The hot seat, p.7
The Hot Seat, page 7
Says Muth,
Your first impression, it’s weird, because he’s almost such a cliché of a football coach, but it seems kind of full of shit at first. I think the longer you’re around him, it’s like, oh, no, this is who he is. He comes in, and he talks a big game about what he’s going to do and what we’re going to do as a team, but he backs it up. He lives it. I don’t think he’s ever said something that he didn’t really and truly believe. I think the most recent thing I heard was, “Beat Ohio State or die trying.” [Harbaugh had, in fact, said this at Big Ten Media Day in July 2021.] It’s one of those things where it’s a cliché, but I 100 percent believe that’s how Jim Harbaugh feels. He would stay at Michigan until he beats Ohio State or dies, if it’s entirely up to him.
I have seen this clarity of purpose in action. In June 2016, Harbaugh and other Michigan staff members were doing a tour of football camps for high school players around the country—long practices, essentially, but without pads on and focused on the more fun, competitive kinds of drills. One was held in suburban Paramus, New Jersey. I was already trying to scheme up some way to write about him, so I borrowed a friend’s minivan and drove there to observe.
It was an unusual opportunity to see someone of his notoriety up close, because the media side of the event was run by the high school, Paramus Catholic, and they didn’t have either the manpower or the inclination to put as many parts of it as possible off-limits, which seems to be what college and pro teams (and anyone else who handles celebrities) regard as the best way to handle things. So I got to follow around Harbaugh and a bunch of other coaches from Michigan and a number of other schools for several hours in the parking lot, hallways, cafeteria, and such. The event was open to any college that wanted to send staff members, and there were head coaches from other major-conference programs present too. Generally, there were a lot of extremely large men in circulation with intensity in their brows and bone-crushing strength in their grips. (Football coaches were once football players, and football players are big. This was somehow not something I had put together before seeing it in person; I had expected, I guess, that when they went from playing into the white-collar profession of coaching, they would shrink to regular size. This is possibly because they look small on TV next to players wearing pads and helmets. Anyway.)
Harbaugh, despite being a relatively slight figure by the standards of the day, was its center of energy. The high school kids, a group of a few hundred, had assembled in the gym before the practice started. A head coach from another school welcomed them and gave a pep talk about effort, hard work, and so forth. It was pretty standard stuff. Then Harbaugh spoke, and he began by describing, if I recall, something he’d read or heard about the way a horse’s heartbeat can be seen through its skin as it’s preparing to run the Kentucky Derby. It was a visceral account. There may have been something about the physical size of the organ, maybe something about sweat. And it went on for a while. His point, he ultimately said, was that this was how excited he felt any time he got the chance to be on a football field, and it was how excited he was, that minute, to be at a practice for teenagers in New Jersey.
When everyone got to the field, he proved his point, putting himself in charge of dividing the players into heats for sprint competitions, acting as the starter for each race, and declaring and congratulating the winners. A man in his element. After a while, I walked to the middle of the field for a better angle on the “finish line,” which was marked by an assistant standing with his arms outstretched. Or at least I thought it was an assistant. When I got closer, I realized that the low-key human traffic cone was Jim’s brother John, who had won the Super Bowl as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. He and a few other Ravens staffers had come up to help out. No one in the crowd of aspiring NFL players and football reporters had noticed him yet. He looked amused.
John also figured in a Harbaugh story I heard from former Michigan safety Josh Metellus, who as of the time of this writing plays for the Minnesota Vikings. Metellus is from South Florida and said that one of his first interactions with his college coach was an in-home recruiting visit involving two of his other high school teammates who also went on to attend U of M. Jim arrived in a car driven by John, who had just coached the Ravens in a game against the Dolphins in Miami. John dropped Jim off as if he were a fifteen-year-old arriving at a friend’s house. Then Jim and the three teenagers played the card game Spades for several hours, and that was the entire recruiting visit. Metellus said Harbaugh paid close attention to the outcome of each hand. “I loved it,” he said. “I was like, if our head coach is this competitive, we’re going to win games.”
The possibility of winning big with this kind of distinctive and distinctly Michiganian value-embodiment had people pretty worked up. Chris Partridge had been a high school head coach (at Paramus Catholic, actually) and an assistant at two smaller college programs when Harbaugh hired him on to Michigan’s staff in 2015. In 2021, he was forty-one years old and working as the defensive coordinator at Ole Miss. “People were really, really excited,” Partridge said about the early days. “It was a huge, way bigger environment than I had been involved in. When you’re in the football building, and you’re trying to get stuff done, that environment gets shrunk. But every time we left the building, there were people standing outside trying to get Jim’s autograph, trying to find out which way he’s leaving.”
But as Harbaugh’s teams on the field wobbled and then collapsed in 2020, his character traits were reinterpreted as flaws. You can see it in the comments about the Washington game. Michigan finished that contest with fifty-six rushing attempts to only fifteen passes, which is a preposterous ratio, even in the Big Ten. This kind of imbalance, so enraging to Thicc Stauskas, was said to be a consequence of Harbaugh’s obsession with individual character and aggression and was proof that the team wouldn’t be able to pass if it ever needed to. His diversity of interests, creative energy, and fixation on fundamentals (trips abroad, complicated plays, blocking lecterns into walls, etc.), in reverse polarity, constituted disorganization, a short attention span, and an inability to prioritize. (The team did, in fact, often seem confused on the field, with the offense failing to snap the ball in time and the defense in turn failing to get itself set up properly when the opposing offense played quickly.) His directness and lack of guile became an unwillingness to form and manage the necessary relationships with players and others at the university.
This last one was a big one. Before the 2021 season, the Wolverine Digest website calculated that sixty players had transferred out of the Michigan program since 2018, one of the highest numbers in the Big Ten and twice as many as had left rivals Ohio State and Michigan State in the same period. Twenty-one had left in the previous year, the most in the conference. Some had been well-regarded recruits and on-field contributors at positions where the team could have used them, particularly on the offensive and defensive lines. Fans complained that top prospects were alienated by Harbaugh’s inflexibility and that top offensive players in particular avoided Michigan because of the aforementioned running-game fixation. A number of the best football prospects in the state of Michigan came out of a Detroit-area high school named Belleville; they had stopped attending U of M, going instead to programs like Michigan State, Penn State, and Kentucky, for reasons that neither Harbaugh nor Belleville’s head coach explained.
What frustrated Alex, Thicc Stauskas, and the substantial group of people who agreed with them was the idea of being associated with an institution that was both arrogant and dumb. Matt Campbell, the Iowa State coach, was a perfect foil: He was from Ohio, did not have elite educational credentials, was said to have great relationships across the region, and carried himself with the relentlessly positive attitude of a church youth group leader. He was, or was imagined to be, someone nice and humble enough to do the easy, smart thing.
Some of the people I spoke to confirmed the long-discussed allegation that Harbaugh can “rub people the wrong way.” Said Metellus, “There was a lot of times as a team we bumped heads, and there wasn’t a lot of slack given on his end. It was his way or no way.” I made a comment about the coach seeming like “a pretty intense dude” to be around. “Yeah,” he said. “Especially for four years.”
I also spoke to the mother of former Michigan wide receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones, Roslyn Peoples, who became known as an advocate for players’ rights vis-à-vis the NCAA when her son was in high school. Peoples-Jones was an elite prospect at Cass Tech High School in Detroit and has become a big-play threat for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, but he caught only thirty-four passes in his last season at Michigan (2019), which is not that many for a player of NFL-caliber talent. I asked Peoples if her experience with Harbaugh’s program had been a positive one. “Well, now, there’s a politically correct answer, and I’ve been trained if you can’t say anything good, just don’t say anything,” she said. I prompted her with the idea that the coach specifically overburdened his players because he feels that they should be 4.0 GPA superhumans at the same time they’re winning Big Ten titles. “I will say that a lot of their players had hamstring injuries,” she offered. (Peoples-Jones was frequently listed on injury reports as having a strained groin, which could have been the result of overwork.)
Muth is a big fan of Harbaugh’s but explained to me how his relationship with players can sour:
If he thought you were doing things right on the football field, he loved you. If you weren’t, and he thought you could do things better, he let you know about it. The relationship could get frustrating. Something that may be a very small detail to another coach is a big deal to him. He’s a detail guy a lot of the times on the football field—what your stance should look like, this is how a cadence sounds if you’re a quarterback, all of that. Sometimes guys may not necessarily agree that that’s the most important thing, and you feel like you’re being picked on because your bad habit just happened to be a pet peeve of the head coach. But he has a lot of pet peeves. He’s going to let you know about it, and it’s not going to be fun until you get it corrected.
The best theory of the 2020 season I was able to develop is that Harbaugh had accumulated too many assistant coaches who were a bit too much like him in this way. That year’s team was “wildly burned out,” one person who was around the program at the time said to me. Defensive coordinator Don Brown, sixty-seven years old, was described to me as “inflexible” and a “his way or the highway” kind of ol’ cuss. Cornerbacks coach Mike Zordich (who was fifty-nine years old and had played 185 games in the NFL) had “pissed off all of Detroit” for saying former star and city native Lavert Hill needed to “learn to play with some nicks” instead of sitting out practice. (This had happened in 2018. Said the source, “Detroit… they hold grudges.”) Regarding offensive line coach Ed Warinner, a sixty-year-old football lifer from rural Ohio, “No one liked him. No one liked him, at all.” Those three coaches were replaced after the year with younger and purportedly more “relatable” ones.
However, I was surprised to find that no one within the football world whom I talked to, on or off the record, was as critical as fans were about Harbaugh’s capabilities or demeanor, or how they affected his chances of turning the ship around. After all, it is the rare football coach who doesn’t wear on a certain number of the dozens and dozens of players he’s in charge of each year. “For the most part, I felt like he did a good job,” Metellus said, later adding, “He’s the head coach, so it is his way or no way. Anybody is going to bump heads if you’re with each other for that long.” Acker, a players’ rights advocate whose job in some respects is to be skeptical of Michigan’s administration, said he was confident that “the academic side and the health and safety and success of the players” was being handled appropriately (and that it had been the reason Manuel retained Harbaugh despite the poor 2020 season record). “Jim is a winner,” Partridge said. “He’s always been a winner, and he still is a winner.”
Said Muth, “One thing about college is there is a lot of turnover from year to year. The guys that are coming into the program are guys that decide to play for him. There’s always going to be some level of buy-in on a college team. I think it can turn around. It would not shock me if they had a good year.” I asked him if he thought Harbaugh’s subdued, almost introverted public demeanor of late was a sign that he’d lost his enthusiasm for the job. He said,
I think Jim is a guy that doesn’t necessarily feel like he’s earned the right to take shots at Ohio State when he hasn’t beat Ohio State. I don’t think Jim’s ever been one for idle trash talk. I think he talked trash before, when he’d first gotten the job, before he had a chance to back it up, because he truly believed he was going to back it up. I think he feels guilty right now throwing any barbs at Ohio State, because he feels like he hasn’t earned it. I think if Michigan goes 11-1 this year and beats Ohio State, I think he will let people know that it was a job well done.
INTERLUDE
Jim Harbaugh, on the Monday after Michigan’s victory over Washington, on the disparity between the team’s number of rushing attempts and passing attempts:
Heard a little bit of noise about, “Why so much running? Are you gonna throw more?” That kind of thing. We all know there are a lot of ways to travel. Some people choose to travel on the ground; some people by air. George Patton was able to get his job done on the ground. Neil Armstrong, through the air. Last Saturday night, we chose to grind it out on the ground. And we were also able to get our mission accomplished.
CHAPTER
6
WISCONSIN AND NEBRASKA
Eleven and one? It was far-fetched. Michigan had won that many games only twice in the preceding twenty-three seasons. There were fans and members of the Michigan football community who supported Jim Harbaugh’s retention in 2021—if everyone had agreed with Thicc Stauskas, he wouldn’t have had to tell someone they had a baby brain—but even in this group, there was often a fatalism about the program’s so-called ceiling. The line one often heard was that Jim cared more about the university than anyone else in his position would, and it was telling that his supporters operated on a first-name basis. It spoke to a sense that it was better to do as well as possible with a member of the family, as it were, than to instigate a bitter divorce and then do the same or worse on the field. “He’s a good coach, good to great coach, and who else are you going to hire that’s better than him?” one person in the program’s orbit said to me before the 2021 season. “People should understand that he is the best that they’re going to get.” Hell yeah! Let’s fuckin’ go!
As little as that sentiment got one hyped and jacked up, it was true that circumstances were conspiring against the program and its coach. The team’s two biggest games of the midseason period, October 2 and October 9 road games against Wisconsin and Nebraska, respectively, were helpful for understanding how and why.
After running over Washington, Michigan had hammer-jacked Northern Illinois 63-10 and beat Rutgers 20-13 (uncomfortably close, but it happened after U of M led 20-3 at halftime and, we can now say with hindsight, endured some essentially random growing-pain mishaps during the second half that resulted in the close score). Its body of work was strong. The rock was still being pounded with vigor and efficiency, but McNamara and the receivers had been interspersing long touchdown throws. The defensive line and secondary had been sturdy, competent, and trustworthy, the kind of position groups you’d want taking out your daughter (or son!). Senior defensive end Aidan Hutchinson kept sacking people and building the team’s ineffable but important quotient of momentum-compounding swag. (Asked to describe the experience of hitting Western Michigan’s quarterback while stripping the ball out of his hands for a fumble, Hutchinson—wearing his hair gelled back, aviator shades, and a gold chain over an open collar, a Patrick Swayze for the new century—responded that “it was fun.”)
Heading into Wisconsin week, though, Wolverine supporters were still queasy. A writer named Alex Kirshner published an article on the numbers-oriented FiveThirtyEight website called “The Case for Believing in Michigan Football.” He began by noting that “Michigan football fans are not conditioned in their modern state to feel anything good,” and then he preemptively apologized on social media for maybe having jinxed everything. Why? Primarily it was because of something that I will call the Hated Self-Reinforcing Graphic of Despair. Below is the version of the Graphic of Despair that was aired during the 2020 Michigan–Penn State game.
To see why this graphic was so ubiquitous and frustrating, you have to start by going back about fifty years, to 1970, at which point historically all-white southern universities were finally integrating their teams, inaugurating the modern era. It was Michigan football’s best decade of said era, in which the team won a double-digit number of games seven times. The baby boom concurrently drove enrollment at the university to almost triple its prewar level, so a lot of people were moving through and watching a winning football team. The modern Michigan fan base and its sense of how successful the program should be were created in the ’70s. It is that baseline against which Harbaugh was being judged by the Graphic of Despair. Here are the final 1970 AP rankings:
