How Chargers’ Jim Harbaugh, Greg Roman formed long football partnership: ‘He keeps it about winning’ (2024)

Adam Snyder saw the video of Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman, and he immediately picked up his phone.

His first call was to Joe Staley, his former offensive linemate with the San Francisco 49ers.

Snyder had to make sure Staley was aware of what their former head coach and offensive coordinator were up to in Southern California.

“Have you seen what Harbaugh and Roman are doing?” Snyder asked.

Staley confirmed: “Oh yeah.”

Harbaugh and Roman had reconnected with the Los Angeles Chargers — Harbaugh again as head coach and Roman as offensive coordinator. The Chargers posted a short documentary on April 16 that detailed where Harbaugh and Roman had been living in their first months after joining the organization: the Waterfront RV Park in Huntington Beach, Calif.

every guy watching this just said “hell yeah” pic.twitter.com/Ir7Xpyv0VC

— Los Angeles Chargers (@chargers) April 16, 2024

Snyder called Staley, then several other 49ers teammates. The reactions were identical.

“It’s classic Harbaugh and Greg,” Snyder said.

“I wish I had thought of the idea when I first moved out here,” said Jonathan Goodwin, who played three seasons at center for Harbaugh and Roman with the 49ers and is now on the Chargers staff as an offensive assistant.

Harbaugh and Roman’s relationship has grown and developed over nearly 25 years — from the Carolina Panthers practice fields in 2001, to two seasons at Stanford, to four with the 49ers, to the Waterfront RV Park and, now, to Los Angeles County with the Chargers’ official move to their new facility in El Segundo, Calif.

It is a partnership built on shared football ideology and philosophy. Running the ball. Dominating the line of scrimmage. Physicality. As former Stanford and 49ers center Chase Beeler put it: “This very blunt, in-your-face, smash-your-nose-in, smash-your-facemask-in style of football.”

It is a partnership that has blossomed largely because Harbaugh allows and pushes Roman to be “innovative,” according to former players and coaches.

It is a partnership that has but one goal.

“He keeps it about winning,” Roman said of Harbaugh, “which is how I like it.”

On Sunday against the Las Vegas Raiders, Harbaugh and Roman will coach their first regular-season NFL game together since 2014.

The partnership resumes.

The Chargers hope it will bring them — and their star quarterback, Justin Herbert — to a place they have never been before: a Super Bowl victory.

“You’re talking about a deep relationship,” said Geep Chryst, the 49ers’ quarterbacks coach from 2011 to 2014. “It’s a relationship that just didn’t happen overnight.”

Harbaugh’s playing career was nearing its end in the fall of 2001.

After two seasons with the Chargers in 1999 and 2000, Harbaugh spent the ensuing training camp with the Detroit Lions. He was cut ahead of the regular season.

That November, the Panthers were dealing with injuries at quarterback. Rookie starter Chris Weinke sprained his shoulder. Backup Dameyune Craig was placed on injured reserve. The Panthers had only one healthy quarterback, third-stringer Matt Lytle. They signed Harbaugh, then 37 years old, on Nov. 7 ahead of a game against the St. Louis Rams.

Harbaugh dressed for six games over the remainder of that season, his final as a player in the NFL.

On that Panthers staff? Roman, who had worked his way up from unpaid strength and conditioning coach in 1995 to assistant offensive line coach in 2001.

One day that season, as Roman recalls, Harbaugh was warming up. Roman was within earshot.

“You know, Greg,” Harbaugh said in between throws, according to Roman. “Someday when I’m a head coach, I’m going to hire you.”

“He doesn’t remember it, of course,” Roman joked in February.

Roman had made an impression. At 29 years old, he was a “grinder,” according to Paul Boudreau, the Panthers’ offensive line coach in 2001.

In college at Division III John Carroll, Roman had played nose tackle. He earned all-conference honors in 1994. His transition from defensive player to offensive coach had been fueled by the intersection of work ethic and opportunity.

“His job as a young coach is to do anything everybody tells him to do,” Boudreau said, “and he would do it.”

Roman was not yet a run-game visionary. But he was laying the foundation.

“He would watch a million hours of film and basically try to learn from that,” Boudreau said.

Harbaugh had already formulated his life plan when he was playing those two sunset seasons with the Chargers: “I’m going to play as long as I can, then coach, then die.”

The second phase was quickly approaching as he had what Boudreau called a “cup of coffee” with the Panthers. And Roman, while devouring tape and accepting every thankless job, had sparked something in Harbaugh.

“As a young coach, you go over and catch balls for the quarterback or you go over and you snap shotgun snaps to the quarterback,” Boudreau said. “I’m sure Jim saw that in a young Greg Roman, and you get into those situations where, if you start thinking about being a head coach, you start thinking about, who do I want to work for me? Do you want a guy that is a self-promoter, or do you want a guy that’s going to do anything it takes to be successful for your team?”

Eight years later, Harbaugh followed through.

Harbaugh arrived at Stanford in late December 2006. He was largely unproven, having just spent his first three seasons as a head coach — at any level — at the University of San Diego, a non-scholarship FCS school. And he faced a mammoth challenge. The Cardinal were coming off a 1-11 season, their worst finish in 46 years.

In his first two seasons, Harbaugh produced incremental improvements. Stanford went 4-8 in 2007 and 5-7 in 2008.

That offseason, he went looking for offensive inspiration. And he found it in an old friend: Roman.

Roman had made two more stops in the NFL after he and Harbaugh were together in Carolina in 2001. He spent four seasons with the Houston Texans from 2002 to ’05, the first two as tight ends coach and the next two as quarterbacks coach. He then was the assistant offensive line coach with the Baltimore Ravens for two seasons in 2006 and ’07. In 2008, he returned to his alma mater, Holy Spirit High in Absecon, N.J., to call plays for the first time.

Harbaugh hired Roman as run game coordinator ahead of the 2009 season. Roman said that soon after he accepted the job at Stanford, he got an offer “from a very, very good NFL team with a Hall of Fame coach at the time.”

“I thought about it, and I said, ‘I think I’m gonna go work for Jim,’” Roman said. “That was a great decision.”

Beeler was entering his junior season when Roman joined Harbaugh’s staff. That spring, Beeler said he noticed “a new kind of level of sophistication and professionalism.”

“There was a definite shift in philosophy, a definite shift in scheme, once G-Ro arrived,” Beeler added.

The legacy of Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense was still alive and well at Stanford in the first two years of Harbaugh’s Stanford stint, according to Beeler. Walsh — who had two stints as Cardinal head coach, one in the late ’70s and one in the early ’90s — was appointed as a special assistant to the athletic director in 2004. In 2005, he was named interim athletic director.

Beeler had transferred to Stanford from Oklahoma ahead of the 2007 season. Walsh, who died in July 2007, was still involved with the athletic department when Beeler got his transfer paperwork.

Beeler said the team was committed “to this idea of sticking with a West Coast-style offense and very much trying to spread out the defense.”

Roman’s arrival brought a new offensive identity.

“We’re just going to ram it down your throat,” Beeler said. “And so we ended up building the offense around power.”

Power, in its most basic form, is a run scheme that utilizes two lead blockers, typically a fullback and a pulling guard.

“You’re going to know what’s coming more likely than not,” Beeler said. “And we don’t care because we’re just going to out-hustle you, out-physical you.”

The shift started with a mindset. Over two years, Harbaugh and Roman built on that mindset, adding what Beeler called “intellectual flourish” to the offensive scheme.

The creativity was possible only because of the quality of the roster. In 2009 and 2010, the Cardinal’s offensive depth chart was loaded with future NFL talent. Andrew Luck at quarterback. Toby Gerhart and then Stepfan Taylor at running back. Jonathan Martin, David DeCastro and Beeler on the offensive line. Coby Fleener and Zach Ertz at tight end. Doug Baldwin at receiver.

Luck had tremendous capacity, even as a 20-year-old in 2009. Beeler said the playbook grew to eventually include between 500 and 600 plays — even more if you include “all the permutations at your disposal at any given time.” There were so many plays, in fact, that Luck could not fit all of them on his call-sheet wristband. Beeler had to start wearing a wristband of his own midway through the 2009 season. Beeler said he originally was wearing the play list on his belt.

“That didn’t work for a whole variety of reasons,” he said. “You can imagine what that looked like with Andrew trying to read it.”

Harbaugh and Roman’s offense included more than 30 variations of power alone, according to Beeler. Then came the play-action passes off those power looks. Then all the different ways the offense could get to those power looks using various motions and shifts.

With each step, the players proved proficient. And that allowed Harbaugh and Roman to “layer on the next piece of complexity,” Beeler said, like the read-option game, or quarterback-sprint concepts.

The offense, including Luck, could handle more and more at the line of scrimmage. At first, the offense would come to the line with two plays from the same family — for instance, two variations of power. That grew to three plays from the same family. Then three plays with no relation. Then three plays with a bevy of complex shifts. It kept building and building until, Beeler admits, “it got a little crazy there” at the end of 2010.

Beeler remembers plays in which he would initially not line up over the ball and then rotate in for the snap. In Harbaugh’s final game as head coach, the Cardinal beat Virginia Tech, 40-12, in the Orange Bowl. The offense unitized a shift in that game called “Montage,” according to Beeler. The series of motions and shifts themselves took between 15 and 20 seconds to complete. Stanford rushed for 247 yards in the win.

Stanford went 8-5 in 2009 and made its first bowl appearance since 2001. The offense broke the team rushing record that had stood since 1949. A year later, Harbaugh led the Cardinal to a 12-1 finish and that Orange Bowl victory, the school’s first bowl win since 1996. The offense finished 58 yards short of breaking the rushing record again.

“It introduced to me the idea that there’s like an intellectual side to football, there’s a strategy side,” Beeler said. “It’s like playing chess. You get to the line of scrimmage, and because you’ve got this diversity of plays at your disposal, now you can do really exciting and really unique, interesting things.”

“If he was a chess player,” Harbaugh said of Roman, “he would be one of those guys that would be elite in how many moves they can think ahead.”

Harbaugh and Roman left for San Francisco that offseason, bringing their burgeoning running game to the NFL.

The 49ers held their offensive install meetings on Wednesdays during Harbaugh and Roman’s four seasons in San Francisco.

The offensive linemen on those teams walked into meetings with a sense of giddy anticipation.

“Dude, what are we going to do this week?” Snyder remembers thinking. “What’s going to be in the game plan? How are we going to attack?”

“We knew he was gonna have something fun, new and creative,” Goodwin added of Roman. “Things that other people weren’t trying in the league.”

Perhaps the best example of this was when the 49ers unveiled their Pistol formation package after Colin Kaepernick took over for Alex Smith at quarterback during the 2012 season.

Roman had been studying the Pistol offense for years at this stage. Kaepernick’s college coach at Nevada, Chris Ault, invented the system. Harbaugh and Roman had implemented some Pistol formation concepts into their Stanford offense, according to Beeler.

Kaepernick’s Wolfpack had dropped 52 points on Cal, Stanford’s biggest rival, early in the 2010 season. Harbaugh had lost back-to-back Big Games to Cal in 2008 and 2009, and, according to Chryst, he was “investing a lot of time and energy and resources to try to even the score on Cal.”

Goodwin was in his 11th NFL season in 2012. He admits his initial reaction to the Pistol additions was, “Phew.”

“Now I had to come into meetings and I’m having to learn a lot of new things,” he said. “So I’m having to study a lot more than I’m used to.”

But as the season progressed, Goodwin said, “We really embraced it, and we loved it. “

Harbaugh and Roman had built a culture with their offensive line group. Snyder compared playing offensive line in a Harbaugh-Roman offense to “a kid on Christmas.”

“Taking the fear out of playing offensive line,” Snyder said. “It’s stressful. If we don’t do our job, guys get injured and guys get hurt, and they pay those guys a lot of money. And so you take pride in that, of course. But you’re not playing scared. You know your head coach has your back. You know your OC has your back. You know this offense is going to be built around putting you as a lineman in a position to be successful.”

Initially an injury replacement for Smith, Kaepernick became the full-time starter for a run to the Super Bowl. The 49ers leaned into their Pistol-heavy offense.

“They’re bold, they’re courageous,” Chryst said of Harbaugh and Roman. “Jim was most proud of G-Ro in San Francisco when we felt like we were doing cutting-edge stuff in the run game, and not kind of a standard-issue NFL run package.”

The 49ers went 6-10 in 2010. In 2011, with Harbaugh as head coach and Roman as offensive coordinator, they went 13-3 and made the NFC Championship Game — a monumental accomplishment considering the offseason was effectively wiped away because of the lockout.

“The amount of detail and importance on those small details, on those finite details, between Jim and Greg’s offense blew my mind,” Snyder said. “They’re just two peas in a pod, man. And their relationship kind of extended to us players. They just made such a fun environment to be a part of.”

After a 12-4 finish and a third straight NFC title game in 2013, the Harbaugh experience in San Francisco soured. The 49ers went 8-8 in 2014.

Harbaugh left for Michigan that offseason. After two seasons as OC for the Buffalo Bills, Roman ended up in Baltimore working on John Harbaugh’s staff. Roman started with the Ravens as a senior offensive assistant and tight ends coach in 2017. He graduated to assistant head coach and tight ends coach in 2018 before taking over as OC in 2019.

Over four seasons as a play caller in Baltimore, Roman led an offense that ranked No. 1 in the NFL in rushing by EPA per play, according to TruMedia. Quarterback Lamar Jackson, thriving using some of those same Pistol concepts, won MVP in 2019.

In that same span, the Ravens ranked 15th in passing EPA per dropback, according to TruMedia. They made the playoffs in three of the four seasons but won only one playoff game. Jackson suffered a season-ending ankle injury in 2021. He sat out the final four games, and the Ravens missed the playoffs. In 2022, Jackson suffered a knee injury in Week 13. He missed the final five games of the regular season and the Ravens’ wild-card round playoff loss to the Cincinnati Bengals.

In 2022, the Ravens finished 26th in passing EPA per dropback. Roman resigned after the season.

“Sometimes the ego of the coordinator, it’s his career and all that bulls—,” Boudreau said. “Well, that gets you nothing but losing football because you’re not going to be calling the play to win the game. You’re going to call it to pad your stats. And in Greg’s case, OK, maybe he didn’t get a head-coaching job because he ran the ball too much. But John Harbaugh was pretty happy with playoffs every year.”

When Roman was introduced to local L.A. media in February, he framed his offensive vision rather succinctly: “Can you imagine Justin Herbert with a great running game?”

The answer to that question, at this point in Herbert’s career, lives only in the hypothetical.

In four seasons with Herbert as the starter, the Chargers have never ranked higher than 15th in EPA per designed rush, according to TruMedia. They have ranked in the bottom half of the league in three of Herbert’s four seasons. They have ranked in the bottom four in two of his four seasons, culminating in a dead-last ranking in 2023.

On aggregate, the Chargers ranked 29th in EPA per designed rush from 2020 to ’23.

Herbert has certainly never played professional football with a great running game.

Harbaugh and Roman are determined to turn the hypothetical into a reality because they believe it will help them achieve the central tenet of their partnership.

“What’s the goal? What are you really chasing?” Roman said. “For us, it’s chasing winning.”

How Herbert fits into the Harbaugh-Roman philosophy and scheme will help tell the story of this 2024 Chargers season.

Herbert will be a factor in the running game, though not necessarily as a runner himself, given he missed three weeks of training camp with a plantar fascia injury in his right foot. As Luck displayed at Stanford, the system requires what Chryst called a “field general in the most positive sense.”

“The quarterback is responsible for more than just throwing the ball to an open target or having a sophisticated passing attack,” Chryst said. “He’s going to need to know what the right run check is. It’s one of the most layered run (schemes): If they do this, then we can do this. If (they) do this, we can check to a second play or even a third play. And the person that’s responsible for it is the quarterback.”

Chargers players reported for the offseason program on April 2. That day, Harbaugh and Roman held their first install meetings.

Tight end Hayden Hurst, who played for Roman in Baltimore and signed with the Chargers as a free agent in March, came away from these initial meetings with what he called “a mantra of this place.”

“We’re going to be physical, we’re going to come at you,” he said. “When you see us pop up on the schedule, it’s gonna be a long Sunday.”

What made that mantra so obvious?

“You can read it word-for-word off the PowerPoints,” Hurst said. “It’s the Harbaugh mentality.”

The Harbaugh mentality. The Roman mentality. Where one ends and the other begins does not really matter.

“At times, you would think they were brothers,” Goodwin said.

“They probably have some knock-down drag-outs behind the closed door,” Snyder said, “and then they come out smiling with blood on their nose.”

What does matter is the shift that has been and will continue occurring in Los Angeles.

“Be able to physically dominate whoever it is that you’re going to play against and let that be your identity,” Beeler said.

The same shift that happened at Stanford. And in San Francisco.

“They’ve been through the trenches together in terms of turning programs around,” Snyder said.

“G-Ro understands — having not just worked for Jim but worked for John — kind of how he’s wired,” Chryst said.

As Roman and Harbaugh gazed over the Pacific Ocean together in February and March, they pondered a new challenge and aimed for a familiar goal.

“It’s two guys just sitting out by the campfire in the parking lot talking football,” Snyder said. “I don’t know how many other conversations there were aside from, ‘How can we win football games?’”

(Top photos of Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman:
Harry How / Getty Images and Kirby Lee / USA Today)