Harbaugh Says Giants Will Build Jaxson Dart’s Offense Like Lamar Jackson’s in Baltimore
John Harbaugh didn’t take the New York Giants job blind. He took it, in part, because he watched Jaxson Dart’s rookie tape and saw a familiar shape — the same shape he spent eight seasons building an offense around in Baltimore.
“I mean, when I looked at the film, I saw a talented quarterback. I saw the same thing I saw with Lamar Jackson,” Harbaugh said of Dart, according to the Irish Star.
On Monday, Harbaugh went further, appearing on The Domonique Foxworth Show to lay out exactly how he plans to build the Giants’ offense around Dart’s legs and arm — and why he isn’t sweating the hits that come with it.
Harbaugh’s plan: the Lamar Jackson playbook, with Dart at the controls
Harbaugh spent 18 seasons in Baltimore and coached Lamar Jackson to two MVP awards before their run ended after the 2025 season, per Yahoo Sports. Now he’s rebuilding that same offensive identity around a quarterback who reminds him of Jackson in almost every way — a runner first who can also throw it deep.
“Jaxson’s capable of doing a lot of things,” Harbaugh said on the Foxworth Show. “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 make people defend that and keep them honest. Then it opens up your play-action passing game.”
From there, Harbaugh described a scheme built to stack advantages. Get in the pistol. Run RPOs. Let Dart’s legs force a defense to commit extra bodies to the box, then punish that decision through the air.
“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 with Jaxson Dart, a lot of the stuff that we had in Baltimore with Lamar, as well,” Harbaugh said.
The logic is mechanical, not just philosophical. RPOs — run-pass options, where the quarterback reads a defender after the snap and decides on the fly whether to hand off or throw — force a defense to defend the run and the pass with the same bodies. Get that right, and offensive linemen see fewer defenders in the box, which means more double-teams and longer blocks up front.
“That’s passes that are almost run reads,” Harbaugh said. “So now if they want to defend the pass, the quick-game pass, you can just hand the ball off to a softer front and give your guards and centers and tackles a chance to double-team defensive linemen off the ball because there’s less people in there to get off the double team quicker and you can block people longer.”
It’s a formula Harbaugh trusts because he’s run it before, at scale, with a quarterback who shares Dart’s game-breaking instincts. “So, if he can do it, then we’re gonna do it, and that’s what we’re planning on doing,” he said.
The hit tolerance question: what Baltimore taught Harbaugh about Dart
Dart’s rookie season gave Giants fans a preview of the upside — and the risk. Across 12 starts in 2025, he showed off the same dual-threat instincts Harbaugh is now building around. He also took a beating doing it, playing through a tweaked left ankle in October and getting checked for concussions multiple times, missing two games with a head injury along the way.
That workload has fueled a familiar question in Giants circles: does Dart need to slide more, get down faster, and stop absorbing hits he doesn’t need to take? Harbaugh has heard this exact concern before — almost word for word.
“I remember hearing the same thing about Lamar, and the same things were said about Lamar really every year but especially after the first season,” Harbaugh said. “‘It’s unsustainable the way he plays. It’s never gonna last. You’ve got to protect him. He can’t run as much.’ You say something like that to Lamar, and he kinda just looks at you like you’ve got three heads.”
Harbaugh’s response isn’t to bubble-wrap his quarterback. It’s to trust him to read the moment.
“I just knew, I trusted that he was gonna protect himself because he wants to be out there and he wants to play, and it’s not the type of sport where you can put yourself in bubble wrap,” Harbaugh said. “You’re gonna play ball and you’re gonna get tackled and things can happen out there. But I do think playing the game in a way that respects that there are other guys out there that are capable of doing damage to you when you have the ball in your hands, especially for the quarterback, is important. I trust that Jaxson Dart understands that.”
What changes for Dart in Year 2
The Giants are betting that a better offensive line and a heavier ground-game emphasis will naturally cut down on Dart’s exposure, even without asking him to run less by design. Fewer negative plays up front means fewer scramble situations where Dart has to create something out of nothing — and fewer hits along the way.
But Harbaugh’s offense isn’t built to eliminate the quarterback run. It’s built to make it a weapon, the way it was in Baltimore for the better part of a decade. That means the burden shifts to Dart himself: knowing when a gain is worth the extra yard against a closing linebacker, and when it’s time to get down.
It’s the same evolution every young dual-threat quarterback goes through — reading not just the defense, but the moment, and understanding that NFL defenders close space faster and hit harder than anything he saw in college or as a rookie learning the league on the fly.
Harbaugh also addressed the offseason dust-up between Dart and teammate Abdul Carter over Dart’s public support for President Donald Trump during the same Foxworth Show appearance, saying the team used it as a chance to grow together rather than a distraction, according to Yardbarker.