Kornacki: Harbaugh's Road to Michigan
12/30/2014 12:00:00 AM | Football
Dec. 30, 2014
By Steve Kornacki
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Jim Harbaugh has come full circle. The young boy, who once played behind the head coach's desk at the University of Michigan, now sits behind it as the leader of the Wolverines.
Harbaugh was named the 20th coach of the winningest college football program on Tuesday (Dec. 30), leaving the San Francisco 49ers for the team he led to the Rose Bowl after guaranteeing and delivering a win over Ohio State as an All-America quarterback in 1986.
He idolized another Michigan quarterback legend, Rick Leach, who used to throw Harbaugh wristbands when he ran the sidelines during practices and games. Harbaugh's father, Jack, was an assistant coach under the legendary Bo Schembechler in the 1970s, and the son lived and breathed the Wolverines.
One day, young Jimmy wandered up to Schembechler's office on the second story of the athletic department building on the corner of Hoover and State. Jimmy leaned back in the coach's chair, put his feet up on the desk and imagined he was Bo.
Schembechler ambled through the lobby in front of his office and came through the door to find a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar, so to speak.
"How are you, Jim Harbaugh?" Schembechler bellowed, thinking he would scare the bee-jabbers out of Jack Harbaugh's precocious son.
Jimmy smiled, changed nothing he was doing, and said, "Fine. How are you, Bo?"
Years later, Bo loved telling the story.
"I knew I had a future quarterback, a future leader, right then and there," said Schembechler said. "That kid had moxie!"
Harbaugh's 387 pass completions, 62.4-percent completion rate and 5,449 passing yards all topped the school's career passing lists when he graduated. And he basically set those records in two seasons by throwing for 2,729 yards as a senior, when he finished third in Heisman Trophy voting, and 1,976 as a junior -- the top two single-season passing totals in school history at that point.
Moxie -- taking initiative with spirit and courage -- is a quality Harbaugh returns to his alma mater. Schembechler would speak in private of how someday Jim Harbaugh should coach his Wolverines. And now that day has come.
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Harbaugh, 51 and a married father of six children, returns after having coached in a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers and with a wealth of experience and knowledge gained since departing Michigan as the first-round pick of the Chicago Bears and coach Mike Ditka in 1987.
Harbaugh threw for 26,288 yards and 129 touchdowns in 15 NFL seasons. That's more yards than were accumulated by Pro Football Hall of Famers Bob Griese, Roger Staubach or Bart Starr. He played for the Bears, Indianapolis Colts, Baltimore Ravens, San Diego Chargers and Carolina Panthers. And he acquired the "Captain Comeback" nickname for the fourth-quarter magic he performed.
He was at his best for Indianapolis. In 1995, he was named the AFC Offensive Player of the Year and NFL Comeback Player of the Year and led the Colts to the AFC Championship game -- coming within one play of reaching the Super Bowl.
Harbaugh marched the Colts 56 yards in 85 seconds, and on the game's final play he lofted a "Hail Mary" pass from 29 yards out that Aaron Bailey couldn't come down with among a host of Pittsburgh Steelers defenders. Bailey and Harbaugh both went to Ann Arbor Pioneer High, located kitty corner from Michigan Stadium.
Harbaugh first reached the Super Bowl as an Oakland Raiders quarterbacks coach. He mentored Rich Gannon, who was the 2002 AP NFL MVP and was voted to the 2003 Pro Bowl squad, and made a big impression on Oakland owner Al Davis.
Davis, who gave Harbaugh his first NFL coaching experience, taught Harbaugh much about football and life. Harbaugh also often picked the brain of offensive genius Bill Walsh, the man whose footsteps Harbaugh retraced in going from head coach at Stanford to becoming the head coach of the Niners.
Walsh and Davis have passed away, but Harbaugh has more than the memories of their long talks. He also tape-recorded some of their conversations and transcribed the others in the many notebooks he keeps and still refers to for wisdom.
"What defines peoples' lives are brushes with greatness," said Harbaugh, who also had the opportunity to learn from quarterback John Elway when his father was a defensive coordinator at Stanford and Jim quarterbacked Palo Alto (Calif.) High as a junior and senior.
Raiders Hall of Fame coach John Madden shared his insights of Davis' fondness for Harbaugh with the San Jose Mercury News: "Al always respected him because he played. Al liked players. He felt the guys that played would relate better to players. He also respected Jim because he was a tough guy, a smart guy, a grinder."
After Schembechler and his father, Davis possibly had the most impact on Harbaugh, who told the Mercury News, "Certain people, coaches, have a profound, positive outcome on somebody's life. And Al Davis had a profound, positive outcome on my life. Not just professionally, but family, as well. There aren't days that don't go by where there's something that affects my family or my job that I learned from him. Very thankful and a lot of gratitude for those two years that I worked for him."
Harbaugh also learned from the hard-driving Ditka as a player. They bumped heads, as Harbaugh and Schembechler also did, but departed with the utmost respect for one another.
Earlier this year, Ditka had this to say about Harbaugh on ESPN, "He's one of the most competitive individuals I've ever been around. And I think that's good. ... It's good to be competitive, it's good to want to be the best, It's good to want to win.
"And sometimes when you do that, when you're climbing that mountain, you're going to rub some people the wrong way. You might step on a few fingers when you're goin' up the hill. But he's doing it the right way. I mean, the guy takes 'em to the championship game. He's won 75 percent of his games."
Harbaugh coached four seasons with the Niners, taking them to three consecutive NFC Championship games and winning the 2011 AP NFL Coach of the Year award before going 8-8 in 2014. He finished 49-22-1 with one trip to the Super Bowl. His older brother, John, beat him with the Ravens in Super Bowl XLVII, 34-31.
He has won at a rate of .689 (107-48-1) as a head coach despite facing rebuilding situations on two of his three head coaching jobs. San Francisco was 6-10 the year before Harbaugh arrived, and Stanford was 1-11.
Harbaugh became a head coach at 40, taking over the University of San Diego in 2004 and going 29-6 in three seasons. Though, it wasn't his first college coaching experience. He spent 1994-2001 as an NCAA-certified unpaid assistant under his father at Western Kentucky, serving as a recruiter and offensive consultant while still playing in the NFL.
Stanford hired Harbaugh for the 2007 season. He won nine games over the first two years, then got the Cardinal to the 2009 Sun Bowl with an 8-5 record while running back Toby Gerhart finished second in Heisman voting. Harbaugh recruited quarterback Andrew Luck, and they turned the program around together. Luck started as a freshman in 2009 and in 2010 Stanford went 12-1, culminating the season with a 40-12 Orange Bowl win over Virginia Tech. Harbaugh won the Woody Hayes national Coach of the Year Award from the Touchdown Club of Columbus.
Luck was the Heisman Trophy runner-up in 2010 and 2011 and was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2012 NFL Draft by the Colts. Harbaugh has a reputation for developing quarterbacks. He had Alex Smith and Colin Kaepernick, both accomplished signal-callers, while in San Francisco, and worked with Gannon during his best seasons in Oakland.
Now, he returns to Michigan with hopes of grooming a quarterback who can carry on the tradition of great passing quarterbacks he began. Elvis Grbac, Todd Collins, Brian Griese, Tom Brady and Chad Henne followed Harbaugh by making big impacts for the Wolverines and going on to NFL success.
Harbaugh was the NCAA's passing efficiency leader in 1985 and 1986 (becoming the first Big Ten quarterback to lead that statistic), when he was an All-Big Ten Academic selection, an All-American and the Chicago Tribune Big Ten MVP. Michigan was 21-3-1 in his junior and senior seasons.
Harbaugh was invited back to represent the Wolverines of the 1980s at a celebration of 125 years of Michigan football in 2005. He addressed the gathering of 750 at Cliff Keen Arena with the fervor-building qualities of a tent revival minister, extolling the virtues of a program which develops men of integrity.
He began by recalling a conversation he had with Jerry Hanlon, then the quarterbacks coach for Schembechler, on the eve of the 1984 season. Harbaugh asked Hanlon what kind of team he expected that year, and prefaced Hanlon's answer by saying that it "unlocked the secret to what Michigan football is all about."
When Hanlon began by saying he wasn't sure about what kind of team they had, Harbaugh became frustrated before Hanlon explained himself by saying the answer couldn't be determined for years to come.
"When you guys come back 15, 20 years from now," Harbaugh recalled Hanlon saying, "and we know what kind of men you are, and we know what kind of husbands you become, what kind of fathers you become, then we'll know how good this football team is."
Harbaugh filled with pride, pursed his lips and paused before receiving hardy applause. He continued by adding how "the Michigan experience changes you" academically and athletically by allowing student-athletes "to develop self-confidence to go against the very best."
He finished by saying, "We became better men. We became better husbands. We became better fathers."
Now the mission he has accepted is to continue molding "the leaders and best," on and off the field.
From left: 1987 Rose Bowl; with the Chicago Bears; 49ers head coach
For inspiration he will bring from his Forty-Niners office a framed, autographed photo from Schembechler. "It's a picture of me and Bo at the Rose Bowl," Harbaugh said in my book, "Go Blue! Michigan's Greatest Football Stories." "We're on the sideline, and he has his left hand on his head set and the fingers of his right hand are curled around the collar of my jersey. He signed it, 'To Jim: A great quarterback. A good friend. Best Wishes, Bo Schembechler."
He discussed the impact that Schembechler, who died in 2006, had on him: "I was showered with that daily by Bo Schembechler: 'Work hard!' I learned of the cause we were fighting for all through summer, spring and winter conditioning. ... And through two-a-day practices and all the fall practices."
I asked for a specific example of a lesson learned from Bo. "Oh, man," Harbaugh said. "There are so many, hundreds. But for me it was the daily kinds of things. I look at Bo and the greatest thing, what I love about him, is that he took the game very seriously but not himself.
"One day, he was wearing that tight, scrunched-down hat, shorts and a T-shirt with white socks and his coaching shoes. I said, 'Going for a workout, Bo?' He said, 'Yeah, I've got to work out, Jim. You are looking at the world's most perfectly figured man.' And he'd swell up his chest and stick it out. I couldn't stop laughing.
"But he said things like that all the time. With most people, you say, 'How are you doing?' And they say, 'Good.' You say, 'How's the family?' And they say, 'Good.' And you are past them and nothing happens. But Bo had a way of making every moment exciting. One time, when I was 9 or 10, he looked at me and said, 'Jimmy, did I ever tell you about the time I was a great pitcher at Barberton (Ohio) High School, a fire-balling left-hander?'"
Harbaugh chuckled and groaned. And by the way, he does a great Bo impersonation. Whenever he quoted Bo, he did so in his mentor's gruff yet somehow loving tone.
And Harbaugh has that in common with Bo, too. He loves conversation and odd-ball topics. He recalled the baseball he drilled a hole into for a converted gear shifter on the beat-up, red Volkswagen bug he drove while attending Michigan. And he will talk your ear off about his favorite TV shows, like "Blue Bloods" (Tom Selleck) or "The Rockford Files" (James Garner).
Harbaugh will make things interesting.
That quality was best exhibited as a player when he guaranteed victory over Ohio State in the final regular-season game of 1986: "I guarantee we will beat Ohio State and be in Pasadena New Year's Day. People might not give us a snowball's chance in hell to beat them in Columbus, but we're going to. We don't care where we play the game. I hate to say it, but we could play at noon or midnight. We're going to be jacked up, and we're going to win."
What in the world was Bo going to say about this, reporters thought at the time. But when Schembechler was asked about the prediction hours later, he surprised everybody. He said he wouldn't want a quarterback who would think otherwise and completely defused the coach-quarterback controversy that could've ensued. Schembechler presented a unified front.
"I didn't know what Bo would say about it," Harbaugh said in "Go Blue! Michigan's Greatest Football Stories." "But from the time I was a little kid, I wanted to play in the Rose Bowl. I saw it as my destiny. I went to three Rose Bowls and walked the sideline as a kid. Michigan needed to win that game to get there, and it was my last chance -- the last chance for a lot of us. We had to win, and that's how I felt about it.
"Bo pulled me into the area where the coaches dress for practice that Monday, and he reacted a lot better than I expected. He looked at me and said, 'Well, you shot your mouth off again.' I said, 'Yes, I did.' And then he just said, "Well, we're going to back it up for you.' And then, in front of the team, Bo said, 'I know one guy who thinks we can win this game, and that's our quarterback!'
"He had my back, and that felt so good."
Michigan beat the Buckeyes, 26-24, and afterward Harbaugh mingled with friends and family outside the locker room.
"I was thrilled for Jim," said his brother, John, after that game. "That guarantee quote was no surprise to me. People said it was out of character. But he wasn't cocky and was right in character. Ever since Jim was 10 years old, he said he was going to take Michigan to the Rose Bowl."
That is the goal once again.
