Sports

Michael James: Evidence Mounts That Jim Harbaugh Is a Misfit as UM Football Coach

September 04, 2018, 11:19 PM

Michael James of The Tribes Sports has spent more than 20 years in sports journalism as a general assignment reporter with The Detroit News, an NBA beat writer for the New York Daily News and as an ESPN writer. His column is reposted with permission.

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Jim Harbaugh: The devil we know.

By Michael James

Have you ever heard that old saying about the devil you know?

What it basically means is that there is a certainty, and a kind of safety, in staying the course with what's familiar.

People use this axiom as reason to stay in bad relationships or employed in dead-end jobs or a whole host of other less than desirable situations.

Another reason we don’t move to change our lot in life is for this phrase that Isuggest: Because of the devils we’ve known.

In the case of the University of Michigan Football Wolverines, our memory banks hold tightly to what came in the decade before Jim Harbaugh.

In sports parlance, Michigan fans were in football purgatory, no longer considered among the elite and relegated to the sidelines.

Woody Hayes Days

In the same way as we remember the halcyon days of The Ten-Year War between Ohio State’s Woody Hayes and UM’s Bo Schembechler, we also recall The Decade of Mostly Darkness, when those legendary figures were replaced by supposedly Michigan Men Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke.

In most of our lifetimes, Michigan Football has never been as irrelevant nor as impotent as those days, save for Hoke’s first season, as they were then.

The collective tenures of Rodriguez and Hoke made Michigan fans forget the days of The Big Two and everybody else.

Worse, they made Michigan football a laughing stock.

There were unthinkable losses to teams like Appalachian State and Toledo.

Appalachian State? I’d bet a hundred bucks you still don’t even know where that is.

Another hundred says you only know that school’s name because their victory over Michigan that shocked the world 11 years ago put them on the football map.


University of Michigan Athletic Department photo

Such was the power and influence of Michigan on the national scene that it’s no longer surprising today to hear that the Mountaineers almost upset Penn State in the 2018 season opener.

Yes, we recall those ghastly memories so vividly that it’s for this reason we so desperately cling to Jim Harbaugh, despite the fact that four seasons in, evidence continues to mount that he is not the man for the job.

What he is, however, is the devil we know.

And nowhere on the current football horizon do we see a potential successor who is as good, despite Michigan’s past of greatness.

Good Enough? 

So we begrudgingly accept good enough. Because we can’t take, God forbid, a redux of Rodriguez and Hoke.

In the meantime, we accept that an entire generation is coming of age never knowing there was a time when UM fans smugly referred to Michigan State as “Michigan State Agricultural College.” They have never known the anticipation of those late November games for all the marbles where we often expected to clench thorned roses between our teeth.

More history from those old enough to know: ‘Twas a time before the Internet when you had to wait for the college scoreboard ticker to flash along the bottom of the television screen to find out how Michigan was doing that day. And what would you see? Gaudy scores like 48-7 or 56-10. An off-Saturday might show the Wolverines in an unexpectedly close one, winning, say, 30-3.

Harbaugh would remember such days as well, for as a star quarterback at U-M, he was often cause of such headache and calamity for opponents.

Surely, he too recalls those days of predicted 40-point spreads. The days when you often didn’t bother to watch games against the likes of Illinois, Purdue or Northwestern. He knows the disbelief Michigan fans felt when the Wolverines would stumble against a team like Minnesota, or when Wisconsin was a walk in the park.

Those were days when, if nothing else, Michigan could actually run the ball. Days when UM’s offensive lines were always the biggest and strongest, could move mountains. Where three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust was a religion.


University of Michigan Athletic Department photo

Those days are long gone.

Harbaugh, The Prodigal Son, has returned, but instead of adding to Michigan’s storied history, he is the foil to the burnishing legacies of State’s Mark Dantonio and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer.

How average has Harbaugh been? Most of you might know that over the first 40 games of his tenure, Harbaugh is 28-12. Hoke? 27-13.

Here’s a startling stat you might not know: Counting three straight losses to end last season, coupled with the Notre Dame loss to start the season, Harbaugh has lost four straight games at Michigan – something Brady Hoke never did.

Rodriguez, who should require a signed temporary hall pass just to again enter the state of Michigan, had two five-game losing streaks during his time in Ann Arbor.

A Stepping Stone

Now in his fourth season, a victory over Jim Harbaugh’s Wolverines has become a stepping stone for others toward a college football playoff.

Once also-rans in the Big Ten no longer fear the maize and blue. There are no signs of this changing in the near future.

Such are the perils of holding on white-knuckled to Jim Harbaugh, the devil you know.


Read more:  The Tribe Sports


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