playoffs four times, would test every bit of credibility he’d earned. As close as Bisciotti felt to his coach, he said publicly he considered making a change after the Ravens fell short of a postseason berth in 2017.

Harbaugh had to create his second act, and that meant crafting a brand new vision around Jackson, who took the starting quarterback job from Joe Flacco midway through his rookie season. Flacco had been Harbaugh’s quarterback for a decade, had won him that Super Bowl. Jackson, a dazzling runner and buoyant personality still facing questions about his passing polish, was about as different from his predecessor as a player at the same position could be.

So when Harbaugh predicted the Ravens would kick off an offensive revolution in Jackson’s first full season, plenty of doubters mocked him.

He was not wrong. The Ravens set a single-season rushing record, staked out new frontiers in fourth-down aggression and won their last 12 regular-season games. Jackson threw 36 touchdown passes and was named Most Valuable Player.

Harbaugh didn’t design the particulars of this juggernaut, but coordinator Greg Roman said he was “the one who really orchestrated the vision for this offense and kind of set us on our way to do it.”

Bisciotti echoed many others in praising his gift for reinvention, saying that Harbaugh was essentially a different coach than he had been when he won that Super Bowl in his fifth season.

For his part, Harbaugh told me that he found the job more interesting than ever, and that at age 57, he enjoyed getting to know players in a way he had not when he was 45.

Many Ravens, from Jimmy Smith to Odell Beckham Jr. to Marlon Humphrey, have testified to Harbaugh’s gift for connecting and finding the best in people. ESPN commentator and former Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth has theorized that Harbaugh’s background in special teams made him unusually good at understanding all types of players.

“I’m super grateful and appreciative of Harbaugh,” fullback Patrick Ricard said the day after the Ravens’ season-ending loss to the Steelers. “He’s a big reason why I’m here. He’s a big reason why I even had a chance to play fullback. I was an undrafted defensive lineman out of Maine, and he could have just looked at me as that, but he saw something in me and gave me the opportunity to make this team. I just have a lot of respect for him. I think he’s a great leader. I think he’s a great coach, and I would love to keep playing for him. I know how much he means to the guys in this locker room and to this organization. He just loves football, and he loves us, so that’s all you really want out of a head coach.”

Harbaugh could be thin-skinned. He had little patience for people who could not help his team win. In his role as the franchise’s chief spokesman, he occasionally said things — for example, his touting of the team’s zero-tolerance stance on sexual misconduct — that led to him being called a hypocrite.

But there’s no denying his gifts as a leader and communicator. He once told me that when he got in front of his team at crucial moments, he always just knew what to say. As a result, he never truly lost his grip on a season. Even at the end of a 2025 campaign marked by so many disappointments, the Ravens went hard, as if they believed greatness was still in reach. Humphrey said that was in part because Harbaugh showed them that he still believed.

On its final Sunday, his team let another lead slip away in a game it could not afford to lose. There were too many defeats like that in the late chapters of Harbaugh’s career, and they will be part of his legacy as the longest-tenured coach in Baltimore pro sports history.

But the man won almost 200 games, brought the city a championship and became one of the most recognizable figures in his adopted hometown because he could both change and be changed by the people around him.