Throughout an hourlong verbal bloodletting, Steve Bisciotti could not have been clearer how much he loves John Harbaugh, the coach he just fired.
He loved him, he said, like a brother. “We’re going to be friends forever,” he declared of the man he dismissed via phone call. Even as he seemed energized about hiring a new head coach for the first time in 18 years, Bisciotti acknowledged how big Harbaugh’s shadow will be for his successor.
“God bless him if he can rise up to the level John did,” he offered wistfully at one point.
But the 65-year-old Ravens owner would like to get one thing straight: It was his hiring process that found John Harbaugh. Bisciotti helped conjure the formula that found the right guy.
In this cycle, the billionaire owner expects to knock the hire for his next head coach out of the park again. Based on what the media and Ravens fans heard Tuesday, I would expect it, too.
When former Super Bowl-winning coach and NBC analyst Tony Dungy expressed his disapproval of Harbaugh’s firing — “Good luck Baltimore in finding a better coach,” he tweeted — Bisciotti took umbrage.
“I literally wanted to call Tony and say, ‘Do you remember John 18 years ago?’” Bisciotti said, pausing a beat to let the weight of the rhetorical question sink in. “How can you take our success and use it against me while we’re out trying to find the next John Harbaugh?”
The subtext was unmistakable from the start of Tuesday’s press conference until the finish: Bisciotti is back in the building, calling the big shots, and he trusts his own impulses even more than his handpicked coach who led the Ravens to a Super Bowl in the 2012 season.
After hearing Bisciotti out, it seems straightforward that he has an uncommonly lucid view of where his franchise was headed — and why he needed to act.
While I thought the decision to fire Harbaugh last week had merits, there was enough ambiguity to question if Bisciotti made the right choice. But a week later, hearing Bisciotti’s justification in his own words makes his bold move even more convincing.
Even though about 1,000 miles separates Bisciotti’s Jupiter, Florida, residence from M&T Bank Stadium, the 65-year-old’s grasp of the Ravens’ struggles was crystal clear. Sourced reports in the last week questioned if Harbaugh had lost the locker room, or if had been dismissed over coaching staff decisions, but Bisciotti was not interested in hashing out such minutia.
The biggest reason it was time to move on was that the Ravens were underachieving. Period.
The symptoms of that underachieving were myriad, and Bisciotti was able to name them all.
He hated that the franchise led the NFL in blown double-digit fourth-quarter leads over the last five years. He was frustrated that the team had regressed since going to the AFC championship game in 2024. He didn’t see the player development he expected, especially along the offensive line. And underwhelming performances from the team’s stars in the postseason were especially grating.
The season-ending loss on a missed field goal in Pittsburgh ultimately sealed Harbaugh’s fate. But if Loop had managed the 44-yarder, Harbaugh would have been the Ravens coach “for a week,” Bisciotti said succinctly, sucking some of the air out of the room.
He had already seen the slide taking place, and barring a miracle, he was moving on from Harbaugh even if the Ravens made the wild-card round.
While Bisciotti has largely stepped away from public view in recent years, his reemergence on the Ravens’ podium revealed that he has kept a steady finger on the team’s pulse — even though his distance from Baltimore has allowed him to keep his deep, russet-colored tan.
Bisciotti was able to overcome his own affinity for Harbaugh to see that the coach was on the cusp of getting caught in an all-too-familiar spiral — undercut by having to change all of his coordinators and coaches even as he’s trying to stay afloat.
“I thought, ‘If I’m already here, and my gut is telling me it’s time, why would I let John rebuild an entire staff?’” Bisciotti reasoned. “Because I’m going to be sitting here next year saying, ‘What the hell did I do last year? Last year was the time.’”
It may strike fans as common sense, but this kind of logic isn’t “common” at all to NFL owners. Teams like the Giants, Raiders, Falcons and Titans have head coaching openings that they routinely cycle through, changing the faces in the control room but not the results. The impulses for most owners with a coach with a record as good as Harbaugh’s would be to stay with the steady presence. But a steady hand is not what Bisciotti wants.
The Ravens owner wants to win. Win soon. Win in bunches.
He doesn’t want to be like Falcons owner Arthur Blank or the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, in his 80s and crossing his fingers that his team can finally break through again. He’ll probably sell the franchise before he needs a walker to reach the trophy presentation ceremony.
“I want to win a couple of Super Bowls and get the hell out,” he said. “I’d love that to be in the next 10 years when I’m 75. That’s my dream.”
Bisciotti’s ability to hold the sentimental concerns at bay for the betterment of his team shows that he still is fairly sharp, even though he’s just a decade or so away from his vision of retirement. Unlike the last hiring process in 2008, he’ll defer to his lieutenants more in this next hire.
“I want very much this person to be picked by Eric and Oz and Sash more than me,” Bisciotti said, referring to general manager Eric DeCosta, executive vice president Ozzie Newsome and team president Sashi Brown. “When I come in, when they call me in for these five [candidates], I’m going to already know why they love them.”
But then Bisciotti is going to subject those finalists to his own process, spending a few hours in conversation, digging beneath the surface for the qualities that will make or break their head coaching tenures. He’ll trust his instincts to help make the final decision.
Those impulses served him well when hiring Harbaugh in 2008, and Bisciotti showed they’re still sharp by picking the right time to say goodbye in 2026.
If the trend holds, the Ravens owner should have his franchise well prepared for the next era — and pick the right person to oversee it.