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With everyone spent, and jubilation washing over the victorious locker room, Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh stood in front of his team with a bunch of game balls to hand out.
That first ball went to head strength coach Scott Elliott. Sunday’s marathon 41–38 win over the Cincinnati Bengals took place with temperatures in the 80s and the humidity that often accompanies the Cincinnati riverfront, with the Paycor Stadium turf baking under the sun. Going on the road to win this one wouldn’t have been easy for Baltimore in regulation. It took a little (or a lot) extra, from just about everyone, to go another round in a classic AFC North heavyweight fight.
“The idea that we were going to be stronger at the end,” Harbaugh told me over the phone on his way out of the stadium. “It was hot out. It was hot. This turf, October, it was 85 degrees, it was hot. We’re going no-huddle. Our guys are puking. It was tough, and our guys executed in that scenario. It’s the strength coach, but really it’s giving a game ball to all the guys for the way they practice and train throughout the week.”
As for that other game ball? Derrick Henry wouldn’t even let Harbaugh hand it out.
In postgame, the coach mentioned to his star tailback, one of Sunday’s heroes, that he’d be getting it after scoring his 100th career touchdown in the first quarter and hitting 10,000 career rushing yards in the second quarter. Only Jim Brown, Emmitt Smith, LaDainian Tomlinson and Emmitt Smith have reached those twin milestones as fast as Henry—Sunday was his 124th career game—and Harbaugh wanted to recognize it.
But the jackhammer of a tailback wasn’t having it. Not on this day.
“He said, ‘No, no, no. This is a team win. This is a team win. Don’t do that,’” Harbaugh says. “He didn’t want me to say anything about it. That’s how he’s been.”
Five games into the season, it’s really how all of the Ravens have been.
It would have been easy for doubt to creep in after back-to-back losses to start the season—one on the road to the Kansas City Chiefs, and the other at home to the Las Vegas Raiders—that followed last year’s devastating finale in the AFC title game. Similarly, it’d have been easy for the Ravens to chalk up Sunday to facing a red-hot Bengals offense, with Cincinnati taking 10-point leads on three separate occasions in the second half.
Instead, Harbaugh’s group kept swinging, and eventually, it was the Bengals who found themselves on the canvas. And when it was over, to Harbaugh, there were so many people, Henry and Elliott among them, that personified what it took to gut out his sort of win. The result should give the Ravens, reborn at 3–2, a puncher’s chance at getting back to where they were a year ago—and maybe even further.
Week 5 has one game to go. Every team in the league now has at least one win and, pending tonight’s result, only two are undefeated, which gives us a lot to sort out. So in this week’s takeaways, we’re bringing you …
• A deeper look at Caleb Williams’s progress at quarterback in Chicago.
• Details on another special afternoon from Washington Commanders rookie Jayden Daniels.
• More on how the Minnesota Vikings keep winning, and doing so in different ways.
But we’re starting with the strength of the Ravens program winning out again.
As Harbaugh sees it, what’s happened over the past month is very much a story about people, and how the program he’s helped establish over decades in Baltimore develops them at every level.
This year, in particular, was one in which the Ravens needed that machine to hum.
Mike Macdonald, Baltimore’s young wizard of a defensive coordinator, landed the head coaching job in Seattle. Starting guards Kevin Zeitler and John Simpson left in free agency, and right tackle Morgan Moses was traded to the New York Jets—the three of them taking 24 years of NFL experience, and 60% of the team’s starting line from the AFC title game, out the door. Former first-rounder Patrick Queen, who’d come into his own since pairing with Roquan Smith, left too, as did veteran pass rusher Jadeveon Clowney.
Other teams in that position would’ve scrambled to find experienced stopgaps. The Ravens effectively did the opposite, operating like a baseball team in love with the prospects it had coming up from the Triple-A club.
To replace Macdonald, Harbaugh promoted 32-year-old linebackers coach Zach Orr, once a player in Baltimore who had his career cut short by injury. Along the line, Harbaugh trusted the job to the late Joe D’Alessandris (who died at age 70 this summer), bringing along third-year guard Daniel Faalele and second-year guard Andrew Vorhees. He also had long-time utility man Patrick Mekari ready to go and believed offensive line coach George Warhop would have rookie right tackle Roger Rosengarten ready.
And on defense, Harbaugh challenged 2023 third-rounder Trenton Simpson to fill Queen’s void, and young pass rushers Odafe Oweh and David Ojabo to replace Clowney’s production, trusting that GM Eric DeCosta and his staff got more of these things right than they got wrong, which historically is a good bet.
In a certain way, it mirrors how the organization once gambled on Harbaugh, seeing something in a charismatic special teams coach that others might’ve missed.
So when things got tough in September, Harbaugh wasn’t about to flip the script.
“I’ve been head coach for 17 years, and there are things I could have done better today,” he says. “When you don’t come out on top, it’s real easy to start looking at that stuff and start saying this isn’t going to work. If you believe in the person, or the people, and they’re working hard and you think they have the ability to do it, you give them a chance and you keep sticking with them, usually, it works out—if they’re high character people.”
Which is what Harbaugh saw that others couldn’t. A bad day for Orr against the Raiders mirrored Week 2 of Macdonald’s first year as Ravens DC when Baltimore yielded 42 points and over 500 yards to the Miami Dolphins. Early struggles for the offensive line were due to three guys with one start between them adjusting to playing a ton of snaps. Similarly, new roles on defense would settle with time.
These things were always going to take a little time.
“You got to give people a chance,” Harbaugh says.
On Sunday, it turns out, that went for everyone.
John Harbaugh’s little brother Jim said earlier in the season that his favorite football word is stalwart because of what it represents—someone who is there, and can be counted on, no matter what. It’s fair to say that the Ravens have more than a few of those players.
Some of the names the Ravens have come to rely on came up huge when it mattered most in Cincinnati.
Start with the spot Baltimore found itself in at the very end of regulation. Baltimore had battled back from deficits of 24–14, 31–21 and 38–28 in the second, facing a red-hot Joe Burrow and an even hotter Ja’Marr Chase. After a Houdini scramble touchdown throw from Lamar Jackson to Isaiah Likely cut Cincinnati’s lead to 38–35 with 5:24 left, Burrow picked up the dagger, poised to finally drive a stake through the Ravens’ comeback effort.
The first play, 19 yards to Chase. The second play, 11 more to Tee Higgins. The fourth play, another nine yards to Higgins, and another first down. Tick, tick, tick.
After a false start, the Bengals lined up for second-and-15 with 3:05 left, the Ravens down to one timeout. A first down would likely end the game. And it was there that, on this 10-catch, 193-yard, two-touchdown day for Chase, the Ravens would finally get the best of the Bengals’ big star—with one of their bedrock players. Marlon Humphrey, the homegrown, three-time Pro Bowl corner in his eighth season, undercut Chase's route and somehow outmuscled one of the NFL’s strongest receivers for the ball.
“They were having an unbelievable day. They’re making catches on the sideline. They’re making stop catches with corners draped all over them,” Harbaugh says. “They’re running good stuff, getting guys open, got the big play at the end of the half. And then all of a sudden, Marlon gets one.”
Eight plays later, it was time for the Ravens to put their faith back in a guy who’s been around even longer than Humphrey, and who’s faced bigger questions than anyone early this year.
Because Justin Tucker’s been so outrageously automatic over the years, the fact that he missed a field goal in each of Baltimore’s first three games—in seven of his 12 previous seasons, he missed three or fewer the whole year—was cause for concern. But when it came time to decide whether to go for a fourth-and-6 from the Bengals 38 with 1:43 left, and no timeouts, Harbaugh sent Tucker out for a 56-yard field goal to tie it.
“That’s just another example of what you’re talking about. He goes out there and he drills it after all the adversity he’s been facing,” Harbaugh says. “That was a tough kick. You saw how tough it was later on the [Bengals] miss.”
Harbaugh then brought up Mark Andrews’s effort—another of his Ravens stalwarts—on a four-yard catch to get Tucker a little closer on the play before.
After that, it was time to talk about Jackson. The reigning MVP threw for 348 yards and four touchdowns, ran for another 55 and made a strong statement on who the Ravens are in how he reacted to his mishandling of a snap in overtime, one that looked like it had cost Baltimore the game.
He wouldn’t throw another pass. But his demeanor set a steady tone.
“I just saw him staring straight ahead, just locked in,” Harbaugh says. “He shows his emotions sometimes. I didn’t see him get mad or anything. Just locked in, focused. There’s something about this team. We’ll see how it plays out, but they don’t flinch. They keep believing.”
In the following moments, one of the newest Ravens would give the rest of us a reason to join them in their belief.
After the game, I mentioned to Harbaugh what so many people have thought the past few years—if Henry ever was to leave Tennessee, there were few better fits in football than the physical, hard-running Henry and the tough-minded Ravens.
He responded with a story from the spring of 2016.
“Doing the draft, I was watching the running backs that year. I just fell in love. This guy should be a Raven. This should be our guy. This needs to be our guy. There’s just no way he’s going to fall to us,” Harbaugh says. “And he didn’t. So every time we played him, I’d look at him, with that ponytail sticking out the back of his helmet. The girlfriend you could never get.”
Harbaugh laughed. I mentioned how then-GM and Alabama legend Ozzie Newsome must’ve loved him.
“He was the pie in the sky for us,” Harbaugh says. “He was the high school girl that you never had a chance at.”
So, no one in Baltimore had to be asked twice when Henry became available this offseason. And after a bit of a slow start—he rushed for 130 yards on 31 carries over the team’s 0–2 run—Henry has confirmed that the fit many saw as obvious is very real.
He’s amassed 442 yards on 54 carries through Baltimore’s three-game winning streak, averaging over eight yards per carry— with no carry more impactful than his last one.
The Ravens closed the Bengals out in the most Ravens of ways, taking a toss sweep left behind pullers and with 311-pound fullback Patrick Ricard leading the way down the sideline. It was the first play after Orr’s defense stiffened up after Jackson’s fumble to force a 53-yard field goal attempt that Evan McPherson missed, and it went for 51 yards to give Justin Tucker a 24-yard chip shot to win the game.
“Our perimeter blocking has been really, really good, at a high, high level all year,” Harbaugh says. “Maybe they packed in there a little bit, like they do for an inside run, and I think [OC] Todd [Monken] made a great call. It was hard sledding running the ball. It really was. They were playing good run defense the whole game. To hit that run right there was really massive.”
And it typified what Harbaugh’s starting to see in his team: one that’s pulling together.
He could see it Saturday night, too, at the team hotel. As he and his coordinators addressed the team, Harbaugh saw backs straight and eyes forward. “Every guy is staring holes through me,” he says.
That, as the team’s 0–2 start showed, doesn’t guarantee anything. But that level of engagement does give the Ravens a heck of a chance.
“I think it means you got a bunch of guys that believe in the right thing,” Harbaugh says. “We got the right kind of people in the room, high character people, which is what we really value. It’s just intentionality about doing things the right way on a given day. They don’t get caught looking left or right, being distracted by the road signs or what they hear. They hear it. They see it. But they keep their eyes straight ahead, look neither to the left nor to the right. We talk about let the Lord direct your path. They’re on their path as directed.
“O.K., the ball doesn’t come your way? We rush for a bunch of yards and you don’t get the ball? All they’re talking about is celebrating the blocks that they made in the team meeting on a Tuesday afternoon, roaring and clapping for each other for those blocks. That’s just joy to a coach.”
It also gave the Ravens enough to ride out an 0–2 start, and three separate double-digit, second-half deficits Sunday on the road. And a whole lot to build on.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Reborn Ravens a Reflection of John Harbaugh’s Trust in the Program.
