Ravens coach John Harbaugh has signed a three-year contract extension through the 2025 season, team owner Steve Bisciotti announced Tuesday.
A new deal was long expected for Harbaugh, whose four-year contract, signed in January 2019, was set to expire after this season. He’s expected to remain among the NFL’s highest-paid coaches.
“No interest in having him go lame duck on me here. It’s not fair to him,” Bisciotti told a group of local reporters at the NFL owners meetings. “I think John’s grown and grown and grown. It’s kind of interesting. I don’t feel like I’m just signing up the same guy. I think that’s really a compliment to him. I really feel like there’s a rebirth in John as the years go on. Things that mattered to him don’t matter as much anymore. I’m just thrilled as an owner to have a guy that’s going to be going into his 15th year. So I’m pretty pleased with it.”
Harbaugh, 59, has the ninth-best regular-season winning percentage among active NFL head coaches (.609) and has led the Ravens to a playoff appearance in nine of his 14 seasons in Baltimore. He’s 137-88 overall in the regular season and 11-8 in the postseason, highlighted by a win in Super Bowl XLVII.
Harbaugh’s consistency and stability stand out in a league of constant change. He’s the NFL’s third-longest-tenured coach, behind only the New England Patriots’ Bill Belichick and Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin. He’s just the third head coach in Ravens history, after Ted Marchibroda (three seasons) and Brian Billick (nine). The Cleveland Browns, meanwhile, have had nine coaches over Harbaugh’s tenure in Baltimore alone.
Players and analysts have hailed his evolution as a coach and leader. In 2019, Harbaugh was named the Associated Press NFL Coach of the Year after the Ravens, powered by second-year quarterback Lamar Jackson, a record-breaking running game and an embrace of analytics, won a franchise-record 14 games. Last season, the Ravens entered December atop the AFC despite a series of season-ending injuries. With Jackson sidelined by an ankle injury, however, the team lost its final six games. It was the longest such skid under Harbaugh, who at 8-9 finished with just his second-ever losing season.
As he looked ahead to 2022, Bisciotti was excited by the team’s opportunity to add a high-impact draft class. But he said he was counting more on the return to health of standouts like left tackle Ronnie Stanley and tight end Nick Boyle to help the Ravens contend.
“I love young guys with the prospect of them being great, but I want to just get back to health,” he said. “I just want to get all those guys healthy again. I just can’t imagine how excited they are if they all get back out there and they’re running around. … Boy, it’s easy to be bullish on next year just by getting those guys back.”
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