by Seth Davis
The barbs would continue throughout Harbaugh’s tenure in Ann Arbor. The words stung, but they never cut deep. “It didn’t bother me because I knew he was being honest,” Harbaugh says. “If the truth hurts, then so be it. It might hurt your feelings for a couple of days, but he never lied to me. People can work with the truth. At least they know where they stand.”
It didn’t take long for Harbaugh’s work ethic to differentiate him from the other quarterbacks. He first became the starter as a redshirt sophomore, but his season ended in the fifth game, when he broke his left arm during a loss to Michigan State. He took over again the following season, leading the Wolverines to a 10–1–1 record and the nation’s No. 2 ranking. He was tough, smart, and highly competitive, and he developed a remarkable ability to ad lib his way out of trouble.
As a senior, Harbaugh led the Wolverines to victory in nine of their first ten games. Once again, the season came down to the annual showdown with rival Ohio State. Harbaugh had yet to play in the Rose Bowl, and he simply couldn’t imagine his career ending without it. A few days before the game, he was speaking to reporters when he blurted out, “We’re going to play in the Rose Bowl this year. I guarantee it. We’ll beat Ohio State. We’ll be in Pasadena on January first.”
Those comments caused quite a stir, but Schembechler was not angered in the least. “I might have said the same thing if I had any guts,” he quipped. Looking back, Harbaugh says his remark was uncalculated, that he was just saying what he felt. People can work with the truth, right? It also taught him the importance of backing up one’s words, which he did by throwing for 261 yards in a 26–24 win. After the game, Schembechler shared a quiet moment with his quarterback in his office and said, “I can’t imagine how proud your dad must be.”
Harbaugh finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting, and even though Michigan lost to Arizona State in the Rose Bowl, he ended his career as the school’s all-time record holder in passing yards. The Bears selected him with the 26th pick in the first round of the 1987 NFL draft. (One of the things that impressed the team was the way Harbaugh showed up for his pre-draft interview suffering from a bad case of chickenpox, yet he still played five games of racquetball against one of the assistants.) Harbaugh became the Bears’ starter early in his second year. It was an awesome responsibility. He was the face of one of the league’s marquee franchises, which was just three years removed from having won the Super Bowl with arguably the best team the NFL had ever seen.
Quarterbacking the Bears put Harbaugh under the auspices of yet another hot-tempered coach. He loved playing for Mike Ditka, respected that he was a Hall of Fame tight end who played with great toughness, but it was not easy functioning under Ditka’s methods of truth telling. Things boiled over in humiliating fashion in October 1992, during a Monday Night Football game against the Vikings. With the Bears leading 20–0 early in the fourth quarter, Ditka signaled a running play for Walter Payton. Harbaugh got a little too careless with his ad libbing; he audibled at the line of scrimmage and threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown. Ditka erupted on the sidelines, screaming mercilessly at his quarterback before a national television audience. After the Bears lost 21–20, Ditka continued his diatribe in the postgame locker room, telling reporters, “I’m not going to put forty-seven players’ futures in the hands of one player who thinks he knows more than I do.”
Ditka told me that in retrospect, he regrets losing his cool the way he did that night. Nevertheless, he admired his quarterback’s persistence. “Jim never got caught up in mistakes,” Ditka said. “He always pushed forward. You don’t see that much in a quarterback.”
Things unraveled rather quickly for Harbaugh in Chicago. The team waived him in 1993 following back-to-back losing seasons. His career was resurrected in Indianapolis, where he took the Colts to the 1995 AFC Championship Game and finished second in the league’s MVP voting. Harbaugh led the team to so many come-from-behind wins that season that he earned the nickname “Captain Comeback.” His coach with the Colts, Ted Marchibroda, said of him, “I don’t think I ever saw a guy who enjoyed football as much as he did. He enjoyed everything.”
The one hiccup during his time in Indianapolis came in 1997, when Harbaugh had to take an unpaid one-month hiatus because he broke his hand during a fistfight with former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jim Kelly, who in his role as an ESPN broadcaster had suggested that Harbaugh “overdramatized” his injuries. Asked later whether he regretted the incident, Harbaugh replied, “I regret that I have a crack in one of my bones in my hand.” It wasn’t the most diplomatic answer, but at least it was the truth.
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As Jim was grinding his way through the NFL, John was grinding his way through their father’s profession. After finishing a nondescript playing career in college, John took a job as a running backs and linebacker coach at Western Michigan, where Jack was working as a college head coach for the first time. After Jack got fired in 1987 following a 3–8 season, he and John both went to the University of Pittsburgh to work as assistants. A year later, John moved on to Morehead State before landing at the University of Cincinnati in 1989 as a special teams coordinator. Jack, meanwhile, got another shot as a college head coach that same year, when he was hired by Western Kentucky.
Jack put together a decent record during his first five seasons at Western Kentucky, but when the spring of 1994 came around, the university president informed him that the school was going to drop the football program. Even though that turned out not to be the case, the anticipated move drove away recruits and depleted the team’s schedule. The president made it clear that he intended to deprive the program of the resources it needed to succeed, thereby ensuring a slow, painful demise.
Jack was distraught. He was convinced he was on the verge of losing another job. As it happened, Jim was driving through the area on his way to vacation in Florida and he stopped by to visit. When Jack told him that he was resigned to losing his program, Jim said, “That doesn’t sound like you. How can I help?” Jack said he doubted he could. “Well,” Jim said, “you just got rid of some coaches. How about if I come on as an unpaid assistant to help you recruit? Would I be allowed to do that?”
They checked with the school, and it turns out he was. So that very day Jim signed a contract to be an unpaid assistant coach at Western Kentucky. Since he was on his way to Florida, Jack checked a recruiting newsletter for a list of prospects in the state. The first name on the list was a quarterback from Bradenton named Willie Taggart. Jim called him right away. He also contacted several other players in Florida with help from John, who from his perch at Cincinnati had a deep familiarity with the recruiting landscape. Jack thought the entire enterprise was a fool’s errand, but he didn’t have the heart to tell his boys. “I didn’t think we had a chance, but I saw them so engaged,” he told me. “I couldn’t tell them what I really felt.”
Taggart ended up being the cornerstone for a recruiting class that would go on to win the Division I-AA national championship in 2002. All told, Jim spent seven years working as an unpaid assistant while extending his own NFL career. After playing for four years with the Colts, he suited up for four different teams in four years. He retired in 2001 at the age of thirty-eight and did what he always knew he was going to do—get into coaching. He latched on with the Oakland Raiders, spending one season as a quality control coach and a second as a quarterbacks coach.
Those two years gave him the chance to build his knowledge, particularly during the long hours he spent with the team’s owner, Al Davis, another intense competitor who tended to alienate people. Harbaugh peppered Davis with questions about how to evaluate players, develop talent, run an organization. Every day was an opportunity to learn—on the field, in the film room, and in the office, where he went from not knowing how to turn on a computer to mastering Excel spreadsheets.
Still, Harbaugh couldn’t stand being a low-level ass
istant. It was just like being the third-string quarterback again. His limited experience gave him limited options, but he did secure an opportunity to be head coach at the University of San Diego. It was a Division I-AA program, but that didn’t matter. Harbaugh had won a chance to get in the game.
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There’s a large hill behind the football practice field at the University of San Diego that is the perfect spot for a long, hard conditioning run. Imagine the reaction of the USD players when the new head coach told them to sprint up the hill in the hot sun, then joined them, then ran by them, then puked in a trash can. It was an authentic moment if ever there was one.
Harbaugh never saw the USD job as beneath his “level.” From the start, he wanted to confer a big vision, and he thirsted for ways to enhance his knowledge of what he had inherited. “He really wanted to know all the information, everything that was going on within the program,” says Tim Drevno, who was Harbaugh’s first offensive coordinator at USD. “He dug in on recruiting. He wanted to know about the budget, about how the secretary did her job. He really set the tone that we were all in this thing together and we’re going to collaborate on this. Everybody’s got strengths, everybody’s got weaknesses, we need each other to make this thing great. So it doesn’t matter whose idea it is, as long as it works.”
Harbaugh knew it was important to have a great staff. He hired as his defensive coordinator an NFL journeyman named Dave Adolph, who would follow Harbaugh to his later coaching stops and become one his most important mentors. Adolph had a deep well of knowledge about the game, and he had a way of doing things that Harbaugh wanted to emulate. For example, Adolph wore khaki pants every day, no matter where he was or what he was doing. From that point on, Harbaugh has worn khakis almost every day. “I just saw the genius in it,” he said. “You had pockets. You had a place to put your script, your pens, your gum. Then the amount of time saved where you don’t have to spend fifteen minutes thinking, Wow, what am I going to wear today? Should I go shorts? Should I go sweats? I probably save forty-five minutes a day not standing in a closet.”
At San Diego, Harbaugh was as far from the NFL as a man could get. His office was in a double-wide trailer. The school did not even offer full scholarships. So he called upon his PEAK profile to ignite the program. His pedigree as a fourteen-year NFL quarterback was the foundation of his empathy. The players knew that he understood where they were coming from, and that he had the knowledge to help them get better. He was only a few years removed from playing in the NFL, so he was able to join their drills and compete with them, whether it was throwing the football or dropping to see who could do the most push-ups. He enlarged the roster with recruits from all over the country (the longer depth chart fostered competition at every practice) and assembled a far more ambitious schedule featuring more games and tougher opponents, such as nearby San Diego State, a Division I-A school. Sure, there were moments when Harbaugh felt like he was in over his head, but that’s when his persistence kicked in. “When I’m fearful of something, then as fast as I can I just turn that into aggression,” he said.
Harbaugh was coaching a Division II All-Star Game in Las Vegas when he met the woman who would become his second wife. He and his first wife, Miah, had recently divorced after ten years of marriage. (They had two sons and a daughter together.) Jim approached Sarah Feuerborn at a P.F. Chang’s restaurant. She was a real estate agent and not much of a football fan. She didn’t even realize until their third date that he had played in the NFL, and that was only because she mentioned his name to her brother. During a night out with some of his assistants and their wives, one of the other women pulled her aside and sternly warned, “Whatever you do, do not marry a coach.” It was good advice, but Sarah would ignore it.
With Jack on board as the team’s running backs coach, the Toreros went 7–4 in Jim’s first season. They went on to put together back-to-back 11–1 seasons and claim consecutive conference championships. One of the few blemishes on Harbaugh’s record was an arrest for driving under the influence in the fall of 2005. He pled guilty to a charge of reckless driving. That did not dissuade plenty of high-powered colleges from reaching out in hopes of hiring him. Harbaugh accepted an offer from Stanford. He was going back to Palo Alto.
The Cardinal had gone 1–11 the previous season, which meant the program was a long way from challenging USC for dominance in what was then the Pac-10. The USC program, coached by Pete Carroll, was the league’s biggest and baddest beehive, and Harbaugh couldn’t resist throwing rocks at it. A few months after he took the Stanford job, he claimed to have heard from a member of the USC staff that Carroll, who had previously coached in the NFL for the New York Jets and New England Patriots, would be the coach at USC for one more year. Carroll did not appreciate the not-so-subtle effort to undermine his recruiting. “If he’s going to make statements like that, he ought to get his information right. And if he has any questions about it, he should call me,” Carroll said. (It should be noted that Harbaugh was wrong. Carroll ended up coaching at USC for three more years before leaving to take over the Seattle Seahawks. And it was Harbaugh, not Carroll, who two years later interviewed unsuccessfully for the vacant New York Jets job.)
Stanford went 4–8 in Harbaugh’s first season, but in week five the Cardinals pulled off one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport when they knocked off undefeated, top-ranked USC, 24–23. Stanford came into the game as a whopping 41-point underdog. As Harbaugh continued to improve Stanford’s lot, no element of the program was too small for him to tinker with. He even decreed that the team’s bench should move to the opposite side of the field so his players could be in the shade on hot days. Stanford won just five games in 2008, but the improvement started to take hold the following year when he mentored a quarterback prodigy named Andrew Luck. Together they helped the Cardinal to a second-place finish in the conference and a victory in the Sun Bowl.
The program was on a remarkable trajectory, and it looked bound to continue as Stanford returned most of its starters, including Luck, for the 2010 season. Harbaugh, however, felt compelled to shake things up. He fired members of his defensive staff and stripped some of offensive coordinator David Shaw’s responsibilities. Many of the jettisoned coaches were angry and hurt, and they took shots at Harbaugh in the media. But he saw the moves as necessary. He was not in the friendship business. He was in the winning business.
Thus stirred the beginnings of a narrative that Harbaugh’s high-wattage personality, insatiable competitiveness, and cutting bluntness grates on people after a while—that he can be successful coaching a group in the short term, but eventually he frays relationships, just as he did as a kid on the playground. Harbaugh has said he does not quite understand this impression, but given how entrenched it has become, he acknowledges there must be some validity to it. Even those who are close to him sometimes have a hard time explaining his behavior. “Jim has a tendency to wear people out at times,” Shaw told NFL Network broadcaster Rich Eisen. “He drives people, he pushes people, he is the most competitive person on the planet. It’s just who he is. He’s going to rub some people the wrong way. He’s going to find a way to win football games, because that’s what he does.”
There is also a quirky, odd aspect to Harbaugh’s interactions that comes off by various turns as endearing, mystifying, and off-putting. Former Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer recounted a conversation he had with Harbaugh for Lars Anderson of Bleacher Report. The two were chatting at a dinner function a few days before their teams met in the 2010 Orange Bowl. He noticed that Harbaugh kept referring to Beamer’s team as Georgia Tech. At first Beamer thought he was kidding, but then he realized Harbaugh was honestly mistaken. So he pointed out the error to Harbaugh and told him he couldn’t wait to tell his players that the opposing team’s coach didn’t even know the name of their university.
According to Beamer, after a long, uncomfortable silence, Harb
augh finally blurted, “Well, I can’t wait to tell my players that you said we were going to play Samford, not Stanford!” And he stalked away.
Stanford won the game, 40–12, and finished the season with a 12–1 record, ranked No. 4 in the country. This time, Harbaugh got the NFL offer he had been denied two years before. He was scooped up by the hometown San Francisco 49ers, who were coming off a 6–10 season. In his first season, Harbaugh engineered the most stunning turnaround of his career, leading the team to a 13–3 record and a berth in the NFC Championship Game, where it lost to the New York Giants in overtime.
Along the way he rankled yet another opposing coach. This time it was Jim Schwartz of the Detroit Lions. After the 49ers beat the Lions on October 16, 2011, the two coaches went to shake hands on the field. Harbaugh was so amped by the win that he jammed his hand into Schwartz’s and let out a primal scream. Schwartz did not take kindly to the breach of etiquette, and he literally chased Harbaugh off the field. Harbaugh was clearly in the wrong and he acknowledged as much the following week, both in a phone conversation with Schwartz and to the public. But he stopped short of apologizing. He considered that to be an inauthentic gesture.
While one Harbaugh brother was rising in the west, the other was doing the same in the east. John had been hired as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens in 2008. Imagine the pride felt by Jack, who now had two sons working as head coaches in the NFL. Every week, Jim and John both overnighted their coaches’ game videos to their dad so he could study them at his home in Wisconsin. When the 49ers and Ravens played each other on Thanksgiving Day 2011, it marked the first time in NFL history that teams coached by brothers faced off. The Ravens won, 16–6. The many stories written in advance of that game highlighted the difference in the brothers’ personalities—John’s steely determination versus Jim’s spicy volatility.
