“But no matter if you think it’s right or wrong and whether or not I agree with these guys, my job is to tell you what you don’t want to hear. You have to realize what the mindset is. If you’re the coach you want to know their state of mind. And I’m here to give it to yo like it or not. We have to react based on the mindset of the team.”
Flacco is pragmatic, almost like his owner Steve Bisciotti. “Not everyone is going to have a good opinion of John or me all the time, but we all want mutual respect because we all want to win,” he said. “If the whole locker room is coming together and bitching, somebody has to tell John this. Who else is going to do it? It’s right for the players to be heard, and it builds up.”
After the season Flacco said that it was a major part of the team’s success. “All those things that have happened – good and bad – it’s what makes our locker room close,” he said. “It makes the relationship stronger, that honesty.”
In many ways, that honesty in the organization is a direct reflection of the values and standards of owner Steve Bisciotti, who openly encourages caring confrontation to solve issues. He encourages open communication and discourse. Inside the walls of the Ravens’ complex in Owings Mills it’s called a “care-frontation.”
“It’s a nice way to say we are not going to run with your weaknesses,” Bisciotti said. “If you can’t change and grow, you’ll never improve. Personal development is a willingness to listen and take constructive criticism. It’s no different than with your parents when you were a kid. They constructively criticized you – at least they did that if they were good parents. They told you stuff you didn’t want to hear, but everything they said was for our own good.”
“If the criticism is simply to make the criticizer feel good then it’s useless. If the intent isn’t to make the person better then it’s no good. Some people think any kind of criticism is bad. Constructive criticism is good. If you can’t discern between the two then you’ll be defensive. And you have to trust the source as someone who cares about you enough to be honest with you. It’s confronting in a caring way.”
“My job as the owner is to align people’s personal development with the development of organization. It’s the path of least resistance. The only way to move an organization forward is to constantly keep the players in that game aligned with the corporation’s goals.”
And in Owings Mills, that goal is to the win the Super Bowl. From Bisciotti’s perspective, these kinds of debates are good inside of his building.
Pollard would later address the ugliness from that sometimes non-“care-frontational” moment in the auditorium in Owings Mills at Super Bowl XLVII and commend his head coach. “I think that tells you a lot about Coach Harbaugh, you know, to stand there in front of 60-plus guys and listen to things and what we had to say,” Pollard said. “That wouldn’t have happened in a lot of other organizations, so for Coach Harbaugh to stand there and do that, it just said a lot about his character, and like I continue to say, it was a humbling experience for all of us. We all were humbled, and sometimes it takes you to be knocked down to be in the position that we’re in right now, and we got knocked down, but we came together and we’re sitting here today.”
