They say that styles make fights, and the best fight is brother versus brother. Mufasa versus Scar in The Lion King; Thor versus Loki in The Avengers; Brennan versus Dale in Step Brothers. (Hell, if we expand to siblings, Anna versus Elsa in Frozen.) On Monday night, the Baltimore Ravens and John Harbaugh big-brothered Jim Harbaugh and the Los Angeles Chargers. Baltimore took HarBowl Part III, 30-23 (though it wasn’t as close as the score would have you believe), and John beat his brother for the third straight time. Ravens-Chargers with John and Jim in charge promises to be one of the NFL’s next great rivalries … as soon as Jim can win one of these games.
The Chargers struck first, scoring a touchdown on a flawless opening drive that did not feature a single third down. That marked the first time a Jim Harbaugh team ever had a lead on a John Harbaugh team. But it didn’t last long. The Ravens took over and slowly squeezed the life out of the Chargers. John coached his team with the kind of aggressiveness you usually only see when, well, your younger brother gets an early lead on you in Madden. Down three points with two minutes to go in the first half and operating at his team’s own 16-yard line, John decided to go for a fourth-and-1. The Ravens converted. No team has converted a fourth down closer to their own end zone in the first half in more than a decade, per ESPN Stats and info. That risk eventually led to a touchdown that gave the Ravens a 14-13 lead at the half.
John took more chances in the second half, going for it on fourth-and-1 twice on one drive, which led to another Ravens touchdown. That score put Baltimore up by seven, and they could have kicked an extra point to go up eight. Instead, the Ravens went for two. They failed, but the decision was emblematic of their strategy all night. Baltimore seemed a lot less motivated by analytics than by their coach having shared a bedroom with the man across the field from him for 16 years (John eventually put a line of tape across the room and told Jim they were going to stay on their respective sides).
The Chargers struggled to defend against Baltimore’s offense, which is on pace to average over 7 yards per play this season, the most in NFL history. Baltimore excelled in heavy sets, trotting out multiple tight ends (and sometimes fullback Patrick Ricard), plus Derrick Henry and Lamar Jackson to match up against L.A.’s relatively svelte, defensive back-based defense. And it worked. Henry finished with 24 carries for 140 yards. Justice Hill had four carries for 55 yards. And Jackson averaged 8 yards per throw. Jackson seemed extra amped early, overthrowing three passes in the first half. But he was also able to wipe away many of Baltimore’s issues. When an illegal formation penalty erased a Henry touchdown, Jackson took the ball on the next play and danced into the end zone like he was in high school.
If you are a younger sibling and you have ever played a football game—or any game—against your older brother’s friends, you know the feeling when you realize there is a talent, size, and skill gap between you and them. That was how Chargers-Ravens felt. Where the Ravens had Henry, the Chargers had Baltimore’s castoff retreads of J.K. Dobbins (who left mid-game with a knee injury) and Gus Edwards. Where the Ravens had ol’ faithful Mark Andrews and second-year receiver Zay Flowers to catch passes, the Chargers were relying on go routes and drag routes to Quentin Johnston. L.A. found out the hard way that Johnston’s hands still are not reliable when he dropped a perfectly placed pass in the fourth quarter when he was wide open.
Justin Herbert was excellent in this game, routinely making throws that made Peyton and Eli Manning gasp on the Manningcast (you can tell what truly impresses Peyton when he goes speechless and Eli is forced to chime in). But he also missed on a handful of potentially game-changing plays, like a wide-open, would-be touchdown to Josh Palmer in the closing seconds of the first half.
In a game in which the Ravens committed nine penalties for 102 yards, it is hard to swallow that the Chargers only scored nine points between the sixth minute of the game and the final one.
“I’d lay down my life for my brother,” Jim Harbaugh said before Monday Night Football. “But I would not let him win a football game.” The Chargers didn’t let the Ravens win on Monday. The Ravens took it.
As much as this game concerned two billion-dollar organizations that are fighting for playoff positioning, it also felt fundamentally like someone had touched the other’s drum set.
There is so much familiarity between these two teams that years of Harbaugh influence oozed out of their pores. The 2024 Chargers have seven players on the roster who are former Ravens. And that does not include the eight staffers who came to L.A. from Baltimore, including:
- General manager Joe Hortiz, who worked for the Ravens from 1998 to 2023
- Defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, who worked for John before working for Jim, and whose father, Chargers defensive analyst Rick Minter, has both employed John and currently assists Jim
- Offensive coordinator Greg Roman, who’s spent 13 of the last 16 seasons working for a Harbaugh, from Jim at Stanford to Jim in San Francisco to John in Baltimore to Jim in L.A.
A lot binds these organizations together—but namely the history between their two head coaches. Like the real HarBowl. Remember the HarBowl? It was an unforgettable event that we all somehow kind of forgot about. Sure, people recall the Ravens-49ers Super Bowl that happened in February 2013. But until this week, many of us had probably not in a long time thought about how bonkers it was. The fact that two brothers grew up to be NFL head coaches is wild enough. But meeting in the Super Bowl, with their parents there to see it, was something else entirely. It’s shocking it has not become a movie script yet—even though that game itself was a sequel.
John and Jim first coached against each other in a 2011 49ers-Ravens contest on Thanksgiving, the day before their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. That was (literally) a once-in-a-generation story. And when they met in the Super Bowl a little over a year later, it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime event. But now the Harbaugh experience looks like it’ll be anything but that. Just like all other IP from this century, this duel is turning from something awesome that we thought we’d see once, to something we’re probably going to see all the time. With John and Jim both in the NFL now, this is shaping up to be a regular thing—and perhaps one of the NFL’s defining rivalries for the 2020s.
Jim Harbaugh said earlier this month that he hopes Herbert is the last quarterback he ever coaches. As Herbert is just 26, and Harbaugh has said his plan is to coach football until he dies, the coach could be around the NFL for quite some time. John, meanwhile, has been locked in with the Ravens since 2008. Plus, unlike when Jim was previously in the NFL, both men are coaching in the AFC now, which means they’re guaranteed to play at least every four years. They could play more often than that if they finish in the same spot in their respective divisions (NFL teams always play the other teams in the conference that had the same division finish as them the following year). And that’s before we get to potential playoff showdowns.
If both brothers stay where they are long term—and both of their quarterbacks hold form going forward—it is not ridiculous to think we could have five or even 10 more years of HarBowls on our hands.
Jim Harbaugh is just a notch below the Tyson Zone, where almost anything you say about him sounds true. My favorite Harbaugh competitiveness anecdote is this: He and his friends played every-man-for-himself laser tag at his bachelor party. And Harbaugh emerged from the room victorious—but that was largely because one wayward child had gone into the laser tag space with the party, and Jim spent the entire session scoring points off the kid. One hundred percent of his points came from one target.
There are so many of these stories that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Harbaugh once ate an entire pizza by himself at a recruit’s house. He went into the cold tub in khakis and a shirt (but sans his socks, shoes, and belt, and he emptied his pockets). “They gotta get washed anyway,” he told Rich Eisen of the khakis last week. When he was the coach at the University of San Diego, he invented a trophy that his team would compete for against their rival, Dayton. For a long time he drank milk and ate red meat but avoided chicken because it was a “nervous bird.” Then he decided to raise chickens himself in a coop and his views all changed.
Harbaugh applies that same … spirit and maniacal attention to detail to football—sometimes to an absurd degree. He said on Eisen’s show this week that he doesn’t want Chargers players high-fiving Herbert with their right hands. There’s too much injury risk with the right-on-right high-five. So they’re only allowed to high-five Herbert left-handed. “There’s nobody that enjoys or respects a high-five more than I do,” Harbaugh told Eisen. “But when it’s Justin, let’s go with the left.”
There are not nearly as many stories publicly available about John, but people who have been around him have told me that John is just as, uh, what is the word? Particular. Quirky. “Intense” comes up often. The stories just don’t come out in the wash as frequently. But the rivalry between the two is real.
John told Barstool Sports in 2019 that when Jim had just gotten his first big NFL contract as a player with the Bears, Jim took the family on a vacation to Amelia Island for the Fourth of July. Soon after their arrival, Jim took John on a walk with him out into the ocean. Suddenly, Jim took John down with a single-leg wrestling move, and, well, it’s worth quoting John at length about what happened next:
“I see the sand come up around. It’s dark. Salt water. All of the air bubbles come out. I’m like, ‘OK cool I get it.’ Then he keeps holding me down, holds me down. I don’t know if it was a minute but it seemed like 20 minutes. I’m thinking this is going to be it. He’s snapped. He’s gone. I’ve lost him. He’s going to be in jail for the rest of his life, but that’s not going to help me. I’m done. He let me up finally. … Once I got my breath, he gave me the old, ‘We know where it stands.’ I had to live with that for the next 23 years until the Super Bowl.”
With the renewal of this battle on NFL turf, a lot is on the line. That is why the brothers’ father, Jack Harbaugh, did not speak to his sons this week. Typically, Jack helps his kids gameplan and passes along thoughts. But with his sons playing each other this week, he thought that could be seen as interference. So, per the Ravens website, Jack went incommunicado. Frankly, with 16 penalties for 164 yards, this game looked like neither coach had gotten advice from their father.
Jack and his wife, Jackie, didn’t even attend the game. Instead they are in Florida with their daughter Joani and her husband, former Indiana University basketball coach Tom Crean, celebrating the Harbaughs’ 63rd anniversary. Jack went into the week stressed about having to watch his sons coach against one another a third time. But John offered his father some perspective.
“He said, ‘Dad, this is not for the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl was an ending,’” Jack said. “‘There was going to be a Super Bowl championship. There would be someone that didn’t win it. In this game, it’s a game and both teams are still challenging for playoff position. So it doesn’t quite have the magnitude that the Super Bowl had.’
“And you know what? I shook my head. Once again, I learned something from John that made me a little bit wiser and a little bit more comfortable.”
Not quite comfortable enough to be at the game. But John is right. This wasn’t the end of the season for either team. In fact, it marked the beginning of something new. Both of these teams are currently slated to land wild-card berths this season, with the Ravens behind the Steelers and the Chargers behind the Chiefs in their respective divisions. This loss was a tough blow for the Chargers—but John has had a decade and a half to build Baltimore. Jim has been in L.A. for 10 months. Pretty soon, his team will grow up and be able to fight back. Maybe just in time for HarBowl IV.
