John Harbaugh: Former Ole Miss star Jaxson Dart ‘can live in a lot of different worlds’ offensively
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John Harbaugh will be trying to prove himself all over again this fall after all those successful years as the head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, and he has a quarterback who can relate to that in former Ole Miss star Jaxson Dart.
After Harbaugh spent 18 seasons as the Ravens head coach, winning a whole lot of games and even a Super Bowl, he’s entering his first year as the guy in charge in the brutal New York market. The new coach of the Giants is in the pressure-cooker now, and he’ll be leaning on Dart, who himself is trying to prove he’s worthy again after so much success at Ole Miss.
Dart showed flashes of being the real deal last season as a rookie for a struggling Giants franchise, making 12 starts and throwing for 2,272 yards with 15 touchdowns and 5 interceptions. He also showed he could hurt defenses with his legs at the NFL level, rushing for 487 yards and 9 TDs.
Now comes Year 1 for Harbaugh and Year 2 for Dart in New York, as the head coach and quarterback enter that pressure cooker together for the first time. Harbaugh knows it’ll be a challenge, but he had strong words of support for Dart during an appearance on The Domonique Foxworth Show, an ESPN podcast.
In fact, Harbaugh went so far as to say that Dart’s athletic ability will give the Giants the potential to do “a lot of the stuff that we did in Baltimore with Lamar (Jackson)” as far as going after defenses both in the air and on the ground. That’s really high praise, considering that Jackson has won 2 MVP awards, but Harbaugh didn’t stop there.
“Jaxson’s capable of doing a lot of things. Like, he can live in a lot of different worlds, football-wise. He can live in a power-running game, obviously, and a power-running game protects the quarterback because you can hand the ball off and get yards and make people defend that and keep them honest,” Harbaugh said. “Then, it opens up your play-action passing game. … That stuff, we’re gonna be in those worlds. But now we can also get in the gun or we can get in the pistol, and we can run RPOs, we can run quarterback-driven runs.”
Harbaugh also downplayed Dart’s ability to stay on the field entering his second season after he dealt with concussions as a rookie that kept him out of 2 games and parts of other contests.
While Dart tries to make his mark in the NFL, the program he left behind is trying to climb that mountain and win that elusive SEC title in 2026. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about the Rebels’ chances to do just that with Pete Golding now at the controls in Oxford:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
