The shape this column was set to take underwent a bit of a change in the whirlwind last week of Harbaugh Watch 2k22. I knew I wanted to write something and began to take an introspective look at my time back as a fan and then student broadcaster and then writer/analyst during his tenure. As Wednesday drew closer and the reports asserted that it was approaching a done-deal, the picture started to come together. And with it came a title that I was planning to run with: After the Gold Rush. 

The name was inspired by the famous Neil Young song (and album), but I liked the meaning it had for this instance and I planned to explain it at the start of the piece. That Harbaugh returning to Michigan was akin to the striking of gold in a western mine, kick-starting a gold rush. That we, as Michigan fans, were the miners who hitched the future of this program and our emotional stakes in it to that gold rush. We didn't have fun prospecting names like Geo W. Hemmings or nicknames like "Gooseneck" or "Diamond Jim", but we were in that boat.  

Like the miners who set out to descend on a given gold mine, we began with lofty dreams of high fortunes, that the treasure of the mine would bring us all the glory that we ever dreamed of. But with Harbaugh planning to leave after a lone B1G Championship in seven seasons, we were set to be left like many miners after the end of many gold rushes, richer than we began, but with a pang of emptiness at not getting all that we wanted. And we would also be left with a tinge of sadness at how quickly it all went. 

Of course, this didn't happen. Wednesday night we learned that Jim Harbaugh is returning as Michigan's head coach for the 2022 season and Adam Schefter has reported that the coach plans to stay as long as he is wanted in Ann Arbor. Since I already planned to write something about him leaving, I figured I might as well stay on the thought and write something about this dramatic reversal of fate. With the old framework still in my head, I landed on only one plausible title: The Gold Rush Continues. 

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If you're looking for a more detailed and fact-first column, luckily our site has one. It just won't be this one. I'd recommend checking out Seth's piece from yesterday if you're searching for immediate answers. If you simply want the basic facts of the situation, and where we go from here in a black-and-white sense, that piece is the one you're looking for. This one will include facts, but will be more of a window into my mind as both an analyst and fan, a collection of thoughts but also feelings about what this all means and how to reckon with it all. I hope you'll enjoy the ride. Or, at least find insight in this messy set of ideas. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: The Column]

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This feels like a while ago... or like yesterday? [Eric Upchurch]

The perception of time works in strange ways. On one hand, it feels like Jim Harbaugh has been at Michigan forever. Seven years is indeed a long time, and in a sports world that is so focused on the now, it feels like ages. There have now been three classes of players who began at Michigan under Harbaugh, played out their four seasons, and now have graduated and moved on. He is not a new coach. Thinking back to the time when Brady Hoke was actively coaching at Michigan does feel like a bit of a stretch of the mind. Shane Morris? Jeremy Gallon? Fitz Toussaint? Yeah, that feels like a long time ago. My brother was in the second grade when Harbaugh was hired. He's now in high school. It's been a relatively long time. 

On the other hand, the memory of the first gold strike is still fresh in my mind. The Harbaugh Watch 2k14 craze, his triumphant arrival at Crisler Center before the raucous crowd, the beginning of the charming yet goofy antics. The "Welcome Home Coach" t-shirts that littered downtown Ann Arbor during the summer of 2015. Even memories from his first two seasons, the shutout streak, the goal line stand in Minnesota, the 78-0 game, and of course The Spot, are all pretty fresh. Those are memories that don't seem as long ago as reality. And though sports in the present may have a focus in the now, coaches who win stay a long time. Dabo has been at Clemson for 14 years, Saban has been at Bama for 15 years, Dantonio spent 13 in East Lansing, and of course Kirk Ferentz is now going on two decades in Iowa City. A seven year Harbaugh tenure would've been relatively brief for a coach of his magnitude and success. 

You can think about seven years as the body of time in sports by which events cross from "he wasn't there that long" to "he was there forever". The decision of Jim Harbaugh to stay, should he be here for the long haul, will make his legacy indelible, rather than fleeting. From "I came, I saw, I conquered" to building something long-term and hopefully, sturdier. Part of the reason for this feeling of perception is because 2021-22 has the feel of a swing moment within the scope of Michigan football's future. 

[Bryan Fuller]

Beating Ohio State, winning the B1G, and making the College Football Playoff is what Harbaugh came here to do. It represented the gold nuggets that appeared to be all we would be left with out of this gold rush. But keeping Harbaugh around means that those accomplishments, which represent the first step for Michigan Football towards summiting the mountain of college football's elite, have a chance to be just the base. Either they will be the beginning of a new era of broader success, or we'll look back on it like the 2005 Chicago White Sox, a one-hit wonder season of immense success that didn't start anything new or memorable. Jim Harbaugh leaving made it feel likely that 2021 was condemned to be a one-hit wonder, unless Josh Gattis or Matt Campbell or Matt Rhule or Bill O'Brien turned out to be exceptional coaches who could win big at the highest level.

Harbaugh staying at Michigan by no means guarantees that the Wolverines are going to turn 2021 into some dynasty, or even into a consistent B1G champion. It does, however, give it a shot of happening. And a much better shot than would have been the case had he left. The staff that just helped engineer a stunning turnaround season will likely stick together largely intact for at least another year, and the recruiting momentum generated by such a season will not be rendered like sand in a breeze, blown into tiny shards and scattered by the wind.

2021 represents the chance for Michigan to string together a couple top tier recruiting classes based mostly on on-field achievements, and begin to stockpile some of the talent needed to put up a fairer fight the next time Michigan finds itself in the CFP. Harbaugh leaving would have stopped that momentum dead in its tracks, threatened to blow up the staff, and put a new coach behind the eight-ball. The program would have been in a considerably better position than the program was seven years ago, sure, but it also would likely slam the door on 2021 being the clean first rung on the ladder to CFB's elite.

Harbaugh staying means that possibility is still open. For all the hot takes and heartbreak, Harbaugh is a very good football coach who has won a lot of games at Michigan. He is the singular vision behind the 2021 season. His coaching staff, his players, his scheme. His concoction won the B1G Championship. Anyone pretending like Jim Harbaugh staying in Ann Arbor is anything other than a massive win is kidding themselves, even if he just put us through the most stressful 72 hours since The Game. I'm glad he's staying. 

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[Bryan Fuller] 

There are questions still to be answered in the aftermath of this most recent flirtation to the NFL. I mused about one on Twitter Wednesday night, which was how Harbaugh will frame the span of the last week whenever he talks to the media next. The trust between the fanbase/administration and Harbaugh as to whether the famed coach wishes to be in a different destination has been damaged. The recruiting momentum is not halted, but for the moment, it will make the job of negative recruiting against Michigan for rival coaches much easier. The 2022 recruiting class was slowed because most of it was done at a time when other coaches could rightfully argue to recruits that Michigan's head coach was a lame duck. Harbaugh needs to make it clear that that will not happen with the 2023 class, that he's not simply returning as a lame duck until he gets an NFL offer next offseason. A hefty buyout in his new contract would make that clear. 

That may not be easy because even if Harbaugh isn't a lame duck, he's certainly an odd duck. Underneath the situation of the last week is the fact that Jim Harbaugh is one of humanity's strangest people. He's unpredictable, awkward, and extremely tight-lipped. Anyone who watched the Amazon Prime All or Nothing documentary from the 2017 season may remember several painfully strange Harbaugh sequences. There was the part when he took James Hudson to move into South Quad and embarked on a quest to find his old dorm room from the 80s, before forgetting where in the building that room was. Or the part where he visited Tarik Black in the hospital after his foot injury, walked into the operating room and stared at Black's cast in disbelief like it was an alien life form, before awkwardly telling Black and his mother that Black could now stick around for a grad degree thanks to the injury.

Jim Harbaugh is bizarre. He doesn't operate on the rest of humanity's rules and his cognition does not appear to work the same way that it does for most everyone else. In the past month, he managed to work a full college football coach's schedule that was back-breakingly busy, flying around and visiting recruits, even engaging in his old antics of doing workouts with those teenage football players. Yet at the same time as doing all that, he was fielding NFL offers and presumably dreaming about working a new job. Most people mail it in at their current gig during the period when they're strongly considering quitting and doing something new. Jim Harbaugh doesn't. 

[Patrick Barron]

Harbaugh continued attacking his current job like he had no intention of ever leaving (even hiring a top defensive line coach away from a rival program) when he was setting up NFL interviews at the same time. He was, by all accounts, very honest with recruits about his interest in the NFL during those recruiting visits. The way he conducted himself was truthful and admirable, never shirking the duties of his current employment despite seemingly searching for an escape pod, but that admirable behavior in and of itself was odd and confusing. Welcome to Jim Harbaugh. 

We'll probably never know what really went down between Harbaugh and the Vikings. Harbaugh, as it was noted during the process, talks to almost no one about his personal business and those he talks to don't leak anything useful. All the Harbaugh Watch 2k22 reporting was based on insiders talking to people who had anecdotal knowledge, or people who were trying their best to predict the world's most unpredictable human. No wonder a lot of it ended up being a bunch of malarkey. We went from "there's no serious interest here" to "80-20 he's staying" to "60-40 he's staying" to "50-50" to "he's expected to sign with the Vikings" to Adam Schefter reporting that Harbaugh will be staying as long as Michigan wants him to. Huh? 

So that's what the reporting looks like on Harbaugh's end. A chaotic mess, because, as John U. Bacon tweeted many times, nobody knows anything. If Harbaugh isn't going to leak, all we're left with are what the Vikings are leaking, which is, of course, a fresh batch straight from the spin zone. No NFL team is going to let reporters know that a college coach, and someone they were very interested in, turned them down to stay at that program. Much in the same way that you don't walk around telling everybody that your application got rejected by your dream school. Of course, we don't know if that's how it went down, and it's highly likely that it didn't go like that. But if it did unfold that way, the only party willing to leak anything would make sure that we don't find that out. So until Harbaugh speaks, this will remain a great mystery. 

And Harbaugh, whenever he does talk to the media, won't say that the Vikings lost interest even though he really wanted to bail, if that is indeed what happened. Both sides have a vested interest in protecting themselves, and so neither will give us the full truth. That said, other than for the Michigan Football history books that the 2075 version of Craig Ross and Seth Fisher will be writing, the play-by-play of what happened on February 2, 2022 isn't important. It would make for a good film if it's particularly juicy, but what matters now is that Harbaugh is here.

[Bryan Fuller]

If he's willing to stay for, as Schefter reported, "as long as (Michigan) wants him", then this flirtation will be a distant memory and the internal dynamics are meaningless. All that will matter is that he stayed. Just like how discussion of why the Red Wings wanted to trade Steve Yzerman in the fall of 1995 isn't terribly important, what matters is that it didn't happen and Yzerman stayed and helped win three Stanley Cups in Detroit. Michigan fans can only hope that history deems these two scenarios comparable. 

Now we set off into the real offseason. We'll hold long debates about JJ McCarthy and Cade McNamara, closely follow every drum beat of the recruiting cycle as the 2023 class really kicks into gear, and send our praise to Daxton Hill and Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo when they are drafted by the NFL. It feels rather strange to move on after a close brush with fate, but that's the world of sports. Things almost happen, and then they don't. Then we forget about them, and move on to the next shiny object. Soon, of course, that shiny object will be a new football season, when fans will pile into Michigan Stadium and Harbaugh will lead the team back out onto the field with a shiny ring on their fingers. 

It is in that moment that Harbaugh will get to truly bask in the glow of having accomplished what he came to Ann Arbor to do, and still be around to try and conquer more. The crowd will roar, the band will play, and having Jim Harbaugh on the sideline, coaching the reigning Big Ten Champions, is the gold nugget we waited seven years for. Who knows how the remainder of this gold rush will go, but I'm glad that we got that out of it, and I'm glad that Harbaugh is here to give us a chance to mine for more. Maybe it'll come, maybe it won't. But having him still on that sideline for another year, and hopefully, another decade, is one little shard of normalcy in a crazy world of uncertainty, even if saying the words "Michigan Football, Big Ten Champions" still feels abnormal. 

But beyond that, having Harbaugh wear the headset and the Maize & Blue cap feels right. He's still the right man for this moment and this program. 2021 showed us that much. It's been a turbulent last month but yes, the end result is right. Jim Harbaugh is still the head football coach at the University of Michigan. The gold rush continues.