The inside story of the Giants’ John Harbaugh deal and the talks that saved it

John Harbaugh loves his F-150, so he was planning to drive that pickup 190 miles north for his sitdown with the New York Giants. He was going to spend that time alone with his football thoughts, practicing in solitude what he would say on the biggest job interview of his life.

But the Giants had another idea. They offered up the Gulfstream G500 owned by Steve Tisch, John Mara’s equal partner atop the organizational flowchart. The private jet would provide a quicker, less stressful journey from Baltimore, and it would give Harbaugh a chance to meet another passenger, Giants general manager Joe Schoen, before a marathon Wednesday inside the team’s New Jersey facility.

Harbaugh’s only face-to-face contact with a Giants rep at that point happened three days earlier at his home in Owings Mills, Md., with senior player personnel director Chris Mara, John’s younger brother. Chris had assumed a larger role in the organization since John Mara announced in September that he had been diagnosed with cancer.

Chris Mara and Harbaugh enjoyed a lunch of what the coach called the best chicken salad he could find in Baltimore. For three hours, they spoke about how the Giants ran their football operations and about the way Harbaugh ran the Ravens for 18 years before they fired him.

It was an encouraging start to the process. Chris loved the chocolate chip cookies made by Harbaugh’s wife, Ingrid, and took a few home with him. And now the most coveted free agent on the coaching market was bonding at 35,000 feet with Schoen, the relentless point man in a high-stakes recruiting battle the Giants couldn’t afford to lose. Harbaugh had strong working relationships with his Baltimore GMs, Ozzie Newsome and Eric DeCosta. He could envision building one with Schoen despite his four-year record of 22-45-1.

The all-day meetings at the facility with Tisch, John and Chris Mara, Schoen, executives and department heads — and oh, quarterback Jaxson Dart — couldn’t have gone better. The candidate made a national story out of a local restaurant, Elia Mediterranean, by dining there with Giants officials. There were handshakes and hugs all around at the end of a long but blissful day, and Harbaugh, the product of a prominent football family, felt like he was suddenly part of a new one.

The Super Bowl-winning coach and the franchise that sure needed one verbally agreed to get married. The story got out a few hours after Harbaugh landed in Baltimore, broken and confirmed by New York and national reporters with established track records of accuracy.

Contacted by The Athletic for an on-the-record notarization as the midnight hour approached, Harbaugh said he was deferring to the Giants on any announcement. “Things went well,” he texted. So well, in fact, that Harbaugh canceled his scheduled meeting with the Giants’ most serious challenger for his services, the Tennessee Titans, at his home the following day.

Harbaugh had a catered dinner ordered for his visitors, but he had too much respect for the Titans’ ownership and management team to waste their time. A couple of days later, Harbaugh’s camp thought that might have been a mistake.

In the tense Saturday hours before Harbaugh reached his five-year agreement for $100 million plus lucrative bonuses, his agent, Bryan Harlan, was still communicating with the Titans, who were still interested in hiring his client.

Harbaugh’s done deal with the Giants was not done. And the Titans weren’t the only NFL team ready to pounce if the unimaginable happened and the whole thing fell apart.

Executives around the league wondered if the delay in finalizing a contract meant there was a problem brewing between the Giants and Harbaugh. Harlan wouldn’t have been doing his job and protecting his client if he didn’t keep talking to the Titans, just as the Giants wouldn’t have been protecting themselves if they didn’t keep alternative candidates warm in the bullpen.

As both sides worked in good faith, some vultures circled above. One NFL executive told Harlan that his team’s owner was willing to hop on a plane the next day and make a nine-figure offer to Harbaugh if the Giants negotiations went cold.

And yet the Giants remained confident Harbaugh would ultimately sign with them. To ease the coach’s concerns about the chain of command and operational structure, Chris Mara had secretly met with him on Friday at an undisclosed location between New York and Baltimore, two sources with knowledge of the meeting told The Athletic. Progress was made, according to those sources.

But when asked at 9:17 that night if he was still feeling good about his prospects of becoming the Giants’ coach, the man who had New York as his No. 1 potential destination throughout the entire process, and who had said he kept picturing himself in those iconic Giants colors, responded with a shrug emoji.

Harbaugh needed it in writing that he would report to John Mara, and not to Schoen, a fact that ran counter to the way the Giants have conducted business. New York had historically been a GM-centric organization, even with tough-guy coaches and two-time champions Bill Parcells and Tom Coughlin. Harbaugh was pushing ownership to change to more of a coach-driven model, and it was taking time to get there.

“I think it’s always a little nerve-racking when you come down to the end of a tough negotiation,” Chris Mara told The Athletic on Sunday. “But I felt like I had a pretty good read on the connection that I had made with John Harbaugh. We shared the same vision and the same goal. So at the end of the day, it was all about, ‘Let’s put a structure together that we are comfortable with.’”

Schoen recused himself in the last couple of days of the chase as John Mara and Tisch deliberated, with support from Chris. This was never about money, which is a funny thing to say about a coach who just made a score a little north of $100 million. The Wednesday night news leaks had actually handed considerable leverage to the Harbaugh camp, which could have squeezed the Giants for even more cash. Harlan figured his client’s contract would get hurdled in a few weeks if Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan signed extensions. The agent guessed that if he put Harbaugh up for bidding, he might’ve gotten six years at $25 million a pop.

But Harlan is a former Chicago Bears PR executive and the son of a beloved longtime Green Bay Packers president. Flagship franchises mean a ton to him, and he preferred to place his client with the New York Giants. Harbaugh himself is an Ohio-born son of a coach and student of a league that launched in 1920 with five Ohio-based teams, including the Canton Bulldogs and Columbus Panhandles. He understood league history and his prospective employer’s place in it.

His father, Jack Harbaugh, a high school and college football lifer, effectively told his older son he’d be nuts to sign with anyone other than the Giants. John agreed with his dad, and yet he needed to ensure that he could change the infrastructure of the franchise enough to make it a consistent winner like the one he helped build in Baltimore.

This wasn’t about Schoen; the coach definitely feels he can work with the GM. Harbaugh wanted the ability to impact the entire operation, from security to training to analytics to media relations to staff size to assistant salaries to relocation expenses to you name it. And yes, in the unlikely event there’s a stalemate on draft day between Harbaugh and Schoen, there’s no longer any question who will prevail.

“I think both sides needed to huddle up and make sure we were all on the same page at the end of the day,” Chris Mara said. “It took a little more give and take for both sides to come to an agreement.”

In fact, nothing was settled as late as Saturday morning. Harlan had the Titans on standby. One league source said, “If things fell apart at 1 p.m., I would not have been surprised.”

To avoid angering the NFL, the Giants wanted to make the announcement before the 4:30 p.m. ET kickoff of the Buffalo-Denver playoff game. Assuming there would be an announcement.

“I believe in the long run this agreement came down to a conversation between John and John,” Chris Mara said.

John Mara and John Harbaugh.

Like nearly everyone else in the NFL, Harbaugh has immense respect for John Mara due to their work on competition committee issues. When the two sat down on Wednesday, Harbaugh was struck by Mara’s courage and spirit. The owner is a lion of the league who somehow overcame his grueling cancer treatments to engage in this pursuit fully.

“When I saw him, he looked good and he was sharp. He was into it,” Harbaugh told The Athletic. “He’s shown so much toughness with what he’s fighting, going to the office every day. Now I feel like I’m with him in that fight and I’m praying for him every day.”

The Giants have been in the Mara family for more than 100 years, and it was never going to be easy to merge with the modern-day Harbaugh machine. This wasn’t a hostile takeover, or even a non-hostile takeover.

This was a long-overdue reboot for a franchise that hasn’t done any meaningful winning since its fourth Super Bowl victory 14 years ago.

John Mara, 71, came to agree with his 63-year-old brother to give the 63-year-old Harbaugh the tools he needs to make the Giants contenders again. Chris Mara handled the final round of negotiations with Harbaugh on Saturday afternoon and relayed the terms required to close the deal to his brother and Tisch.

They all agreed to contact Harbaugh with the news that he was their new head coach. John Mara was the one chosen to make the call. That was the way it had to be.

Harbaugh was asked by The Athletic at 3:30 p.m. ET on Saturday when he knew the deal was definitely getting done.

“About a half-hour ago,” he said. The coach wasn’t kidding. He made the agreement official via DocuSign on Saturday night.

It’s been a whirlwind ever since. Harbaugh’s agency, Excel Sports Management, is fielding offers for endorsements and appearances, including one from “The Tonight Show.” New York has its advantages, always and forever.

“We are going to compete for the playoffs and for championships,” Harbaugh said. “I expect and want to make the playoffs next year.”

That will be easier said than done. But if it happens … if John Harbaugh becomes the first coach to win Super Bowls with two franchises, the drama that defined his Giants courtship will make for one helluva story for the grandkids.

The Giants and Harbaugh came together, overcoming the forces that were pulling them apart.

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