Dan Salomone: The first thing John Harbaugh did at his first practice as head coach of the New York Football Giants was jump in on a special teams drill with the gunners. That about said it all.
Heading into the spring, I was curious to see what type of coach he would be at practice. We know he demands a lot from his players and staff. So, would he yell a lot? I’m sure there will be times for that as we progress into the dog days of summer in West Virginia for training camp, and then into the grind of a season. But through veteran minicamp, rookie minicamp, and now OTAs, you rarely heard the head coach with 193 victories to his name, including a Super Bowl ring.
In fact, the only time you really hear him is when he hops in to give hands-on instruction during a special teams session, whether it’s field goal protection, punt coverage, or anything else of that sort.
We’ll dive deeper into his philosophy as the year goes on, but it appears as if he lets his coaches coach while he oversees the whole operation. He isn’t just camped out with the quarterbacks. That’s what Matt Nagy, Brian Callahan, and Mike Snyder are there to do. He isn’t just camped out with his shiny new draft pick in a No. 52 jersey. That’s what Dennard Wilson and Frank Bush are there to do.
Now, maybe Chris Horton and T.J. Weist may have something else to say about Harbaugh. But can you blame the former special teams coordinator? It’s in his heart. On top of that, seeing a head coach, especially of his stature, pay attention to the fine details of special teams surely sends a message to the entire roster: he’s paying attention to all of you, not some.
Weist recently joined the “Giants Huddle” podcast to discuss, among other things, what it’s like to coach special teams under Harbaugh.
“First, he understands the importance,” Weist said. “He gives us two things. He gives us, one, time. A lot of coaches don’t give their coaches or their players time to really develop the systems, to develop the players, all those things. So it gives us that time. And especially we start out here, we start our practice with special teams. The first 30 minutes or 20 minutes is special teams. That way, the team’s focused, the coaches are focused, the guys that aren’t involved have time to do their thing, but we really get that focus done right away.
“The second thing he gives us is weapons as players. He understands the importance of obviously the kickers, the punters, the snappers, the specialists, but then the weapons that the people we need for the punt team, the guys that we need on the outside, the returners, the things that we have to have to succeed. He really understands that and then you can say it’s good or bad – but we think it’s really good – he’s in almost every meeting. He goes into a lot of meetings. He’s in a lot of meetings offense and defense, but especially special teams. And we respect that because he wants to be involved. … He knows every phase, every play, every scheme, every technique in every phase, not just on special teams, but our offense and defense. It’s impressive. We go into a game, he knows the game plan for every phase. What’s our game plan and what’s our game plan against them and what is that opponent going to do against us. So, the team has a lot of confidence, especially in special teams, but the team has a lot of confidence in what he knows in our game plan and it crosses over.”