John Harbaugh is in his 18th season as the Ravens’ head coach. Michael Locksley recently completed his seventh season as Maryland’s football coach. Both are hot topics around these parts, and for good reason.
The reasons are as different as night and day and day and night.
They say a cat has nine lives. Harbaugh seems to have no end to his coaching life in Baltimore so long as Steve Bisciotti owns the Ravens.
Harbaugh has led perennial contenders since coming on board as the head man back in 2008, but he does not have a Super Bowl appearance on his resume since the 2012 season and his playoff record is just 13-11. Nine of those wins came with the ageless Joe Flacco. His playoff record with Lamar Jackson is just 3-5. Tyler Huntley lost that heartbreaker in Cincinnati in January 2023.
The Ravens have a chance to make the playoffs again in 2025, but is anyone in Baltimore feeling confident of any sort of deep playoff run with both lines playing at a subpar level and the two-time MVP quarterback banged up and playing well below his expected level of play? Sure, Baltimore football fans have lost some faith in GM Eric DeCosta, but at the end of the day, the way the Ravens’ top brass operates must be called into question.
I know my history doing talk radio and writing columns. I dwell in a world of always looking to cast blame. But anyone who thinks DeCosta can decide Harbaugh’s fate, I have a timeshare to sell you.
We watched former defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald walk out of the building in Owings Mills and lead Seattle back into the hunt in a very tough NFC West. We’ve also seen what Mike Vrabel has done in turning a 4-13 Patriots team into a top AFC squad. And we’ve watched Ben Johnson turn Caleb Williams and the Bears’ fortunes around overnight. Meanwhile, we watch Harbaugh stumble more and more.
It feels with those three eminently hirable coaches having come and gone, Bisciotti is squandering the best years of Jackson’s career.
Down in College Park, Locksley has a spotty 36-44 record as the head coach at Maryland, not counting his 1-5 record as interim head coach in 2015 replacing Randy Edsall. Closer inspection shows that in four seasons with Taulia Tagovailoa (2020-2023), the Terps amassed a 25-19 record while winning three straight mid-level bowl games. The only non-winning season of Tagovailoa’s Maryland career was a 2-3 COVID-shortened season in 2020.
But despite obvious gains in the recruiting playing field in the past several years, the talent is still at a significantly lower level than the top teams in the Big Ten.
Locksley’s job description became even more difficult with the additions of Oregon, Washington, UCLA and USC to the Big Ten and the fast-moving world of player compensation, leaving many schools without the budgets to match the more traditional power schools.
But despite playing musical chairs with his staff — moves that were supposed to improve the quality of coaching — Locksley’s teams are prone to an inordinate number of big penalties and big mistakes and losing their cool in big moments. That has played a large part in back-to-back 4-8 seasons.
Sliding back so far so fast shows just how small the margin for error was for the Tagovailoa teams.
Even though Maryland ended the 2025 season with an eight-game losing skid, new AD Jim Smith probably made the prudent call in bringing Locksley back for the 2026 season. Locksley is under contract through 2028.
While there are tons of media folks and Terps fans who think that Maryland can’t do better than Locksley, I don’t think for a minute Smith feels that way.
I lived in Durham from 2001-2005. If there ever was a football program looking hopeless, it was the Duke program under Carl Franks and Ted Roof, who went a combined 13-90 from 1999-2007. Suddenly, along came David Cutcliffe (77-97), Mike Elko (16-9) and now Manny Diaz (17-9 heading into the Sun Bowl).
Oh, I know it’s far easier to turn around a team in the ACC than the Big Ten. Nobody is saying that Duke is near a national championship level, but clearly Cutcliffe did the heavy lifting and made the program respectable.
Still, leading a turnaround is not an impossible task in the Big Ten. Look at what kind of football program Indiana has had historically. Dating back to 1957, the Hoosiers have never had a coach end his tenure with a winning record. Their total record from 1957-2023 was 278-457, a winning percentage of .378. The list of coaches includes Lee Corso, Sam Wyche and Cam Cameron.
But heading into the College Football Playoff, Indiana had gone 24-2 since Curt Cignetti came on board ahead of the 2024 season.
Smith won’t buy that it’s impossible for a coach to lift this program. I think he wants to give Locksley one more shot at trying to prove he can truly turn the program around. At the time of his announcement that Locksley would return, Smith added that he would make upgrades to the program’s funding. To his credit, Locksley recently scored the highest-ranked recruit in Terps history, edge rusher Zion Elee from Saint Frances.
What Cignetti has accomplished in two short years at Indiana, winning the Big Ten championship with a gritty win against Ohio State in December, should give hope to a school like Maryland. For Locksley, the bar has been raised to a level I have not seen the Terps reach during his time here. I am not sure what success for Locksley looks like, but ending up with Duke’s Mayonnaise being dumped on him after a very middling bowl isn’t what Smith will be looking for.
Photo Credit: Kenya Allen/PressBox
Issue 296: December 2025 / January 2026
Originally published Dec. 17, 2025.