The best coach Jim Harbaugh knows is John Harbaugh

— -- OWINGS MILLS, Md. -- John Harbaugh retrieved a basketball in his backyard and asked a visitor if he wanted to shoot. His half court included a glass backboard and an asphalt surface marked by regulation free throw and 3-point lines. In other words, it was a place for competition -- not passing the time. It's the Harbaugh way, you know.

Set back from a winding country road and protected by towering trees in the front, his property has the feel of an upscale obstacle course. You see a badminton field on one side of the home Harbaugh shares with wife, Ingrid, and daughter, Alison, and a wall and net for the shooting and gathering of lacrosse balls on the other. You find a pingpong table next to the swimming pool and billiards, shuffleboard, air hockey and video games inside the renovated barn near the basketball court in the back. You face one test of skill and will after another at the Harbaughs' house, and on this day, one of four coaches in NFL history to win 10 postseason games before suffering his first losing season (Don Shula, Joe Gibbs, and George Seifert are the others) was not acing his.

Under a hot, midsummer sun, Harbaugh wasn't making as many perimeter shots as the writer there to interview him. The head coach of the Baltimore Ravens must've been counting because soon enough, he quit muttering about his aim and moved the competition to a more favorable location, the upstairs shuffleboard table, where his touch was reminiscent of an in-his-prime Tiger Woods on the Augusta National greens.

Harbaugh turned on the electric scoreboard, and with his old NFL Special Teams Coach of the Year trophy stationed on the nearest window sill, he began deftly sliding his red discs from one end of the table to the other while blowing the novice guest and his blue discs right out of the barn. It was 2-0, 5-0, 7-0, 9-0, whatever, before the visitor started wondering when his host would stop keeping score. Every time Harbaugh won a round, he walked by that damn scoreboard button and pressed it. He was up 14-0, two touchdowns, before he applied the mercy rule and decided it was time to sit and talk.

"You're 2-0 against your brother, Jim," he was told, including a regular-season victory over San Francisco in 2011.

"I'm 3-0," Harbaugh corrected, including his preseason victory over San Francisco in 2014.

It's funny how this has played out, the story of the only brothers ever to stand as opposing head coaches in the championship game of a major American team sport. If you asked someone entirely unfamiliar with the NFL and college football to spend a few months on social media monitoring discussion of the Harbaughs, he or she would emerge with the distinct impression that the former San Francisco 49ers and current Michigan Wolverines coach is by far the more decorated brother and John is the one who still hasn't quite figured it all out.

Jim is sleeping over at a recruit's house. Jim is climbing a tree in a recruit's yard. Jim is tweaking the Ohio State athletic director over the tattoo scandal that ended the Jim Tressel era. Jim is defending his sweeping satellite-camp tour and nuking the suggestion from Alabama coach Nick Saban that such camps could lead to NCAA violations by tweeting a reminder that Saban's program had already broken NCAA rules. Jim is starring in a video with the rapper Bailey, shouting "Who's got it better than us?"

The correct answer, actually, isn't "nobody." John Harbaugh, 53, is a better football coach than Jim Harbaugh, 52, even if John swears Jim is better and even if Jim has nearly 660,000 Twitter followers, while John doesn't own a Twitter account.

"John is the best coach I know, the best I've ever come across or competed against," Jim said. "I'm envious of the grasp he has of the entire game. I think offensively and with quarterback play, I'm right there with him. But I've got a ways to go in terms of special teams and understanding defense the way he does. I'm half as good as John is, but I'm trying."

Jim spoke of how his older brother knocked hurdles down for him, from Little League through the NFL, yet John accepts why their family tale is often built around the younger son of Jack Harbaugh, the coaching lifer who has recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery in the spring. Jim was the full-scholarship quarterback at Michigan and an NFL starter who spent 10 years as a college and pro assistant before becoming a college head coach. John was the partial-scholarship defensive back at Miami (Ohio) who rarely played and spent a quarter-century as a college and NFL assistant -- never rising to the level of offensive or defensive coordinator -- before he landed his first head-coaching job in Baltimore.