John Harbaugh (AP)
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Jim Harbaugh yesterday called the historic Brother Bowl about to take place down in New Orleans “a blessing and a curse’’ as he braces for what has never been seen before: two brothers squaring off to decide the NFL champion.
As joyous a time as this is for the Harbaugh family, as Jim with the 49ers and John with the Ravens get to their first Super Bowls as head coaches, there’s also a harsh reality about to hit on Feb. 3 in Super Bowl XLVII: One of them is going to lose.
“It’s a blessing because it’s my brother’s team,’’ Jim Harbaugh said. “The curse part of it would be the talk of two brothers playing in the Super Bowl and what that takes away from the players in the game. The players, they’re the ones that have the most to do with it and they’re the ones that should be talked about.’’
“I’m very proud of my brother,” he added. “I love him and that’s the blessing part, that it’s happening to him.”
The brothers are doing all they can to deflect the attention off this super sibling showdown and onto their teams. This is history in the making, but John Harbaugh said, “It’s not exactly Churchill and Roosevelt.’’ He nearly pleaded to drop the storyline as the focal point leading into this game.
“Every story has been told,’’ John Harbaugh said. “We aren’t that interesting. There’s nothing more to learn. I really hope the focus is not so much on that.’’
This unprecedented HarBowl was secured after the Ravens eliminated the Patriots 28-13 in Foxborough, a few hours after the 49ers rallied from a 17-point deficit to beat the Falcons 28-24 in Atlanta. Last year, the brothers came within one game of setting up this exact scenario, but both fell short, in agonizing fashion, in their conference title games. This time, they came through and now the world gets a peek into a unique football family.
Both brothers got their coaching careers launched with help from their father, Jack. Jim was an unpaid assistant for his dad, the head coach at Western Kentucky, for the last eight years of his NFL playing career, as he got the coaching bug early. John’s first coaching job was as a graduate assistant at Western Michigan when his dad was the head coach at that school.
John, 50, is 15 months older than Jim, 49, and took a more circuitous route to get where they are, standing one step away from hoisting the Lombardi Trophy. John was a defensive back at Miami of Ohio but never played in the NFL. He bounced around college coaching for 14 years before finally making the jump to the NFL with the Eagles in 1998.
He was Andy Reid’s special teams coordinator for nine years, but when he sensed his career was approaching a dead end he asked Reid if he could become a position coach to hopefully enhance his resume. Reid obliged, John Harbaugh became the defensive backs coach and a year later, in 2008, he was named head coach of the Ravens, beating out Rex Ryan in what at the time was considered an upset.
Jim’s ride and rise was smoother and quicker. He spent 14 years in the NFL, starting 150 games at quarterback for the Bears, Colts and Chargers. He worked with the Raiders quarterbacks in 2002 and then began a rapid ascension as the head coach at the University of San Diego and then Stanford, where he helped cultivate Andrew Luck, went 12-1 and won the Orange Bowl in 2010.
Jim, lured away from Stanford, makes more money than John, even though John has been a head coach three years longer. John makes $4 million per year, Jim $5 million.
Both Harbaughs are feisty on the sideline, are not subtle about getting their point across and can rail at perceived slights with the best of them.
“I think that the growing that he did with his team, the way he grew with us and the way that we understand and we respect each other and the conversations that we have as men, that’s what I applaud him the most about,’’ Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis said.
John is more refined around the edges when it comes to dealing with the media, and Jim, to be kind, is quirky.
“He puts the [players] first,’’ 49ers CEO Jed York said in the victorious visitors’ locker room inside the Georgia Dome on Sunday. “He might not put the media first or the rest of the league first. He is who he is and he’s comfortable with it.’’
Humble is not a word often associated with Jim Harbaugh, except when it comes to brother John. Jim recently told Comcast SportsNet that John is the best coach in the NFL. “I’m half the coach he is,’’ Jim said.
The brothers are close, openly rooting for each other’s teams. They talk on the phone several times every week and they involve their father, who is retired after 19 years as a head coach, by sending him game videos to critique and offer suggestions.
They do not want to dwell on this family feud, but everyone around them realizes how special it is.
“Two brothers going up against each other … it’s kind of a storybook ending,’’ Ravens linebacker Paul Kruger said.
paul.schwartz@nypost.com