Michigan football matters again.
Michigan matters again because Jim Harbaugh, a former Wolverine quarterback who is the right guy at the right time, chose to come home. “Throughout my life, I have dreamed of coaching at the University of Michigan,” Harbaugh, one week removed from his 51st birthday, told the assembled media and university VIPs at an introductory press conference on Tuesday. “Now, I have the honor to live it..... I know Michigan football and I believe in Michigan football.”
Michigan should always matter because if the Wolverines did not actually invent college football, they perfected it, particularly in the Midwest. Michigan has been playing football for 135 years, since 1879, and no program has more victories (915). And until the past few perfunctory seasons under recently fired coach Brady Hoke, the Wolverines also possessed the best winning percentage in college football, a distinction the school has since yielded to Notre Dame. The most people who have ever attended a single football game—115,109, among them rapper Eminem—did so last year at Michigan Stadium, a.k.a. “The Big House,” and saw the Wolverines defeat the Fighting Irish.
Hail to the Victors? You bet.
“There is nobody better in America right now,” another former Michigan quarterback, Rick Leach, told local Ann Arbor radio station WTKA, “than Jim Harbaugh to come and take over our program.”
The press conference was held, coincidentally, on the day LeBron James celebrated his 30th birthday. The four-time NBA MVP famously returned to his Rust Belt roots last summer, and now Harbaugh was continuing the theme (“Go Midwest, young man!”). And while it may be debatable whether James means more to the Cleveland Cavaliers than Harbaugh, the 1986 Big Ten Player of the Year, means to Michigan football, there is no doubt the Wolverines are a more prominent part of their sport than the Cavs are in the NBA.
Indeed, Harbaugh’s hiring is a “When in the course of human events” moment for both him and his alma mater. In the past seven seasons, the Maize and Blue fell into irrelevance and sorely needed a fire lit under it. Harbaugh, meanwhile, despite being only two seasons removed from leading the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl (where they lost to a Baltimore Ravens team coached by his older brother, John), had worn out his welcome in Silicon Valley. He and General Manager Trent Baalke were not on speaking terms for most of the 2014 season, and it was an open secret all autumn that a Harbaugh exodus was inevitable.
This union between Harbaugh and Michigan appeared destined. “I made a decision from the heart,” said Harbaugh, who most definitely did not leave his heart in San Francisco, “which I thought was best for me and my family.”
Michigan matters again because there is no person currently walking the Earth, in or out of khakis, who is better suited to coach the Wolverines than Harbaugh. He is the personification of this august program: successful, arrogant, highly competitive and truculent. As author Michael Weinreb points out in A Season of Saturdays, his fabulous book on the history of the game, released earlier this year, Michigan may be the only school whose fight song, “The Victors,” assumes that they’ve already won. That is sooo Meeee-chigan. And so Harbaugh.
Speaking to an audience of blindly faithful believers on Tuesday, Harbaugh bristled at a reporter’s suggestion that his mission was to turn around the program. “This is Michigan,” said Harbaugh, who will earn $5 million per year in a seven-year deal before incentives kick in, “and there are no turnarounds at Michigan.”
That’s just a case of a man looking at life through Rose Bowl-colored glasses. The Wolverines finished 5-7 this season under Brady Hoke and have achieved only double-digit wins once since 2006. Worse, back in September Wolverine legend and 1991 Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard, now an analyst on ESPN’s College GameDay, stated on-air that he had attended a Michigan practice “and I didn’t see anyone willing to put in the effort to be great.”
That statement was the final nail in Hoke’s coffin.
If anyone can claim expertise in reversing the fortunes of football teams, it is Harbaugh. In 2007 he was named head coach at Stanford, which had endured five consecutive sub-.500 seasons and a 1-11 campaign the previous year. In his very first year, he led the Cardinal to arguably the most monumental upset in college football history, as Stanford traveled to No. 1 USC as a 40-point underdog and won.
In Harbaugh’s fourth and final season in Palo Alto, the Cardinal finished 12-1 and barely missed out on playing for the national championship. At a school that had always been known as soft, he created a smash-mouth atmosphere that lingers to this day. Stanford hits the way Michigan used to when Harbaugh played there.
Along the way, Harbaugh made few friends and even fewer apologies. Two years after the upset of USC at the Coliseum, Stanford returned for a rematch in 2009. This time the Cardinal pummeled the Trojans and Pete Carroll, the most vaunted program and coach of the era, with impunity. Stanford won 55-21, which was not only the worst loss of the Carroll era but also USC’s most lopsided defeat in 43 years. As a peeved Carroll and Harbaugh met at midfield afterward, the USC coach famously asked Harbaugh the question everyone who has studied him as a coach has wondered: “What’s your deal?”
Carroll was Harbaugh’s nemesis in the Pac-12 and, later, as coach of the Seattle Seahawks, in the NFC West (the two teams played for the NFC championship last January). His new nemesis is Urban Meyer, who in just three seasons at rival Ohio State has returned that program to glory. The two men were born in the same Toledo, Ohio, hospital six months apart.
The Buckeyes face Alabama on New Year’s Day in a national semifinal, and when Meyer, 50, whose three-year record in Columbus is 36-3, was asked about Harbaugh’s hiring, he stated with great diplomacy, “Any time you add a quality coach to the Big Ten or college football, obviously it’s great for the Big Ten and college football.”
Already comparisons to the “10-Year War,” the decade of clashes between Bo Schembechler and Ohio State’s iconic coach, Woody Hayes, are being made. And while these two men are not carbon copies of their predecessors, expect their rivalry to be no less intense. Besides, Meyer, like Carroll before him, enters it up two national championships to zero on Harbaugh.
Harbaugh returns to the college town—acolytes have already re-dubbed it “Ann Arbaugh”—where he spent part of his youth and all of his undergraduate years. His father, Jack, was a defensive backs coach under the legendary Bo Schembechler from 1973 to 1979, coinciding with Jim’s childhood from ages 9 to 15. In 1980 Jack Harbaugh became the defensive coordinator at Stanford, and Jim spent his final two years before college at California’s Palo Alto High School.
Harbaugh’s first homecoming took place in the summer of 1982, when he matriculated at Michigan. On Tuesday, Harbaugh smiled as he shared a tale of arriving 10 minutes late for his first team meeting and Schembechler, who had known him since his prepubescent years, gruffly telling him that he would never get on the field for the Wolverines.
Not only did Harbaugh defy Schembechler’s prophecy, trotting out onto the field wearing that iconic winged maize-and-blue helmet, but he started three seasons. During an era when college offenses were still run-oriented (this was the era of Herschel Walker and Bo Jackson), Harbaugh set an NCAA passing efficiency record that would last for 12 years. He was a terrific player, but more than that, Harbaugh was a charismatic leader. This was a quarterback who guaranteed a victory over hated rival Ohio State in Columbus his senior season and then delivered. The win sent the Wolverines to the Rose Bowl, back when that truly meant something in precincts such as Ann Arbor and Columbus.
Michigan has not mattered in recent seasons, but the value of its brand is undeniable. It is worth noting that in the seven seasons before Carroll arrived at USC, the Trojans won a middling 46 games. Then Carroll led the Trojans to a pair of BCS national championship games. In the seven seasons before Nick Saban arrived at Alabama, the Crimson Tide also won 46 games. Since, Saban has led them to three national championships and may be on the cusp of a fourth.
Michigan, in the past seven seasons, has won 46 games. As an NFL quarterback for 14 seasons, Harbaugh earned the moniker “Captain Comeback” due to his uncanny ability to lead his teams to come-from-behind wins. On Tuesday, Captain Comeback came back to the school and the town that matter most to him—and because of that, Michigan matters once more.
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