Previously in this series:

• Business is Finished by Ace Anbender
• You'll Fight and You'll Make It Through by Desmond Was Tripped

As you may be aware, Michigan won the national championship. Brian's said his bit on what this means to him, and now it's everyone else's turn. We're inviting everyone who's contributed to the blog over its existence to write whatever they want about the 2023 football team, and hope to roll out a series of these over the course of the next few months.

Next up we are honored to have Jordan Acker, who was once excoriated for a sports take by Brian, and yet somehow survived to become the administration's champion of Michigan athletics. You know him as a University of Michigan regent, one of the students in Dooley's class knows him as "The regent who tweets," and I've known him as a friend since he finally got old enough to not be such a starry eyed little freshman. Jordan also got to work directly with Jim Harbaugh, and recounts the man he got to know once he got over the initial starstruck handshake. –Seth

---

I remember the day I became a father. March of 2015. I was incredibly exhausted (but not nearly as exhausted as my wife), but I was mostly a glorified errand boy. Clean this bottle, get that diaper changed, hold the baby so I can change the spit up off my clothes. I had no idea what I was doing.

That wasn’t the day I became a dad. That was later in 2015. September 3, 2015, to be exact. That new baby girl had grown a little bit bigger and needed me a little bit more. As a night owl, it was my job to feed her after she went to bed, a literal “dream feed” for both of us.

The problem? That was right during the fourth quarter of Jim Harbaugh’s first game as Michigan’s coach.

[Hit the jump.]

—

Rich Eisen noted about our recent championship that one reason sports is so great is because it marks time in your life. I remember skipping study time during my middle school exams to watch a beaten-up Jim Harbaugh nearly single-handledly lead the Colts to the Super Bowl in 1995. I was sitting in my apartment in DC in late 2007, frantically trying to find some channel called “Versus” to see Harbaugh’s upstart Stanford team beat USC before heading out for drinks with friends I had made working on Capitol Hill. I was a new law student in Washington at that time.

I remember a few years later, watching his 49ers beat the Lions as Lauren and I had our engagement photos taken in Chicago.

And I remember that sunny California morning when I woke my pregnant wife and told her that Jim Harbaugh was finally, happily, coming home.

So on that late summer night, my new daughter in my hands awaiting her bottle, it made sense to me to bring Coach Harbaugh in there. She wasn’t old enough to care about Michigan football, and truthfully, the light probably bothered her eyes more than anything else, but it just seemed right. Even though we came up short, sharing this moment of my life with Coach, and the team that gave me the most joy as a kid, made so much sense. We were, though having never met, in the place we were supposed to be.

—

When I was elected as a Regent in 2018, I had no qualms about the role of academic governance and football. As long as there wasn’t a major policy to oversee, it wasn’t my role, and nor was I interested, in interfering. Drinking from a firehose at the University was a challenge enough. But I’m still a reads MGoBlog everyday fan. I’m still the only Regent that Brian has personally attacked his writing. (Nearly 20 years later, I like to look at it as a way for Brian to tell me I’d just be a better Regent than sportswriter. I hope this is true).

The Pandemic and NIL changed everything. For me, suddenly there was a major policy issue involving athletics that I felt I needed to know everything about. I got to know Jim’s team: Biff Poggi was a key person who really understood this at the time. I got to see first hand how much Coach genuinely cared about his kids well being. I was struck by my own cynicism. Maybe I had read about too many coaches using kids to get to the next job, or winning the next thing. But that wasn’t his way. He deeply cared. He wanted NIL policy not just to reflect his wishes, but to reflect what was best for the kids. Eventually, we got to know each other well enough that he invited me to join the team practice to give them “wise words.”

Yes, that's right. Me, a little nobody, addressing the MICHIGAN FOOTBALL TEAM. When you’re a lawyer and you’ve worked in politics, you generally get a good sense of what kind of speeches work and which don’t. I didn’t have any idea what to say to the team that day. But the pandemic had just happened, and we were finally getting back to football in fall practice, 2021. So what did I do? I opened up about joy.

I talked about the joy of the marching band, the joy of being on a team, the joy (for me) of bringing my daughter to her first game that fall. And the joy, I ended, of beating Ohio State that November. Here’s the truth though. I could speak all day about the joy of the first few. I didn’t believe the last one. I didn’t believe they were going to beat OSU that fall. But in their roar back, I could hear that the coaches and players really did.

Even though it poured that afternoon at practice, I knew I was walking into something special. There was something different about that team. There was something different about Coach. There was joy.

A few months later, they gave us all joy by beating Ohio State.

But it was also about teaching. I remember one day settling in for my lunch at work when I saw a tweet by Donovan Edwards come across my feed. My first call was to Mike Hart, and then to Coach. You could feel his compassion in his voice, as if his funny, goofball son had suddenly done something very out of character (this turns out to have been exactly correct. Donovan is a great kid). He insisted that Donovan learn from his mistake. And so learn we did. His talks to his players while we were at the Holocaust Museum were incredible. Seeing photos of the ’36 Olympics and Jesse Owens, he reminded his young men about how there was a plaque honoring Owens behind the football facility, where Owens set several world and Big Ten records. He then told his players how close the Holocaust was to them: that when he was a high schooler in Iowa City, his dad had introduced him to Owens and had taken a picture with him. Our team was better for that day, and Donovan Edwards is a better man now for having gone through it.

—

In 2022, Coach invited me to come with him to Iowa. Iowa City is secretly my second favorite place to visit in the Big Ten, and so I had to jump at the chance. My seatmate was his son Jay, the special teams coach, and I saw how the love of football and the love of teaching was passed through the generations. (This is the point in this essay where I tell you, dear reader, that football is way more complicated than any layperson could possibly understand).

My oldest, Jenna, was now old enough to understand what was going on. And she was in love that fall. Not just with the band and the team, but with JJ, and Blake, and Donovan, and Colston Loveland, and Makari Page (she loves #7’s from West Bloomfield), and so many more names that left me wondering “how did you even know who Junior Colson was?” She was her daddy’s kid. I loved taking her and her sister Mimi to the Big House in 2022. That fall, we went to meet JJ McCarthy at the M-Den and both girls were overcome with joy when he took a picture with them. That fall was full of Joy. Our third had just turned two. Now, all five of us were going to Michigan Stadium. Our family was complete.

There was nothing quite like the celebration in Columbus that year, an outpouring of both joy and incredible schadenfreude of hearing ‘that’ screech of defeat that Michigan fans knew so well in this rivalry as Buckeye fans hit the exits. I knew that Jenna and Mimi were at home, wearing their Mr. Brightside T-Shirts. Football helps mark time.

That offseason, as the Big Ten expanded again, I got to take some of Coach’s confidence and competitiveness and use it as my own. Inspired by his ability to stand up for our student athletes, I decided to write an essay of my own in the New York Times about revenue sharing. The first person to call me after it was published? Coach Harbaugh.

Some coaches say things that are ‘progressive’ or ‘pro-athlete’ because they are trying to win the next recruiting battle, or get some positive press for their programs. Not Coach. Incredibly, I was able to sit in on a series of meetings that showed how thoughtful he was. Over two years, he had evolved. What started off as “its not right that our players don’t get to control their name, image, and likeness” turned into an idea that revenue sharing is not only coming but morally correct, and should be dictated by all stakeholders in college sports. In addition to victories on the field, we will deeply miss his voice advocating for college athletes the way he has.

—

The first half of the next season went by in a flash. But then, reflecting the world around me, October 2023 became a nightmare I would never forget. My friend, Samantha Woll z’’l, was murdered one Friday night. October 7th occurred, and the brutal aftermath continued to rip apart lives in Israel and Gaza and friendships at home. The pain I was feeling was immense, but I spent many hours that month distracted from these real horrors, dealing with the aftermath of the fact that Connor Stalions was a household name and why.

I won’t get into it here — by rule, I can’t — but the remarkable difficulty of that fall opened me up to a different Coach Harbaugh. Through our incessant conversations about NIL and compliance and the future of college athletics, I learned about what he meant by winning and losing, what he meant by caring about student athletes and their whole selves. But this whole situation was different. You could see how this scandal had struck at something inside him and weighed on him deeply.

That November, when I went back and had lunch with him, just one on one at Schembechler Hall, we talked about the past (especially that 1995 AFC Championship Game), our families, how we could do better on campus, and how much fun he was still having. He didn’t lie to me that day; he told me that if there was a fantastic NFL offer, he’d have to strongly consider taking one more shot, and that despite that he still loved Michigan. You could see it in his face. He was five yards short in the Super Bowl against his brother. He wasn’t going to be done until he got to the goal line.

Last Wednesday night, as I was preparing my kids for bed, I sent Coach a long text. In typical Coach Harbaugh style, he called me back right at 8 p.m. My kids saw the name on the caller ID, and knew I’d have to go answer. We talked for 45 minutes, and I could feel that passion in him still. The details are private and unimportant, except for this one: he promised that, if he was to take an NFL job, when (not if) he wins a Super Bowl, he’d bring the trophy back to Ann Arbor to share it with his Michigan family. I have no doubt he will, sooner rather than later.

Last week, as dinner time approached and the girls did cartwheels all over the place, inspired by gymnastics (they still love JJ and Jim and Blake, but when Bev Plocki and her team show up, they are really starstruck), I told them the news.

“Will he come back to visit?,” my oldest asked.

“Of course,” I said.

My girls weren’t sad. They walked around in new Michigan national champions gear. There were no tears at all this season. That team was fifteen and zero. The greatest team in Michigan’s modern history. They weren’t boys or even men anymore. They were legends. Football marks time, but it also freezes it.

As Coach Harbaugh goes back to California, he’s a different person. Wiser. Older. More mature. And so am I. My beard now tints gray. We are thinking about the teenage years to come with my kids. My parents talk of retirement. It’s not 1985, or 1995, or 2007, or 2015 anymore. I’ll be 40 this year, and Jim Harbaugh’s been around that life, even if he didn’t know it yet, since I was just one.

Whether he knows it or not, his role in my life has been profound. I’ve been honored to be around him, to get to know him, good and bad. In the last nine years, so much has changed with all of us. When he arrived, the job could never have been called elite. Today, Sherrone Moore and his staff have the opportunity to inherit and build on an elite program. That Coach is just a couple years younger than me, with a couple little girls of his own.

And then the cycle will start all over again. Some young father will be feeding a bottle to his new baby this fall. He’ll realize, with the girl on his lap as he rocks her back to sleep, that he’ll always remember watching that first Michigan game with the new head coach. Football marks time, but it always keeps moving.

Thank you for everything, Coach Harbaugh. Forever, Go Blue.