ExtremeRavens Posted 12 hours ago Posted 12 hours ago On a makeshift set in Owings Mills, just a few years ago, the third coach in Ravens history unknowingly sat across from his eventual successor and interviewed him on the qualities that shape successful coaching. John Harbaugh occupied stage right, with a microphone fastened to his “Winning Football” T-shirt. At stage left was Jesse Minter in a Jordan Brand Michigan polo. Between them: a large insignia for The Harbaugh Coaching Academy. It was a prescient, 20-minute interview between two coaches who go back a long way. Minter, who coached in Baltimore from 2017-2020, was about 10 years old when his father, Rick, took the head coaching job at University of Cincinnati and retained Harbaugh on his staff as special teams coordinator. “I owe your dad my career for sure,” Harbaugh smiled. At one point, he called Rick “the foremost defensive coach in college football for a long time.” So one of his first questions for the younger Minter was how much of the football X’s and O’s did he learn while watching dad do it at a high level? “He’s the complete foundation of what I knew defensively,” Minter said. By junior high school, Minter was introduced to the intricacies of football and its accompanying rules. Back then, he couldn’t differentiate between Cover 2 and Cover 4 defenses. Then in high school and during his playing days at Mount St. Joseph University in Ohio, Minter took more of an interest in the sport’s schematic nuance. And he put it to practice. Although, maybe not in the obvious way. Minter would make note of a concept his dad was employing with the Bearcats then take it home and test out packages playing the Madden video game. “As crazy as it sounds, you start to say, ‘OK, I learned this from him, I’m gonna try this on the video game,’” said Minter, who will now call defensive plays for the Ravens. “Nowadays, [for] young people, that’s really an intro into the schematic side of football. Pick your coverages, pick your plays.” Minter and Harbaugh dug further into several topics, including the then-Michigan defensive coordinator’s career path and building a culture within a program. That last one, Minter said, “I think I learned [that] here as much as anywhere.” He waxed poetically about how sound football starts with coaches and players all being on the same page, be it through the language of the playbook or the flexibility of shared ideas. In the years since, he’s repeatedly credit those four years in Baltimore as being the equivalent of a football master’s program. In 2017, Minter joined a Ravens defensive staff led by Don “Wink” Martindale and he worked alongside Mike Macdonald, another rising star now in Seattle coaching for a Super Bowl. They rebuilt Baltimore’s defense by scrapping leftover language and building what proved to be a bruising group, at one point the best in football. Minter went and did something similar in Ann Arbor, winning a national championship in 2023. Then again flipping the Chargers from a bottom-third defense to a top-third group. “We talk about our language,” Minter said, “and it’s every detail of how we want our guys to play defense. We want to have a very, very specific encyclopedia of words.” With Harbaugh, he spelled out the four pillars: block destruction, ball disruption, effort and angles to the ball and communication. In every Minter defensive meeting at Michigan, he dedicated the first five minutes to showing what the quartet looks, feels and sounds like. Or, conversely, examples that could use some refining. He saw that as a more beneficial use of their time than a bland install of blitz packages because “good teams and bad teams have called the same defenses” and yielded opposite results. Culture was a prominent talking point in the interview. Harbaugh called it a “big word,” that’s easy to say and tough to make real. The way Minter explained it, which offers some perspective into how he’ll steer the ship in Baltimore, is that players drive the culture and coaches ensure it doesn’t go off the rails. Togetherness is a sticking point for Minter. He used the word 11 times at his introductory news conference. It’s an obvious point of emphasis as Minter inherits a Ravens team that, in 2025, spoke frequently about their shortcomings being a result of disjointed plans – not doing their “1 of 11,” as they called it. That’s something Minter can’t refine playing Madden. But relationship building and culture molding has been key to his success in prior stops. On a video posted by the team account, Minter called it his secret weapon. Harbaugh said in the coaching academy interview, “Guys loved you” in Baltimore. The former Ravens coach began their sit-down flashing a toothy smile, introducing his eventual replacement as a “former Raven.” But, he said, “once a Raven, always a Raven” — a more literal line all these years later. Have a news tip? Contact Sam Cohn at scohn@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/samdcohn.x.com. Sam appears as a host on The Sun’s “Early Birds” podcast . Ravens coach Jesse Minter, shown at his introductory news conference, used to play video games to test out defensive plays and schemes. (Kevin Richardson/Staff) View the full article Quote
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