When John Harbaugh showed up in Maryland as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens in 2008, he already had 24 years of assistant coaching experience under his belt, spanning from Western Michigan to the Philadelphia Eagles. But his ‘welcome to the Ravens’ moment wasn’t as warm as he’d hoped.

On the Dominique Foxworth Show, Harbaugh was asked by his former cornerback how his second head coaching stint (with the New York Giants) was different from his first. Harbaugh pulled back the curtain on a locker room featuring legends like Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, and Terrell Suggs who wouldn’t accept him.

“I don’t know. God works in mysterious ways, I guess. He charts out our path for sure because it’s pretty much bookended,” Harbaugh said. “It started with Baltimore. The guys were all looking at me like, ‘Who the heck are you? What are you doing here standing in front of the room?’ And that was a veteran team with guys like Ray, and Ed, and Suggs, and [Marshal] Yanda, and we did have a rookie quarterback, Joe [Flacco]. And it was just really a unique type of a deal.”

When Harbaugh joined, Lewis was already a future Hall of Fame linebacker with nine Pro Bowls, seven All-Pros, and two Defensive Player of the Year honors. Ed Reed already had a DPOY nod (2004), 4 All-Pros, and 4 Pro Bowl nods as a Ravens Safety, and linebacker Terrell Suggs was also on a similar trajectory. Harbaugh walked into this room full of veterans as a head coach for the first time in his life, and it took him a while to gain the trust of his team.

Harbaugh almost had a mutiny on his hands because of his coaching philosophy. In the 2012 season, around Halloween, the Ravens were still reeling from a 43-13 beatdown at the hands of the Houston Texans. When the team got back from its bye week, Harbaugh ordered a practice with pads, and veterans like Ed Reed openly questioned the call. The coach let everyone speak, listened, explained his reasoning, and the group left the room more united than ever.

By the 2015 offseason, while the rest of the league was taking it easy on a Thursday, Harbaugh was putting his team through its paces through a 150-minute practice session. None of the veterans were complaining, and Terrell Suggs was actually explaining how “Nobody practices like us in training camp.” Harbaugh himself explained how his vision had been absorbed by the team:

“After eight years of certain principles and methods and beliefs, it becomes our way of doing it,” he said. “And the older players, it’s their way.”

Eighteen years have passed since John Harbaugh took up the reins in Baltimore. After parting ways with the Ravens, by his own admission, Harbaugh is “the old guy” with a young team. What’s more, the tenacity he saw players like Dominique perform with is something he now sees with the Giants, and the 63-year-old coach is very excited about it.

“I see [it] with a lot of these young guys right now, too,” Harbaugh told Foxworth. “I just see a bunch of guys that are really hungry, that want to do well, that are all ears, but also want to understand why and want to work. If you want to work, I like that. I like guys who want to work, so it’s different. But it’s also the same, too, in different ways. So, we just kind of dig in and see where it goes.”

Harbaugh is now applying that same energy to second-year quarterback Jaxson Dart. After a two-hour sit-down in January, he said Dart’s mindset and enthusiasm for the game got him “fired up,” becoming the driving factor for the coach to choose the Giants. Since then, he has praised Dart’s progress this offseason under new offensive coordinator Matt Nagy, highlighting Dart’s competitiveness and the drive “to be perfect on every play.”

The Ravens story started with a room full of veterans questioning John Harbaugh’s credibility. The Giants chapter is starting with a coach who sees hungry young players asking, ‘why do we do it this way?’ The question has changed, but the job’s still the same: earn the trust, set the standard, and let the work answer the rest.