Lamar Jackson, Baltimore Ravens look like Super Bowl favorites
4. Harbaugh and the Ravens coaching staff
Many times throughout the history of the NFL, we’ve seen a pretty standard sequence of events transpire when teams acquire a unique talent such as a quarterback like Lamar Jackson. The team caters the game plan to the player early on but then tries to mold him into a more traditional player, taking away some of the things that make the player so special.
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John Harbaugh and the Baltimore Ravens coaching staff has done the exact opposite with Jackson. Everything that this offense does is designed to play to the strengths of their quarterback. Whether it’s the offensive line capable of mauling in the run game, the aforementioned weapons that play to what Jackson does well or even the play-calling, it’s all by design for the signal-caller.
The guts that it takes for a veteran coach like Harbaugh to abandon what he’s done for years with a player like Joe Flacco — a leading candidate for the player most unlike Lamar Jackson in the NFL — and revamp it for the talent and personnel that’s available to him. And it seems as if he’s showing no signs of drawing that back moving forward.
Harbaugh boasted all season that the Ravens offense was going to be unlike anything fans and analysts had ever seen before in the 2019 season. He wasn’t lying. However, this full commitment from the coaching staff to what this team is doing right now is going to serve them tremendously well. You need an identity to win in the postseason and Baltimore is unapologetically faithful to theirs.