Were John Harbaugh’s monumental mistakes in 2020 as egregious as Bill Cowher's in 2002?

Ravens Coach John Harbaugh

Photo courtesy of AP

Coaches always look back at certain losses on the football field and ask, “How could that have happened?”

John Harbaugh, the presumptive NFL/AFC Coach of the Year for the 2019 season, will be going over his loss to the Tennessee Titans in the AFC Division playoff game for decades after he retires. His team was the number 1 seed for the AFC and odds-on favorite to win the Super Bowl.

Instead, they fell to the Titans in a monumental collapse, despite having the best record in the league, the best QB in the league this year, the best offense in the league … which really makes losses painful for the coaches and players.

In fact, Harbaugh will think about this loss 20 years from now when he considers the worst losses of his coaching career. Such is the life for even very successful coaches.

Bill Cowher, who was just elected to the NFL Hall of Fame, can commiserate with Harbaugh. He has one loss, this one in an AFC title game that cost the Steelers a realistic chance to win the Super Bowl, less than 20 years ago.

In one instance, Cowher and Harbaugh both made the same mistake. In another respect, Harbaugh perhaps made a mistake that Ravens’ fans are still questioning a few days after the 28-12 loss to the Titans in a game in Baltimore.

Question number 1: Did Harbaugh make a major mistake in sitting QB Jackson in Week 16?
Since the Ravens had secured the top AFC seed and had nothing to gain in their 16th game, one against the Steelers, Harbaugh decided to sit some key players, including QB Lamar Jackson, who ended up having a tough game in the loss to Tennessee.

Mike Florio sets up the dilemma,

The question of whether a team with nothing for which to play should play to win in Week 17 has received another data point for when it inevitably arises again.

The Ravens, who secured the No. 1 seed with a Week 16 win over the Browns, rested key starters for the regular-season finale. As a result, said key starters went 20 days between games.

“Ravens’ loss dusts off Week 17 rest-or-rust debate,” NBC Sports, Jan. 12, 2020

Twenty days between games? That is the question that many are raising now.

Florio noted that reporters asked Harbaugh about that. Here is that exchange,

So were the Ravens rusty on Saturday night?

“I don’t know,” coach John Harbaugh said after the 28-12 loss. “I don’t have the answer. It’s unanswerable. I thought our guys practiced really hard, did the best they could. But we didn’t play a sharp football game, for sure. What you attribute that to, I guess you can theorize.”

Mike Florio, NBC Sports, Jan. 12, 2020

Florio notes, however, that no one can know whether or not this was a poor decision. What everyone knows is that Jackson’s timing was way off, his confidence shaken, and he played poorly. Still, no one is certain that decision caused the debacle,

Embedded in that answer is the possibility that Harbaugh, the PFT coach of the year, made a coaching error by not keeping his guys fresh. Of course, if Harbaugh had played the likes of Lamar Jackson in a meaningless game against the Steelers and if the likes of Jackson had gotten injured by a hard-hitting arch-rival that entered the game with a playoff berth still a possibility, Harbaugh would have been relentlessly criticized.

It will remain unknown whether Harbaugh made a mistake, without finding an alternate universe in which he played all starters in Week 17 and the Ravens didn’t lose to the Titans in the divisional round. Regardless, the No. 6 seed bounced the No. 1 seed in stunning fashion, extending to two years Baltimore’s streak of one and done playoff exits. Harbaugh’s focus for 2020 surely will be to ensure that it doesn’t happen three years in a row.

Mike Florio, NBC Sports, Jan. 12, 2020

I agree with that analysis, but he could have played Jackson for a half so that he stayed sharp. Having a player off for 20 days is never a good idea, though, so I questioned that decision then — and still do. Play him for a quarter, or a half. Not the whole game.

And then pray that he is not hurt.

Harbaugh’s similarity with Cowher, though the Steelers’ mentor was worse here

The problem for Harbaugh is that his players were already talking about the Super Bowl despite needing two wins to reach that pinnacle of NFL sports.

That happened with Bill Cowher in the 2001 postseason.

The 2001 season debacle for the Steelers

How good were the 2001 Pittsburgh Steelers? Arguably, they were Bill Cowher’s best team, but he made some major mistakes in the AFC title game that cost them a legitimate chance at winning a Super Bowl.

Overall, Steeler fans, who now would love to have Cowher return to replace Mike Tomlin, were upset with the fact that Cowher lost four of five AFC championship games when having home-field advantage, often the number 1 seed.

However, the one that really hurts, and the one in which Cowher really botched his coaching, was in the 2001 season.

In a post a few years ago, I wrote this about that team,

I believe that only one [Steeler] team over the past 26 years should have won a title, while a number could have done so. The team that should have was the 2001 Steelers.

The Steelers entered the game as the number one ranked defense in the league and their 55 sacks led the NFL. With a rookie QB named Tom Brady leading the Patriots, the Steeler defense was confident — actually overconfident.

The Steeler offense was third in the league. The QB for the Steelers was Kordell Stewart, and this AFC title game would cement his reputation in the minds of Steeler fans. And not in a positive way.

“Should the Steelers have won more Super Bowls?” Blog, 

“Still Crazy After All These Years,” Hugh Brady Conrad, 2018

Cowher was outcoached by a guy who was fired a few years earlier by the lowly Cleveland Browns. Bill Bellichick outcoached Cowher in every aspect of the game.

Here is what happened, but the problem in that game came down to game preparation. That is where Cowher failed as much as Harbaugh did in the Titans debacle. The similarity was that both teams were heavily favored, but each lost,

However, the difference in the game was the play of New England’s special teams and an inordinate number of miscues by the Steelers. The first mistake led to a Troy Brown touchdown. Brown scored the first TD of the game on a 55-yard punt return that would never have occurred had not the Steelers’ Troy Edwards been flagged for going out of bounds on a 64-yards punt. Brown went up the middle on the re-kick from deep in Steeler territory.

The hero for the Pats was not Brady. He was injured in the second quarter, and Drew Bledsoe came in and engineered another scoring drive that gave the Pats a 14-3 halftime lead.

The Pats raised that to 21-3 after they blocked a 24-yard field goal, and Brown recovered it and returned it 11 yards before lateraling it to Antwan Harris, who returned it for a TD.

So, the heavily-favored Steelers were down 21-3 early in the third quarter before falling 24-17. It was a brutal loss for the team and the fans, and it led to the dominance of the 2000s by Bellichick and Brady.

“Should the Steelers have won more Super Bowls?” Blog, 

“Still Crazy After All These Years,” Hugh Brady Conrad, 2018

The genesis of the problem

Whenever a football loses a game because of special teams errors, that can be traced to poor preparation. Certainly, the players have to execute, but in this case, the preparation was horrible.

Here is what I wrote about that situation,

Here is the problem. Cowher allowed the team to get out of hand prior to this game. They had cut a video about reaching the Super Bowl, and he made a statement that the team spent a portion of each practice preparing for the Super Bowl — which never came to fruition.

“Should the Steelers have won more Super Bowls?” Blog, 

“Still Crazy After All These Years,” Hugh Brady Conrad, 2018

When a team is preparing for the Super Bowl with another game ahead of it, then it is in trouble. Cowher should have known better to let that become public information — and the Pats certainly learned about it. 

However, the Patriots and the rest of America saw the video that Steeler players shot about reaching the Super Bowl. Once Cowher saw and discovered that, he should have put a stop to it — but he did not.

The preparation for the game was shoddy, and a far superior team lost that game. The players did not have focus, and that falls upon the coach.

Worse for the Steelers, the Patriots then upset a mediocre St. Louis Rams team to win the Super Bowl, and that started their dominance of the 2000s.

Who knows what would have transpired if the Steelers had won that AFC title game? For starters, chances are that the two teams would not be tied for the lead in winner Super Bowls at six.

Conclusion

So, were Harbaugh’s errors worse in the 2019 postseason playoffs than Cowher’s in 2001? That is something that no one can say for certain, but this much is true: Both John Harbaugh and Bill Cowher made major mistakes in those two seasons that could conceivably have cost them a Super Bowl victory.