If Jim Harbaugh Wants a Real Challenge, He Should Go to Michigan

For the third straight year, Ohio State is in the midst of amassing one of the best recruiting classes in the country, and this seems like as good a place as any to start with Jim Harbaugh. Earlier this week, unnamed sources told the NFL Network's Ian Rapoport that Harbaugh was determined to stay in the NFL, even as his tenure as the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers appeared to be nearing its end. A couple of days later, unnamed sources told Rapoport that Michigan was still pushing for his services, reportedly offering a six-year, $48 million contract that would make him the highest-paid coach in college football.

I have no idea what Harbaugh is thinking at this moment. I'm not sure what he wants, and I don't know if anyone else does, either, including Harbaugh himself. He is a wildly emotional and manically obsessive and largely inscrutable public figure, as ESPN The Magazine's Seth Wickershamfound out earlier this season. He can be cruel and brash and utterly devoid of empathy, but he is also supremely prepared, and he is utterly confident, a man who seems to lean in to monumental challenges. There is an anecdote in Wickersham's story about Harbaugh getting pushed by his brother John (now coach of the Baltimore Ravens) when they were kids, and Jim retaliating by punching John in the stomach.

And their father says to John, "If you push someone, then they might punch you back. You understand?'"

And their father says to Jim, "Do you have something you want to say to your brother?"

And Jim says, "Good. Now he knows."

And this is perhaps the only reason that Harbaugh should take the Michigan job rather than another position in the NFL: because Michigan is the toughest challenge of them all. Because Michigan is getting pushed, and has no one to punch back.

The problems at Michigan run deep; the problems at Michigan directly coincide with the success of Ohio State, which qualified for the first-ever four-team college football playoff the same year Michigan fizzled into discord under Brady Hoke. In just three seasons, Urban Meyer has elevated the Buckeyes into a nationally prominent program again; he has owned recruiting in the state of Ohio—which has less talent than it did in the era ofWoody and Bo, but is still by far the holy grail of Midwestern states when it comes to football talent—and he's begun to dip into the South, stealing five-star prospects like safetyVonn Bell (a Georgia native) from the SEC. Urban Meyer is one of the two best recruiters in the country (along with Nick Saban), and it is not coincidental that Michigan's fall has coincided with Meyer's rise.

This is why Michigan was willing to offer Harbaugh an unprecedented contract. This is why Michigan feels like they need Harbaugh so badly: They require an immediate firewall, a coach who can come in and steal some of those Ohio recruits from Meyer, and then go toe-to-toe with southern schools for kids from the Southeast. It wasn't that Brady Hoke was a terrible recruiter, but he wasn't Urban Meyer; few coaches possess the touch with recruits that Meyer does, but Harbaugh, given his national profile, given his ties to the NFL, would immediately be able to convince five-star recruits that he can provide them with a pathway to the pros. (Which—depressing as it may be—is what most 18-year-old high-level recruits are looking for above all else.)

It's not possible to win on a national scale with kids from the Midwest anymore, one recruiting expert told me the other day. There is still good young football talent in the Midwest, but there's not nearly enough of it, and there is so much of it in the Southeast, this expert contended, that the only way to compete with the Alabamas of the world is to pick off some of those kids. Ohio State is already doing that. And the only way a school like Michigan does it, at least immediately, is if they get someone with the profile of Harbaugh.

There is a certain amount of inherent condescension among NFL people toward college coaching; there will always be myopic fools who consider Nick Saban something of a failure because of his unsuccessful tenure with the Miami Dolphins. But college coaching is actually a far more difficult occupation. College coaching requires a year-round commitment to recruiting, a constant monitoring of social networks and text messages. College coaching is both a management job and a sales job. It rewards obsessiveness. Saban is the best coach in the modern history of the sport, at any level, because he is scarily proficient at both things. And Meyer is the same way.

I have no idea if Harbaugh wants this challenge. As utterly hapless as the Raiders have been, that job—or any other NFL opening—is still easier than the Michigan job. Those jobs are just about football, and it's possible that, five years removed from his time at Stanford, Harbaugh would prefer this. But I imagine Michigan is selling him hard on the idea of the challenge. I imagine Michigan is appealing to Harbaugh's pathologically competitive nature by pleading that they need someone to go after Urban Meyer in the same way Harbaugh went after Pete Carroll when they were both were coaching in the Pac-12, and in the same way he went after his brother when they were kids. I imagine Michigan is doing everything to appeal to both his best nature and his worst nature, which, in the case of a man like Jim Harbaugh, are essentially one and the same.