Guys who make it to the highest levels of sport are often incredibly intense competitors who HATE losing.

I saw an interview with Magic Johnson once where, despite his incredible success as a five-time NBA champion, NCAA champion, and gold medalist  on the Dream Team, he said how much he still thinks about the one that got away—the 1984 NBA Finals where the Lakers easily could have won 4-0 and ended up losing to the Celtics in 7.

And there’s a good friend I played high school soccer with who became a college All-American, played professionally in the NASL and for the US National Team, and yet, when we were driving home from a golf outing roughly 35 years after high school, he was talking about how ticked off he still was that we “only” ended up co-state champions after a scoreless tie in the state title game and that we absolutely had the far better team and should have won it outright.  (There was no PK shootout to determine a sole champion.)

And this brings me to Jim Harbaugh.  I have always heard about how unbelievably competitive he is—but this story I came across from 2017 is beyond the pale.  It’s relatively short—told by his brother John—and is worth the read just to get a sense of how off the charts he is in certain respects:

https://collegefootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2017/03/14/breaking-jim-harbau...

And what it ultimately tells me is this: going 0 for 5 in The Game is most likely eating away at him so much that, I bet if you gave him a lie detector test, it would indicate that he regrets ever having returned to Ann Arbor to coach TTUN.  Because we know how he grew up with The Game and how much it means to him,

So Jim, I guess you better hope you continue to stomp on your niece in driveway pickup basketball because that’s probably the closest you’re going to come to winning any kind of rivalry game in the near future.