Jim Harbaugh wants Michigan football to defy the law of gravity
What goes up must come down. It’s a fact of life.
Jim Harbaugh accepts Newton’s law of universal gravitation but is also wary of it, believing it could be applied to his ascending Michigan football team. The Wolverines have won 30 of their last 33 games and just trounced Nebraska by 38 points during a crisp, clinical performance last weekend that left them riding high in the sky as they jetted back to Ann Arbor.
Harbaugh mentioned Monday that the state of the program is “scary good” right now, which is why he’s worried about whether Michigan can sustain its excellence. A fall of some kind seems inevitable, he posited.
“The law of averages say that it’s going to catch up to you,” Harbaugh noted.
It was a surprisingly sober comment from the cheery coach, who tends to use his platform in front of the media to celebrate his team’s accomplishments and pump up his players. But as his No. 2-ranked Wolverines have hit their stride in Week 6, Harbaugh now must keep them from being lured into what he calls the “deep, dark lonely trap” of complacency that resides next to the pitfalls of success.
“How do you keep those balls in the air?” he wondered aloud. “How do you keep them high?”
Harbaugh may have been asking the same questions 10 years ago, when he led the San Francisco 49ers.
Almost instantaneously, Harbaugh restored the tradition-rich franchise, guiding it to three consecutive NFC championship games, a Super Bowl appearance and 41 victories in 56 games from 2011-2013. It was an intoxicating period, when Harbaugh drafted a winning blueprint and seemed to push all the right buttons.
“He always had the answer to something,” former 49ers guard Alex Boone told the Free Press.
But Harbaugh couldn’t quite figure out how to sustain what he had built. The forces of nature were too strong, the gravitational pull too heavy. The suction was unavoidable, as Boone recalled, even though Harbaugh tried to stop it.
He told his players they were getting lax. He warned them about the details they had begun to neglect and their lack of urgency. He admonished them for buying into their own hype. Harbaugh poked and prodded even when the veterans were convinced the team was performing at its same high standards.
“And he was always right,” Boone said, “because he was a former player. I mean as a former player you feel it . ... It’s almost like you see guys aren’t taking as many notes or there’s more laughter around the locker room when there shouldn’t be at certain times. That’s just one of those things we feel as players. And him being a former player, he had a great pulse. You could just feel it. Yep, we’re going down a bad road.”
In 2014, the 49ers crashed back to Earth, stumbling to 8-8 record and missing the playoffs in Harbaugh’s fourth and final season.
The sudden downturn spawned Harbaugh’s divorce with the 49ers and his return to Ann Arbor, where he has ushered the Wolverines into a golden age these past three seasons. After winning the last two Big Ten titles, Michigan was immediately pegged as a national championship contender. Based on Harbaugh’s own assessment, the roster he assembled was the deepest and most talented of his tenure.
“I think it doesn’t get any better than this,” one person in Harbaugh’s inner circle recently told the Free Press. “This team offensively is totally loaded.”
It certainly looks that way after Michigan has cruised to a 5-0 mark.
More than a third of the way through the schedule, quarterback J.J. McCarthy owns the fifth-best passer rating in the country and receiver Roman Wilson is tied for the most touchdown catches in the country. Meanwhile, the running game that has recently regained its footing, averaging 225 yards in the last two games. Then there is the stalwart defense, which has surrendered only 30 points, the fewest points in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Based on the evidence, there is little reason to believe Michigan is about to go bust.
But the hyper-vigilant Harbaugh is looking for signs of decay or insidious elements that could cause a backslide. Sports history offers
many examples where corrosive human foibles like jealousy, selfishness, smugness and hubris have disrupted a season in the same way that physical ailments like muscle strains, torn ligaments and broken bones have derailed them.
“The gravitational force of the Earth is tremendous,” Harbaugh said. “And so are some of the forces against a football team — some of the things that are sent there to divide a football team. And the ones that aren’t divided are playing in the playoffs and eventually champion.”
Achieving that ultimate goal is, of course, the mission. So, Harbaugh has reminded his players to stay on task, to not “get the big head.”
“Because a lot of the younger guys, all they know is winning,” said senior right guard Zak Zinter. “As leaders on the team, we’ve got to keep them motivated and keep them pushing, where they don’t know that loss with everyone not being on our side and loving us like they are now. We just got to keep our head down and keep working.”
Otherwise, the downward force starts pulling slowly, almost imperceptibly, before it can’t be stopped.
“There’s a lot of times, you can’t see the tree from the forest,” Boone said. “You look back … and say, ‘Maybe, this is one of the things that took us down. It’s the little, tiny, minute things that nobody sees that when you’re a coach and when you have your hand on everything, you’re like, ‘Hey, I just feel like it’s getting too lax. I don’t like this.’ And that’s why Jim’s a great coach. … I’m telling you, he’s a master.” In football — and maybe physics, too.
Yes, Harbaugh knows that over time he’ll eventually lose the fight against gravity. But that doesn’t have to happen this year, with this team. It’s why Harbaugh has already taken preemptive steps to ensure Michigan never comes down in 2023.