SHOCKING NEWS: Michigan coach found dead…
The legacy of Jim Harbaugh as Michigan football coach is nuanced.
History.
In the context of college football, the word seems to have a different connotation these days. Alright, in these most peculiar of college football seasons, it seems as though every term has a different meaning now than when it was first allocated a long time ago. As in, say, 2019?
We are faced with defining the legacy of a very different kind of college as Jim Harbaugh leaves the game of college football for the NFL Cinematic Universe, capping his trilogy of moves from campus to the big leagues: Stanford to the San Francisco 49ers as a head coach in 2011, Michigan to the Chicago Bears as a quarterback in 1987, and now Michigan to the Los Angeles Chargers, also as a head coach.
He is both adored and perplexing. At least as many people misunderstand him as adore him. All of us, Wolverines and non-Wolverines alike, would have to click on the relationship status line that says, “It’s complicated,” if college football were a Facebook profile.
I’ll bet that the majority of folks reading this right now may believe Harbaugh’s time at Ann Arbor was not that long. However, it wasn’t. He was absent from The Big House for nine complete seasons. That is more than twice as long as his four-year tenures on The Farm and across the road with the Niners, and it is three times longer than his first head coaching stay in San Diego.
Those same individuals may think
Throughout the nine years, there were an infinite number of stories that seemed strange at the time they occurred. However, looking back even a little bit, we can now see them as representations of a man who was willing to defy the college football system.
Describe it as groundbreaking. Describe it as wild. As long as you end up designating everything as unique.
Our minds have been burned with the image of 51-year-old Harbaugh, shirtless, flinging passes on his coaching staff’s “Summer Swarm” barnstorming football camp tour ever since June 2015, his first year on the job. The purpose of that road trip, which included exercises in Florida, California, Pennsylvania, and, gasp, Alabama, may have slipped your mind since then. His quarterback sulks
The Wolverines strolled beside their coach through the streets of Paris and South Africa, as well as on the beaches of Normandy, in the years that followed. The costly travels, which Michigan benefactors paid for, drew criticism from non-Wolverines who saw them as mere showboating. At worst, though, they were unique—college basketball teams had been on such trips for decades, as Harbaugh himself noted.
Then there were the ridiculous recruiting stories, which everyone remembers. Harbaugh playing off of DJ Khaled’s “How are everything going? Boomin’!” to entice a defensive back from California. Harbaugh demonstrated his own NFL-caliber upper-body power by scaling a tree in a recruit’s front yard. Harbaugh slept on top-ranked kicker Quinn Nordin’s sofa so they could talk at that precise moment.
However, that class was accompanied by an NCAA probe into alleged recruiting infractions that violated the pandemic-related limitations. Critics of Harbaugh will also bring up his two different three-game bans this season at this point, noting that investigations are still ongoing into the recruitment infractions and, of course, the ongoing fiasco involving the stolen signs, which, well, isn’t going away anytime soon. The program is still plagued by controversy even after the man who served as its CEO and was accused of building an overly complex signal-deciphering network has packed up his khakis and returned to the professionals.
Thus, we are left looking at that trisyllabic term that has so much more weight and complexity these days than
If you wake up every morning humming “Hail to the Victors,” then you may find it easy to understand Jim Harbaugh’s legacy. He made a promise when he got home to put his alma mater back on the NCAA football ladder, and he followed through on it. To prove that, a large silver and gold trophy was been added to Schembechler Hall. In actuality, though, there won’t be a break until the investigators are finished and their final findings are read aloud at the end of his block-M chapter. Nobody can predict when that will occur. If and when it occurs, it could all turn out to be a big waste of time. However, it may also take a completely different and disastrous turn.
Then and only then
