HARBAUGH’S 15-0 SEASON IS MEMORABLE, FOR MANY MORE WAYS THAN ONE
His players are national champions, but the head coach swindled the system and was suspended six games, which allows him to escape Michigan with a stadium banner and move on to the NFL's riches
He will sell books and give speeches because, in the core of our existence, Jim Harbaugh thinks he’s a reformist. Some would use demeaning phrases, preferring fabulist, but deforming the Big Ten and lying to the NCAA didn’t interfere with his passion. He led Michigan to the national championship of college football and now heads to the NFL, for perhaps an all-time coaching contract.
Is this the way we get ahead in 2024, by swindling the system, assuming there is a system? Is that the message we’re sending to college students, if they even care about the truth anymore? His program beat Washington with a donor-swelled budget of $214 million, to the point private-equity people think the Wolverines can earn $1.5 billion by leaving Ann Arbor and becoming a professional operation. Does anyone even think about classrooms anymore? Do you visit the campus bookstore and buy a “Michigan Vs. Everybody” t-shirt for $45?
The newfangled reasoning expands far beyond a 34-13 victory on Monday night in Houston. Harbaugh did more than win another banner for the 108,000-seat Big House. He changed what we think of his sport, some of it still laudable — such as Donovan Edwards, who rumbled for two long touchdown runs, and J.J. McCarthy, whose meditation sessions with a staff psychiatrist worked efficiently in the fourth quarter — and a whole lot of it not very good at all.
Fifteen and zero.
And tainted.
“Watching this confetti, it tells the story, every one of these pieces of confetti,” said Harbaugh, now available to the Los Angeles Chargers or a team that will pay him $18 million. “We’re 15-0. We took on all comers. We’re the last one standing. It’s a glorious feeling. So happy for the players, their parents and grandparents.”
He was just getting started on the field. He hugged his brother, John, who must be wondering if Michigan’s glory could be followed by his own in Baltimore, where the Ravens have a chance of winning the Super Bowl. He talked about “a spiritual journey, a council from God, the holy spirit.” Then he brought in his father, Jack, who asked aloud to the crowd — with appropriate interruptions in the delay — if anyone has it better than the Harbaughs. He said he can join his brother and father at the dinner table now that he has won a title, which they’ve both won.
“What they’ve done is amazing,” Jim said of his players. “They’re champions. They’re simply known as national champions. Pull it down! We did that!”
Before the suspensions, Harbaugh was honorable. He took a pay cut for subpar play and was rejected when he interviewed with two NFL franchises, Denver and Minnesota. He was on his way to a wonderful story, but then, he stopped answering questions from the NCAA and blew off the Big Ten. A spiritual journey, maybe not, though don’t tell his players. “We stuck together this year as brothers,” said Blake Corum, so wondrous on a night when his team rushed for a record 303 yards. “We have a strong culture at Michigan. It started in the locker room. We faced adversity, looked to the right, to the left. We locked arms. Now, we’re national champions.”
You felt good for the players, who didn’t cheat. There was McCarthy, who finally is a Chicago-bred quarterback who wins it all, when he said, “I’m J.J. McCarthy from La Grange Park, Illinois, and I’ll be the best I can be.” All he did was smile and exchange kisses with his girlfriend, as a 20-year-old who has dealt seriously with depression and does long motivational sessions before games. He’ll be in the NFL, maybe with Harbaugh, who can demand what he wants with the Chargers or Las Vegas Raiders or Washington Commanders. It’s his call, this time.
“I just want to enjoy this. I hope you give me that,” he said when asked about the next level. “Does it always have to be what’s next? What’s the future? I hope to have a future. I hope there’s a tomorrow, a day after tomorrow.” After which he said, in a galling remark, “Off the field issues? We’re innocent. We stood strong and tall because we knew we’re innocent.” Innocent is not the word.
At home, Harbaugh farms chickens. Why would he care that a Naval Academy graduate named Connor Stalions was paid $55,000 to cheat on the side, involved in illegal sign-stealing inside dozens of stadiums and defying an in-person rule not to use electronic equipment? To counter the wrongdoing, he dips into religious talk. “If Jesus were to come back in this era, I suppose many of the biblical analogies he’d use would be about sports as well as agriculture, maybe a combination of the two,” he said. “Solomon would have been a great coach, too. I have that feeling. Jesus would have been a five-star. He would have been a five-star player, no doubt about it. He would have been a Hall of Fame coach.”
Whatever you make of him, and there is much everywhere, Harbaugh just beat the power players and won the school’s first national title since a split version in 1997. For all the arrogance from a Midwestern brand of bombast, it’s stunning how so many Michigan grads — doctors, business moguls, attorneys and those as rich as Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, who donated $100 million to a campus school — don’t have an issue with Harbaugh’s suspensions. He was ordered to sit twice for three-game bans in a 12-game regular season. He’s a half-and-half coach for the ages. Only because the College Football Playoff operates by its lonesome, thanks to ESPN, will Michigan’s signage not be folded into vacated baggage like the Fab Five basketball scandal in the 1990s.
No one cares, except a few souls like me. Washington, coached by a homebred South Dakotan with NAIA hardware, runs its program the right way. Kalen DeBoer isn’t well-known in this land when he should be. Harbaugh is a nationally infamous turnaround artist, reversing fortunes at Stanford and the San Francisco 49ers until he fought with front-office bosses, leading to his Michigan return. It took five years to get past Ohio State, but he needed to battle the sign-stealing of the Buckeyes — legal, as McCarthy pointed out — before his dominance went historic. He says he has done nothing wrong off the field. Two suspensions insist he did, along with more coaching ejections if he came back next season.
This was the end of the geographical game in the sport, as the West Coast and Midwest become one, with both programs playing in Seattle next October in the expanded Big Ten. Have we thought how the revisions alter space and land when Oregon travels to Maryland, or South Carolina plays in Texas? Have we thought about Fox Sports taking over the Big Ten and ESPN taking over the SEC, with their rivalry not healthy for any of us? There was hope that multiple broadcast partners would split the new 12-team playoff event, but just as Bristol shoves screwball Pat McAfee down America’s unwilling throat, the CFP will cut another exclusive deal with ESPN through 2031. That’s a win for the SEC, with the network paying $1.3 billion and favoring the South.
All while the sport faces more upheaval from Florida State. Representatives were so livid at the selection committee members, after one-loss Alabama and Texas made the final four, that executive director Bill Hancock contacted the authorities about the then-perfect Seminoles. “We've been in contact with the FBI just to say, ‘We got this. We got a threat on my house. We want you to know about it and tell us what should we do about it?' Most of us did,” he said, describing the anger as “disgusting, profanity-laced emails and phone calls." The FBI? “Every NCAA sports committee receives criticism from the teams who were left out," Hancock said. “I've seen it and I understand fans, but this one was absolutely over the top and inappropriate. In my 35 years, I've never seen anything like this.”
As the night passed, Michigan beat up Michael Penix Jr. and quieted a brief run. In a booth, a former Michigan student named Derek Jeter watched in a booth with Michael Jordan, whose sneaker brand sponsors the national champions. Finally, the players drenched the coach with Gatorade after many tries.
Blue syrup.
“You have to go to those dark places to get what you want,” said McCarthy, who is 27-1 in his college career. “Coach Harbaugh is the reason we’re here today.”
The apologists will serenade him. “I don’t think there’s an asterisk,” ESPN’s Rece Davis said. “There will always be a subtitle.”
There will be more than that.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.