Sixty-six years as a Giants fan has taught me never to predict anything about my team’s prospects for the upcoming season. When I do, I usually get it wrong. This season, though, with newly installed John Harbaugh at the helm, it’s tempting to predict something about what the team is going to look like on the field in 2026. Headlines like that of Giants Wire’s John Fennelly the other day summed it up: “John Harbaugh’s run-heavy vision has Giants RBs licking their chops.” We all agree on this, right?
You don’t bring Patrick Ricard with you from Baltimore if you’re not going to run the ball a lot. You don’t spend the No. 10 pick on a player you intend to put at right guard if you’re not going to run the ball. You don’t hire Greg Roman as a coach if you’re not going to run the ball.
League-wide statistics from the 2025 NFL season bear this out. The NFL, thanks in part to rules changes early in the century that benefited offenses and especially quarterbacks and in part to the spread offense that the New England Patriots introduced in the 2007 season and that Tom Brady ran to near perfection, left its 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust heritage in the rear view mirror and became a pass-first league. That has changed a bit in the past few years as defensive masterminds like Vic Fangio have utilized two-high safety looks with post-snap rotation to confuse quarterbacks and limit big passing plays. Still, the NFL remains first and foremost a passing league (data from Pro Football Reference):
Not a single NFL team rushed for more yards than they passed for in the 2025 season. The 2025 Giants under pass-happy Brian Daboll and Mike Kafka were right in the middle of the pack in that respect, with 3474 yards passing vs. only 2195 yards rushing. Harbaugh’s Ravens, though, were closer to the 1:1 line than any other NFL team; only the Jets, who had big quarterback problems last season, came close.
So we know what to expect from Harbaugh’s Giants in 2026…or do we?
Here is Harbaugh’s season-by-season pass-rush breakdown during his tenure as Ravens head coach:
We can see that Harbaugh’s 2025 Ravens pass-rush balance was actually a bit of an outlier relative to his previous history. His first year as Ravens head coach, with rookie Joe Flacco as his QB, had a good pass-run balance, similar to what the Ravens did in 2025. After that, though, as Flacco grew as a QB, the Ravens became a pass-happy offense just like the rest of the NFL did to try to keep up with the Patriots. Flacco was injured and missed the last 6 games of the 2015 season, though, and after one more good season, began to decline, though he has continued to start at least a few games in every season since.
In 2018 Baltimore traded back into the first round to draft Lamar Jackson. Jackson started the last seven games but was very limited as a passer while being extremely dangerous as a runner. He was actually the Ravens’ leading rusher for 5 consecutive seasons. You can see the trend of the Ravens becoming an almost equal pass-rush offense in 2018-2020. The last few seasons, though, as Jackson matured as a passer and the front office tried to provide him with weapons, the Ravens once again became a pass-first offense, similar to the Flacco peak seasons. It wasn’t for a lack of talent at running back – Derrick Henry became a Raven in 2024 and rushed for 1,921 yards that season. Jackson himself had seasons of 767, 764, 821, and 915 rushing yards from 2021-2024. Only last season, when Jackson again had injury problems and the offense showed signs of aging, did the Ravens show a pass-rush balance similar to Jackson’s early years.
So will the Giants run more this season because Harbaugh is the head coach? Based on the chart above, it’s not obvious. It probably depends more on whether Jaxson Dart further develops as a passer and whether the Giants’ offensive line becomes better at run blocking than on any perceived preference by Harbaugh for the run over the pass.
