Inside the 36 hours that decided John Harbaugh’s fate with the Ravens

The previous three-plus hours, and probably the past four months, looked like they had worn on John Harbaugh. The Baltimore Ravens’ normally ebullient 63-year-old coach was unusually subdued as he answered questions at Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh late Sunday night.

Harbaugh and the 2025 Ravens had taken one final gut punch, a 26-24 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers after Baltimore’s rookie kicker Tyler Loop sent a game-winning field goal attempt wide right.

The Ravens’ season was over, and Harbaugh was already being asked whether he wanted to take another run at it next year.

“Yes, I love these guys,” Harbaugh said in a manner that suggested he was surprised the question was even asked. “I love these guys.”

Harbaugh, who had just endured a swift end to arguably the most disappointing regular season in his 18-year tenure, exited briskly from behind the lectern and headed quietly to the coaches’ locker room.

A stunned and vanquished Ravens team returned to Baltimore in the wee hours of Monday morning. It was due back at the Under Armour Performance Center later that afternoon for the final act of a 2025 season that ended shockingly early.

As players cleaned out their lockers and said goodbye to their teammates, Harbaugh conducted one final team meeting, thanking his players and coaches for persevering through a season that challenged them at every turn.

“We exited the meeting thinking there would probably be a few coaching staff changes, maybe a coordinator change. That’s usually how it works,” a Ravens veteran player said.

“Then, the next day, everything got turned on its head.”

Harbaugh, according to team sources, met Monday morning with Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta, executive vice president Ozzie Newsome and team president Sashi Brown. Harbaugh discussed his vision for the team and his coaching staff. The situation, as one team official put it, was “unsettled,” but there were certainly people in the building advocating for Harbaugh’s return, and there was momentum in that direction.

Around 5 p.m. the next day, players’ phones started buzzing with text messages from agents, friends and family members. The news was jarring.

Harbaugh was fired by owner Steve Bisciotti in a phone call while the coach was driving from the team facility to his Baltimore County home. And it was neither a resignation nor a mutual parting. He was relieved of his duties.

“I was shocked,” the player said.

He wasn’t alone.

What changed in the hours between Monday morning and late Tuesday afternoon for Bisciotti to reach the franchise-altering decision?

It wasn’t until Thursday that Harbaugh and Bisciotti spoke more in depth, according to league sources. Bisciotti wanted to provide further explanation of his decision after the emotions had settled.

DeCosta and Bisciotti, who hasn’t done an interview with reporters in nearly four years, will talk at a news conference Tuesday.

The Athletic spoke to numerous sources, including league and team officials familiar with Baltimore’s decision-making process, current Ravens players and coaches, and agents who represent Ravens players and coaches to try to piece together the roughly 36-hour span that resulted in the end of the highly successful Harbaugh era in Baltimore and the start of the organization’s first head-coaching search in nearly two decades.

Sources were granted anonymity to speak freely about the situation.

“It wasn’t just one thing as it’s being reported,” a team source said. “There were a number of things that they felt needed to be fixed.”

Bisciotti no longer saw Harbaugh, his longtime coach and friend, as the right person to do it.

The Ravens have an organizational credo you often hear around draft time. If you are conflicted about a player or a decision, get more information. That’s exactly what Bisciotti spent the crux of Tuesday doing.

The owner doesn’t have an everyday presence around the team. He rarely goes to road games, and he’s not a regular practice attendee, either. But he is approachable, and he has solid relationships with many of the team’s veterans. That Tuesday, Bisciotti spoke to several players to get their thoughts on Harbaugh and the direction of the team.

One player even went to Bisciotti’s house for an in-depth discussion. It isn’t clear how much, if at all, Bisciotti spoke to two-time MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson, who isn’t an easy player to get ahold of in the offseason. However, one Ravens veteran confirmed that other players had urged Jackson to be more vocal with Ravens decision-makers about matters affecting the team.

“He’s the pillar of the organization,” a Ravens veteran said. “Our hopes and dreams rest in his hands. You have to include him in the decisions more than any of us.”

Bisciotti’s conversations with players came on the heels of a season when there was far more locker room grumbling about Harbaugh and other coaches than in previous years. Offensive coordinator Todd Monken, who has a brash and edgy style that isn’t for everyone, was criticized anonymously by offensive players in stories in The Baltimore Sun and The Baltimore Banner.

There was plenty of noise about Harbaugh, too. One Raven said Harbaugh’s messages in meetings “rubbed some people the wrong way” and could be contradictory. He said Harbaugh would challenge players to focus on the upcoming game, then go on a tangent about the future.

Harbaugh, one player said, also didn’t necessarily click with some of the team’s younger and more talented players.

“There wasn’t the best relationship with your star players, but I don’t think people were necessarily at the fed-up stage,” the player said. “It’s hard to please 50-plus guys, and when you’re losing, everything is magnified. But I never had the sense that this was really bad, and he lost the locker room. Other guys might tell you differently.”

Another veteran player agreed, calling the notion Harbaugh lost the locker room “BS.” He said the Ravens locker room was like others he had been in, where there were supporters of the coaching staff and dissenters, but the complaints about Harbaugh were often trivial.

“That’s always an easy blanket statement when a coach who has been there a long time gets fired,” the veteran said. “But I don’t remember any instances where guys thought he lost the team.”

Several players and coaches, however, acknowledged there was an awkwardness in the Harbaugh and Monken dynamic with Jackson. All three have rebutted any suggestion in recent weeks that they didn’t get along. However, it’s indisputable there was frustration this year on both sides about Jackson’s injuries and how little he was able to practice. A Baltimore Sun column last month was critical of Jackson’s work habits and professionalism, and that surely didn’t ease the tension in the building.

Overall, though, several players laughed off any perception of a power struggle between Harbaugh and Jackson, because nobody in the organization had done more to promote, praise and defend Jackson than his head coach.

“He catered to him to a degree, so yeah, I don’t even know how that could happen,” one veteran player said.

The 2025 season was a deeply disappointing one for anybody associated with the Ravens. Nobody denies that. It started with blowing a 15-point lead in the final four minutes against the Buffalo Bills in Week 1, continued with standout defensive lineman Nnamdi Madubuike’s career-threatening neck injury in Week 2 and Jackson’s multi-week hamstring injury in Week 4.

A five-game midseason winning streak represented a nice recovery from a 1-5 start. Yet, the Ravens never found any consistency down the stretch. They had shown glimpses of a dangerous team, but they had provided very little evidence they were primed for a lengthy playoff run — even had Loop split the uprights Sunday night.

Still, many at the team facility, including the coaches, believed a reset was needed, not a complete overhaul or regime change. That’s certainly how Harbaugh saw it. Bisciotti clearly saw things differently.

And now, “we all have to own it,” a Ravens assistant coach said.

Bisciotti was not present at Monday morning’s meeting with Harbaugh, DeCosta, Newsome and Brown. In fact, sources familiar with how the situation played out said Harbaugh never formally met with Ravens ownership before the final decision was made. He was never truly given the opportunity to present his case to Bisciotti to keep his job.

Such meetings between the decision-makers weren’t unique. They meet annually after the season, but this offseason brought a higher level of urgency. They needed to figure out what needed to change to make sure 2025 was an aberration rather than the start of an organizational-wide regression.

The status of Harbaugh’s coaching staff was among the topics of discussion. There was an understanding there would be a change in that area, potentially at the coordinator level, where Monken and defensive coordinator Zach Orr had difficult years. However, no ultimatums were made to Harbaugh, nor did any discussions with him reach the stage where final decisions about the makeup of his 2026 staff were communicated.

It was inconceivable, however, that the Ravens were going to run it back without significant changes to Harbaugh’s staff. Everybody was on board with that.

By Monday night, Harbaugh, who was under contract through 2028 and signed a three-year extension nine months earlier, had gotten no assurances that he’d return. But there was no reason to believe he wouldn’t get the opportunity to resolve the team’s issues. When contacted late Monday, several team sources expressed confidence Harbaugh would remain the Ravens’ coach. That, they said, was at least the widely held belief inside the Under Armour Performance Center.

By late morning Tuesday, that sentiment hadn’t changed. As Bisciotti contacted players, Harbaugh was at the facility and even met with some of his coaches to discuss offseason plans. Harbaugh, though, acknowledged to a few coaches that his status was still up in the air. History suggested the Ravens’ decision-makers would work everything out.

Yet, there was also obvious concern about what’s next for the team. If it were just one area to fix, the Ravens could attack it in the offseason and stay the course. However, the offense and defense regressed badly in 2025. Baltimore’s propensity to blow big leads was a major source of frustration within the organization, team sources said. Game management hangups were happening far too often with a veteran coaching staff.

Bisciotti had to think about the paying customers, too. Fans were frustrated, and a growing number were opting to stay home rather than attend key late November/December games at M&T Bank Stadium, with an AFC North title still within the Ravens’ reach.

It isn’t clear how much Bisciotti was affected by his conversations with players. However, it’s hard not to connect the dots. There was a belief in the building Tuesday morning that Harbaugh was returning. By late Tuesday afternoon, he was out, leaving Harbaugh more surprised than stunned.

Eighteen years earlier, Bisciotti acknowledged that player feedback was instrumental in changing his mind and firing Brian Billick, another successful Super Bowl-winning coach who had recently received a contract extension. Bisciotti will surely be asked Tuesday whether history repeated itself.

Once the decision was made and Harbaugh was notified, things moved fast. DeCosta rounded up Harbaugh’s staff members and informed them of the decision. One assistant coach said DeCosta, who considers Harbaugh one of his closest friends, fought back tears as he delivered the news. Not all of Harbaugh’s staff was still in the building, so those who weren’t were notified in a video meeting later.

The Ravens sent out a 5:50 p.m. video call invitation to the players. DeCosta and Brown then informed them of the decision.

Days later, opinions remained mixed about whether it was the right move. One veteran said the decision felt “extreme” and “reactionary.” Another said he thought there were other steps to take to solve an 8-9 season, and he questioned whether teammates realized how good they had it in terms of the culture and expectations Harbaugh laid out.

But Harbaugh had lost some support in the locker room, and some players are welcoming a new voice and new leadership.

“If his message wasn’t leading us in the right direction,” one player said, “then obviously something needed to change.”

Harbaugh, per several people close to him, is at peace with the decision. He quickly became the market’s top head-coaching candidate. He’ll start interviews next week and has positioned himself to pretty much decide where he wants to go, whether it’s the New York Giants, who are perceived as the favorites to land him, or the Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons, Tennessee Titans or Cleveland Browns.

By Wednesday, Ravens officials were already formulating plans to line up interviews for Harbaugh’s replacement, who will be just the fourth head coach in the organization’s history.

When the Ravens last conducted a head-coaching search, Jackson was 11 years old, playing youth football in South Florida. Rookie safety Malaki Starks was 4 years old. Running back Derrick Henry was still eight years from beginning his NFL career.

For Harbaugh and Bisciotti, it was a great run together over 18 seasons. Nothing that happened over the last week changes that.

But ultimately, it was time to move apart.

— Ian O’Connor contributed to this story.