In calmer days, when John Harbaugh was more than a year removed from leading the Ravens to victory in Super Bowl XLVII, team owner Steve Bisciotti explained the interplay among himself, his coach and then-general manager Ozzie Newsome.

“I’m not a patient man,” Bisciotti told The Baltimore Sun in September 2014. “[John’s] not a patient man. So, just like I rely on [former Ravens president] Dick [Cass] for business, I rely on Ozzie sleeping on things. Whenever John and I have an issue we agree with or strongly disagree with, it’s bring in Ozzie. Let’s get the third opinion.”

Call it checks and balances. Call it creative friction. Newsome used to refer to it as “scrimmaging.” But that back-and-forth between executives, all of whom report independently to the owner, has been a hallmark of Bisciotti’s Ravens.

It will come to the fore again now that Bisciotti has fired Harbaugh and begun his search for a leader to reinvigorate the Ravens’ championship ambitions.

Bisciotti has made precious few public comments about the Ravens or their leadership structure over the last five years — though that will change Tuesday when he and general manager Eric DeCosta are scheduled to hold a press conference. Over his first decade and a half as owner, he sprinkled enough hints throughout his state-of-the team addresses to give us a sense of how he might operate over the coming days and weeks.

If he follows his script from 18 years ago, when he chose Harbaugh after abruptly firing Brian Billick, Bisciotti will lean hard on DeCosta, Newsome and his other football decision-makers to give him a curated list of candidates. He’ll spend good chunks of time with the ones he likes best — Harbaugh got about 15 hours in 2008 — and then trust his gut on the final call.

Bisciotti cherishes delegation and collaboration, just as he did when he and his cousin, Jim Davis, built their company, Aerotek, from two desks in the basement of a rented Annapolis townhouse into the third-largest private staffing firm in the world. He also trusts, absolutely, his instincts on choosing a leader, even if his preferred candidate lacks an obvious track record.

However the Ravens’ search plays out, it will be an expression of the owner’s management proclivities and personal style. Bisciotti, 65, knows what he likes.

“You have to be willing to do things the masses would never do. That’s how you separate yourself from the masses,” he said at the news conference introducing Harbaugh in January 2008. “You go with your instincts, and I think I have pretty good instincts.”

As much as he relies on his antennae for talent, Bisciotti puts just as much faith in the collaborative process through which his top lieutenants flood him with information on the best candidates. He began that same news conference 18 years ago by thanking the seven team executives who narrowed the pool to six potential coaches.

“These guys delivered me six people that could be my head coach,” Bisciotti said at the time. “In order to get a reputation to end up in that final six, in order to garner the kind of positive thoughts people communicated to us … you’ve spent 25 years doing a million little things right or you don’t get the kind of endorsements that we got out of these six candidates. So I was never nervous.”

Never nervous even though the process steered him to Harbaugh, who had never been a head coach at any level, never coordinated an NFL offense or defense.

Kevin Byrne, the Ravens’ former senior vice president for public and community relations, was one of the advisers carrying out that search.

Each person called on his contacts from around the football world to build dossiers of useful information on each of a dozen or so initial candidates. They would gather at least once a day to bat around what they’d learned. “Steve’s style, what I remember is that he’s in charge,” Byrne recalled. “But he’s very open to let his group of leaders express themselves so that, in the end, we come up with a common good answer for all of us.”

Once the Ravens invited their finalists for interviews, Bisciotti’s gift for asking thought-provoking questions took center stage.

“Steve asks questions that are unusual,” Byrne said one candidate told him. “But you end up examining yourself. Have I thought enough about this?”

Harbaugh found the owner intriguing enough that he took notes on how Bisciotti conducted their introductory interview.

Bisciotti asked what he was doing. “Well, I’m a long shot for this job,” Byrne recalled Harbaugh saying. “But I might as well learn something.”

Those nuggets cut through the crush of information.

“Steve has a knack to spot the unusual,” Byrne said. “John’s the perfect example. There were more logical candidates.”

So don’t be surprised if Biscotti’s next hire is not atop the speculative lists currently circulating or if he takes his time making a choice, even though the Ravens began Zoom interviews with candidates Thursday. He needed 20 days to choose Harbaugh, in part because his first choice (and a hotter candidate), Jason Garrett, opted to stay with the Dallas Cowboys. Bisciotti won’t be rushed by external forces.

“I don’t want to speak for him, but I think it’s because he believes there’s not just one out there,” Byrne said. “If somebody is going to threaten us by saying, ‘I’m going to take the Browns job today unless you make me an offer,’ Steve’s probably willing to say, ‘Well, you should take that, because we’re not ready to make our decision today.’ He wouldn’t be uncomfortable saying there’s more than one person in the whole world who could be a successful head coach for the Ravens. He’s not sitting there today panicking about losing such-and-such.”

Bisciotti can operate that way because he’s comfortable in his own skin but also because he’s holding an excellent hand with a stable, winning franchise, a well-regarded general manager and a two-time NFL Most Valuable Player at quarterback. Analysts have called it the most attractive NFL job opening in years.

For some NFL teams, the coach is de facto general manager. For others, he is subordinate to the top football decision-maker. The Ravens are not alone in treating their coach and general manager as equal collaborators who form a three-legged stool (four when you include the team president on big-picture decisions) with Bisciotti. But they stand out for their proud devotion to this multiheaded structure.

Byrne detailed it in a 2015 column on the team’s website.

“Here’s what I know: there are only a handful of NFL teams where the head coach and the general manager are clearly on the same page,” he wrote. “Insecurity is rampant in this pro football world, and accusations abound.”

He noted the doors to Newsome’s and Harbaugh’s offices were less than 6 feet apart and the two men bumped into one another a half-dozen times in a typical day, a designed coziness that persisted after DeCosta succeeded Newsome in 2019.

“Neither of us is afraid to honestly voice an opinion, and we’ll ‘scrimmage,’ as Ozzie says. But, there’s never a trump card situation,” Harbaugh told Byrne. “We’re not walking out on each other. We’re like two lawyers in a court of law presenting our cases. We’re not seeing who has the most power here. It is always about what is best for the team.”

Bisciotti refers to this as “care-frontation.” In other words, you have to care enough about your colleague’s opinion to tell him you don’t think he’s right in a given case. That extends to him. Yes-men are anathema to the Ravens owner.

“It encourages everybody to speak their mind without fear,” Byrne said. “I’m sure many people have worked in organizations where they’re listening to drumbeats from the owner or the president. But with Steve you’ve got to care enough to tell him the truth. Even Art Modell, who welcomed others’ opinions, he never invited it to the extent Steve would. Steve almost demands it from you. ‘Do you really believe that, or are you just repeating what I just said?’”

It remains to be seen if the front office setup will persist with a new coach far less steeped in the Ravens way than DeCosta, who has spent his entire career in the organization. But Newsome’s stature was greater than Harbaugh’s in 2008, and he gracefully welcomed the younger man as a friendly sparring partner with whom he’d hammer out a winning roster. Newsome was DeCosta’s teacher, and Bisciotti remains in place as collaborator in chief, so it stands to reason that the team’s brain trust will stick with its modus operandi.

“You have to make the best decision for the organization, and you do that by talking about things, not running from them, not closing your door,” DeCosta said when he was introduced as general manager in 2019. “You talk about these things. You confront the issue. You confront the evaluation or the player or the decision, and you come to an agreement that’s the best decision for the organization. Yeah, we’ve never always been aligned on every single issue or every single player. But in the end I always feel like we’ve always made the best decision, regardless.”