As a resident of that state up north, it has been simultaneously fascinating and disturbing over the years to watch the deity like status, going all the way back to his playing days, the Wolverine faithful have always bestowed on Jim Harbaugh despite his actual accomplishments never coming anywhere near what is usually required for that level of fan idolatry.
Sure he was a pretty good college quarterback who had a solid, if unspectacular, career in the NFL that was highlighted by breaking his hand punching Jim Kelly after Kelly called him a baby who often tried to fake injuries to get penalty calls, but the guy wasn’t ever some kind of record setter who took UM to new heights of success. Yet he’s venerated on a level that no other Wolverine quarterback, including a guy named Tom Brady, ever has been, mostly on the strength of the fact that he was one of “Bo’s favorite guys.”
When he started having success as a head coach you could count the amount of time it took for UM fans to start salivating at the prospect of ol’ Jim coaching the maize and blue in nanoseconds. Even his public trashing of UM’s vaunted athletic academic standards
while he was the HC of Stanford did very little to dim the appeal of his walking the UM sidelines someday and when, after looking like he was a shoo in after Rich Rodriquez was fired, he spurned the Wolverines to coach the 49ers, you would have thought that UM had missed out on Bear Bryant and Nick Saban combined. When he was eventually hired as HC after the Brady Hoke debacle came to its fiery end, he was deemed as no less than the “savior” of UM football who was going to take the program to glorious new heights it hadn’t experienced since the invention of the forward pass. The whole craziness was probably best encapsulated by a billboard that said “Welcome Coach Har’bo’ugh.
I’ll admit the enthusiasm was understandable to some degree, after all the Rodriquez/Hoke years were unmitigated disasters and, on the Buckeye side of things, first Jim Tressel, and then Urban Meyer, had put the horrors of the John Cooper era in the rear view mirror and had turned “The Game” into little more than a speed bump for OSU. But, even with the joy and excitement around Harbaugh’s arrival, you could tell there was also a little desperation because it was clear that most UM fans were pushing all their chips in with Jim and, if it didn’t work out, THERE WAS NO PLAN B! As a result Harbaugh was given huge leeway to do whatever he wanted with no threat of being fired.
As a result of this utter belief that he was UM’s anointed savior, he was able to survive six….SIX seasons of extremely underwhelming success, especially compared to the expectations that he was expected to meet or succeed with ease. Winless against OSU, including 2 epic blowouts in back to back years, 3-3 against MSU, including the now immortal “trouble with the snap” loss, a terrible record against top 10 opponents, no Big Ten titles, no playoff appearances, a 1-4 bowl record. All these things would have likely gotten any other UM coach fired, but not only did they not fire Harbaugh, they ACTUALLY MANUFACTURED A WAY TO NOT HAVE TO FIRE HIM by ducking Iowa and OSU because of “COVID”. This after he smugly bragged that UM had the best COVID protocols in the nation and they could play their regular schedule with no pandemic related issues.
And it wasn’t like he had some shining personal integrity that caused people to overlook his on the field performance. Almost from the day he was hired he seemed to find ways to get into needless pissing matches with various other schools and he also repeatedly showed that he wasn’t afraid to push the boundaries of the rules. While looking for an edge at the expense of what is and isn’t acceptable isn’t exactly unusual behavior for college football coaches, it was just another example of how a school that always loudly proclaims they do things THE RIGHT WAY, unlike all those other scumbag teams who aren’t the “leaders and best”, basically just said “no problem, Jim, whatever you need to do” when the chosen one decided to open certain doors.
He even became more and more of a weirdo personally as the years went by. When he arrived at UM he was the vocal, high energy guy that had coached at SDSU, Stanford, and the 49ers, but he seemed to undergo a transformation that really became noticeable after the 2016 OSU loss. He looked like he aged about 20 years, in interviews he started speaking in a more subdued tone, sometimes mumbling in a way that sounded like he was either stoned or having a stroke, and numerous other little things that made you wonder what the hell was going on in his head. He even seemed to develop an obsession with looking like Bo, adopting the glasses and block M hat look that he was famous for.
And through all of it, there wasn’t ever once any kind of serious consideration given to firing Harbaugh. In fact, UM fans seemed most concerned that he would bolt back to the NFL and they would have left to find their way without their beloved savior.
Of course we know that UM’s willingness to stick with Harbs through thin and thin eventually paid off as he turned things around on the field and looked to be on the verge of giving the Wolverine faithful a season to remember…….at least until about a week ago when it was revealed he had to cheat on an epic scale to achieve these results.
But even now the cult of Harbaugh endures as, instead of UM immediately suspending or firing his ass over this, as well as the various scandals he’s been involved in over the last few years, the worst that seems to be coming out of Ann Arbor are “questions” about his future as their coach.
Keep in mind that MSU almost immediately canned Mel Tucker’s ass when his allegations broke, PSU told Joe Paterno “No thanks, Joe, we’re good. You can retire now” when he arrogantly informed them in the wake of the Sandusky scandal that he’d be staying on until the end of the season, and Ohio State, the school that UM loves to disparage as their moral inferior, has fired not 1, not 2, but THREE of their most successful coaches ever over various episodes. It also can’t be stressed enough that none of the actions of these fired coaches directly compromised the competitive fairness of the game on the field while Harbaugh is involved in actions that undermine the integrity of the game itself on a scale the true nature of which is only just starting to be revealed.
I know lots of schools have coaches they revere and hold high esteem, but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen a coach that has such a cult like hold over a school and its fans as Jim Harbaugh has. So much so that, even after all of this, it’s not inconceivable he either remains at the UM coach, or at least gets to walk away from it on his own terms instead of getting unceremoniously kicked out the door like he so richly deserves to.
“The leaders and best” my fucking ass
