{"id":92,"date":"2008-01-18T22:41:41","date_gmt":"2008-01-19T03:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=92"},"modified":"2008-01-21T11:43:32","modified_gmt":"2008-01-21T16:43:32","slug":"harbaugh-may-not-have-deserved-ravens-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=92","title":{"rendered":"Harbaugh May Not Have Deserved Ravens Job"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"harbaugh\"Today, the Ravens hired Eagles secondary coach John Harbaugh<\/a>as their new head coach, signing him to a four-year contract.\u00a0 Harbaugh is seen as the Ravens second choice, as they reportedly\u00a0offered the job to Dallas offensive coordinator Jason Garrett before Garrett decided to stay in Dallas.<\/p>\n

I’m happy for Harbaugh.\u00a0 This was his first year as the secondary\u00a0coach after spending seven seasons as the Eagles special-teams\u00a0coach.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0Eagles were horrible on special teams\u00a0when he got the job, and he really turned it around and made it a strength\u00a0for the team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have mixed feelings about this hire though, for a couple of\u00a0reasons.\u00a0 One, as an Eagles fan, I feel like we shouldn’t be having our assistant coaches raided right now.\u00a0 We’re 24-24 over the last three seasons, and someone just hired our special teams\/secondary coach to be their head coach.\u00a0 That doesn’t seem right, does it?\u00a0 Don’t the Patriots have a guy pushing a mop somewhere that might\u00a0be a better fit?<\/p>\n

Also, on a less selfish\/more serious note, does John Harbaugh really<\/em>deserve a head coaching job?\u00a0 Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know how a lot of\u00a0coaches become “hot” candidates.\u00a0\u00a0At this time last year, Jason Garrett was just some career\u00a0third-string quarterback getting a\u00a0shot in coaching, and now, apparently, he’s the next\u00a0Vince Lombardi.\u00a0 I’m not saying he won’t be a\u00a0really good head coach, I’m just\u00a0saying I don’t understand the process through which\u00a0so many teams\u00a0became convinced that he was the next\u00a0great\u00a0one.\u00a0 But at least Garrett was offensive coordinator for the best offense in the NFC this year (and played in the league, unlike Harbaugh).\u00a0 Did Sean Considine do something in the Eagles secondary this year that made the Ravens say, “Wow, who’s coaching that<\/em>guy, we need him running the whole show down here!”?\u00a0\u00a0Or were they just so impressed with the\u00a0way the Eagles set their wedge on kick returns under Harbaugh that they saw a future head coach?\u00a0 It all just doesn’t really add up to me.<\/p>\n

So, my real problem with this hiring is that there’s tons of way more qualified candidates out there than John Harbaugh.\u00a0 Unfortunately for them, their father wasn’t a college head coach and their brother wasn’t an NFL quarterback and current head coach at Stanford.\u00a0 I’ll stop with the implications and just say it: this hiring stinks of nepotism.\u00a0 You can look around the league and find a lot of coaches that have been successful\u00a0offensive\/defensive coordinators or assistant head\u00a0coaches\u00a0that have\u00a0never been given a shot as a head coach.<\/p>\n

To make matters\u00a0worse, there’s the still all-too-obvious lack of black head coaches.\u00a0\u00a0It’s been much\u00a0publicized,\u00a0but in a league with roughly 70% black players,\u00a0less than 20% of the head coaches (6 out of 32) were black\u00a0this season.\u00a0 A year \"caldwell\"after the first two black head\u00a0coaches reached the Super Bowl, there still seems to be little progress.\u00a0 It’s not as if there aren’t qualified candidates.\u00a0 There are a bunch of black coaches that are more\u00a0qualified than Harbaugh, including 49ers\u00a0assistant head\u00a0coach Mike Singletary,\u00a0Colts defensive coordinator Ron Meeks, and Vikings defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier.\u00a0 Another well qualified black candidate,\u00a0Colts assistant head coach Jim Caldwell, withdrew his name from consideration\u00a0for the Ravens and Falcons openings, with many people speculating he\u00a0did so because he is next in line for the Colts\u00a0head coaching position when Tony Dungy retires.\u00a0 However, there has been speculation that Caldwell withdrew because he didn’t think\u00a0he\u00a0was seen as a legitimate candidate and was “tired of being the ‘token’\u00a0African-American interviewed for head coaching jobs around the league”, as Mike Preston wrote<\/a> for the\u00a0Baltimore Sun<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Harbaugh may end\u00a0up being\u00a0very successful with the Ravens and\u00a0I’m disappointed that the Eagles lost a solid assistant coach, but if I were\u00a0running the Ravens, he’s not\u00a0the man I would’ve hired.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, the Ravens hired Eagles secondary coach John Harbaughas their new head coach, signing him to a four-year contract.\u00a0 Harbaugh is seen as the Ravens second choice, as they reportedly\u00a0offered the job to Dallas offensive coordinator Jason Garrett before Garrett … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4,174,175,173,76],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nfl","tag-eagles","tag-jason-garrett","tag-jim-caldwell","tag-john-harbaugh","tag-ravens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}