Pair of big-time coaches clash in big game
Michigan’s Harbaugh, Ohio State’s Meyer face off.
One week into this season, after another offensively inept loss in a highprofile game, the hot takes about Jim Harbaugh were flying like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. Would Michigan actually consider firing him? Would he admit defeat by running back to the NFL? Had all the buzz about returning to his alma mater in 2015 been one big con job?
The skeptics were not without merit. Forty games into his Michigan tenure, what had Harbaugh really accomplished aside from a resounding win over eventual Big Ten champ Penn State in 2016, beating Jim McElwain twice at Florida and irritating SEC Network host Paul Finebaum?
But if 10-1 Michigan does what it’s supposed to do on Saturday and beats
Ohio State, it will be time for a narrative correction. In fact, it should be good enough to make Harbaugh the national coach of the year.
Though his job was never on the line, nobody in college football was under more pressure to deliver than Harbaugh, whose norm-breaking, self-promoting style has not only gotten under his opponents’ skin but made him a target for derision over the first three years of his tenure when the Wolverines did not do better than third place in the Big Ten East Division.
It’s quite possible that was by design. Harbaugh, who is anything but dumb, inherited a program that was largely in disarray and badly in need of a modern identity to freshen the staid tradition that the school always had relied on.
“It’s Michigan,” Harbaugh’s predecessor, Brady Hoke, would often say, which was as impressive to recruits from outside the state as a box of yams. You might as well have been sending them snail mail and calling them on rotary phones.
Harbaugh’s willingness to continually make himself the center of attention, whether it was picking fights on Twitter with Butch Jones and Kirby Smart, doing spring practice at IMG Academy in Florida, taking his team to Rome and Paris or setting up so-called satellite camps in Georgia and Alabama had everything to do with making Michigan relevant nationally in a way it hadn’t been since the mid-1990s.
At some point, though, parlor tricks and social media distractions weren’t going to cut it. Harbaugh needed to win big this season or risk being reduced to a sideshow that only bothered the nation’s truly elite programs from February through August.
It appears he’s finally poised to deliver.
Though the told-you-sos will be fierce Saturday if Michigan comes up short in what appears to be the Wolverines’ best chance to beat Ohio State since Urban Meyer came on the scene, it’s worth keeping in mind that the preseason consensus in both media polls and the Amway Coaches Poll was that Michigan would finish fourth in the East behind Ohio State, Michigan State and Penn State. Given the Wolverines schedule, which included Wisconsin and a non-conference opener at Notre Dame, it was easier to see four losses than one or two.
Instead, what happened is that many of the players who were part of Harbaugh’s early barnstorming blitz such as defensive tackle Rashan Gary, cornerback Lavert Hill and receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones have matured into the kind of upperclassmen that can contend for titles, just as their recruiting rankings indicated. Even Karan Higdon, a three-star running back from Florida who signed shortly after Harbaugh got the job, has become a massive success story with more than 2,000 rushing yards over the last two seasons.
The point is, while everyone was focused on the antics, Harbaugh was doing the necessary work to build a program.
No, it wasn’t perfect. There were legitimate questions about why someone with such an esteemed reputation for working with quarterbacks couldn’t find someone to competently run his offense until Mississippi transfer Shea Patterson became available this year.
More important, the results in rivalry games weren’t there, though you can chalk some of that up to bad luck (his Michigan résumé would look a lot different if not for a blocked punt at the buzzer in 2015 against Michigan State and a questionable spot against Ohio State in 2016).
Add it all up and it didn’t seem likely after Michigan’s 24-17 loss to Notre Dame in Week 1 that we’d be sitting here in late November talking about how the Wolverines are favored to beat the Buckeyes in Columbus and primed to make the College Football Playoff.
But regardless of the Ohio State game, what they’ve accomplished is truly impressive. Michigan is No. 1 in the country in total defense by a margin of nearly 20 yards per game over Clemson, No. 4 in scoring defense at 13.5 points per game, tied for 14th in turnover margin and ninth among Power Five schools in rushing.
Their so-called revenge tour has brought the Wolverines resounding wins over Wisconsin, Michigan State and Penn State.
And their dominance since the Notre Dame game has put them solidly into the No. 4 position in the Playoff rankings, which probably correlates with why Harbaugh has been far more subdued and out of the spotlight this year. He’s letting his team do the talking.
None of that is enough for Harbaugh’s many critics, who need to see him deliver a Big Ten title before admitting that he’s justified the massive contract Michigan gave him. But if he beats Ohio State, it’s not only time to end the debate over whether he’s worth it, it’s time to hand him the trophy for coach of the year.