On the night of Jan. 8, Jim Harbaugh finished his story. This year, he delivered a rare gift to his alma mater: he won a consensus national championship. Even Harbaugh’s mentor, the legendary Bo Schembechler, couldn’t get the Michigan Wolverines higher than a No. 2 ranking in the final polls. The win-at-all-costs and widely-disliked Harbaugh, who was suspended for three games earlier this season by Michigan for recruiting violations and another three by the NCAA for improperly scouting opponents, did it Schembechler’s old-fashioned way: he rammed it down everyone’s throats, with a smash-mouth running game and a defense laden with NFL size and speed.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. The 1995 NFL Comeback Player of the Year has long been known for rebuilding teams to a championship level, but then stopping short when his intensity waned and his eye wandered — the University of San Diego, Stanford, and the San Francisco 49ers were all brought to the brink of greatness, then left suddenly.
Harbaugh had arrived at Michigan with a lot of big promises and tough talk after returning the 49ers to glory and nearly beating the Baltimore Ravens, coached by older brother John, in power outage-marred Super Bowl XLVII. But those 49ers, led by future social justice superstar Colin Kaepernick, regressed in Harbaugh’s final two seasons. And his first five seasons at Michigan were merely good, not great. During the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the bottom fell out for Harbaugh; his team went 2-4, and he was forced to make major changes to his coaching staff.
Time was running out for the ultra-competitive man who coached his own children to maximize their Halloween candy caches, refused to let them win at board games, bought additional time for working by wearing the same cheap pairs of khakis every single day, and continued to challenge active NFL quarterbacks to passing competitions well into his 50s.
The changes worked. Sherrone Moore and Jesse Minter, the offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator, respectively, have proven themselves to be two of the best young assistant coaches in the country; each won games while coaching the team in Harbaugh’s absence. The players have gotten bigger, faster, and stronger — Aidan Hutchinson, the 6-foot-7-inch, 280-pound second-generation defensive end who was the second overall pick by the Detroit Lions in 2022, serves as the model for the massive offensive and defensive linemen who bullied the Alabama Crimson Tide and Washington Huskies en route to the 2024 national title. Running backs Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards are future NFL starters. Quarterback J.J. McCarthy is the spitting image of Harbaugh himself, a reliable game manager in a run-first offense who nonetheless has surprising speed, toughness, and a pro-caliber arm.
It’s Big Ten football, all size and power, and it didn’t seem like it could ever work again. The last Big Ten team to win a title, Ohio State in 2014, did so with a coach, Urban Meyer, who had cut his teeth in the Southeastern Conference and fielded a team not dissimilar to his prior Florida Gators squads. The balance of power had obviously shifted southward long ago; Alabama coach Nick Saban has won seven national titles coaching in the SEC, more than the entire Big Ten Conference has since 1970.
This didn’t matter to the “Michigan Man.” Harbaugh, son of longtime Western Kentucky University coach Jack Harbaugh, brought it all back. The bowling-ball downfield runners. The gigantic linemen. The quarterback who could do more in a glitzier offense, but here does the most important things of all — controls the flow of the offense, milks the clock, and rises to the occasion when his arm is needed. The only compromise to the old model popularized by Schembechler and his arch-rival Woody Hayes at Ohio State is speed. Everyone on Michigan’s roster, especially the cornerbacks and safeties who made Washington star quarterback Michael Penix Jr. look like a future draft bust, is incredibly fast.
It’s understandable why Harbaugh is so disliked: he’s the son of a good coach and player, played good football at a blue-chip program for a Hall of Fame coach, carved out a decent NFL career almost purely on strength of will, and has won everywhere he has coached. Except Harbaugh hasn’t won the big one until now, and people won’t hesitate to say he cut corners to get there. He recruited players during a so-called dead period imposed by the NCAA during the pandemic; his school’s huge athletic budget enabled him to assign an assistant coach to steal the signs of future opponents. Never mind that other big schools have done these things, and done worse — Harbaugh, with gifts aplenty, strikes many outside observers as someone who doesn’t need to cut such corners. Born on second base, his competitive streak helped him advance to third and then drove him to steal home.
In the grand scheme of things, none of these misdeeds matter. Barring some new dump of evidence, Harbaugh has already paid for his crimes. And Michigan, unlike Rick Pitino’s 2013 Louisville Cardinals basketball team, will get to keep their newly-won title. But the stink will surely linger, as it does for longtime New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whose practice-taping and football-deflating scandals continue to mar his legacy.
Fans who don’t care for Harbaugh can always cite these mini-scandals as evidence that he didn’t win fair and square, whatever that might mean in a cash-saturated college sports context. Like it or not, however, the pages of history are inscribed by such winners. Those small men carping about their indisputable successes, by contrast, are losers — and their stories are soon lost in the sands of time.
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Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
