The Athletic’s Austin Meek won the race to FOIA Harbaugh’s new contract.

Just received Jim Harbaugh’s new contract. If my math is right, he’ll earn $7.05 million in base pay next year, up to $7.6 million by the end of the deal.

— Austin Meek (@byAustinMeek) February 17, 2022

I’ve put a full copy of it on our site if you’d like to see it yourself.

Let’s discuss.

1. How much is it?

The number I came up with is an average of $8,486,000/year counting his base salary, additional compensation, the retirement contribution, and an easily achievable (for him at least) bonus for team academic performance.

For whatever reason the "base" is a paltry $655k/year with "additional compensation" representing the bulk. Together those parts increase annually from $7.05M to $7.6M, plus a $1 million/year contribution to his retirement fund and other doodads like an extra $150k/year for academic progress rate scores of 960+, and a summer football camp using school facilities from which Harbaugh gets to keep the profits. The sum is on par with what Ryan Day gets from Ohio State, and what Harbaugh was making on his 2015-2020 contract. The incentive structure of his 2021 contract seems to be unchanged.

Big Ten Coach of the Year would be $50,000, or $75,000 if one of the national selectors name him Numero Uno.

This is in line with what Sam Webb reported earlier this week. It’s sensible: Michigan wasn’t going to try to match the deals that Franklin and Tucker extracted from their schools but it isn’t so significantly different that Harbaugh’s going to be living a different lifestyle than the best-compensated college coaches in America.

2. How much is the buyout?

Not much. This is the big deal, because a sizeable buyout would likely end any further opportunity for Harbaugh to leave for the NFL. The buyout for Harbaugh is $3 million if he leaves before January 11, 2023, which since the threat is the NFL that’s pretty unlikely. The more important number is the $2.5 million buyout after January 11, 2023, which drops to just $1.5 million on January 11, 2024,  $750,000 in 2025, and then zero.

We’ve been saying that the buyout is the key because as we saw in this round of NFL openings, the league’s interest in Harbaugh is as tepid as the journalists who cover it are not. The Vikings were the closest he got, and that happened because of a connection to one of Harbaugh’s top lieutenants, but even there the Vikings were looking to rebuild like the Rams—based on analytics—and it’s my interpretation of events that their ownership seemed surprised to find themselves sitting across from the Jim Harbaugh Experience instead.

This buyout would not significantly deter NFL interest. The $3,000,000 start is a fig leaf; while mid-January is on the late side to get a college coach, that’s relatively early in the NFL coaching carousel; if Harbaugh is offered an NFL job next year, the timing of that would be either after the $3M buyout’s expiration date, or so close to January 11 that they could just wait it out.

$2,250,000 is a lot of money to you or me, but well within Harbaugh’s ability to cover himself, and any NFL team that hires him would be likely to cover all or part of it over the course of his deal. It drops significantly from there, to the point where I think their rivals will use it against them in recruiting.

We can compare it with the other two Big Ten East restructured deals this offseason. Even Mel Tucker’s buyout, which we mocked because it wasn’t that high to begin with and didn’t change a scratch when they restructured his deal, isn't significantly different. Here’s a comparison (with the date the buyout number goes into effect) of those three contracts:

Last season	Harbaugh	Tucker (MSU)	Franklin (PSU)
2021	$3,000,000 (1/11/22)	$2.500,000 (1/16/22)	$12,000,000 (4/1/22)
2022	$2,250,000 (1/11/23)	$2,000,000 (1/16/23)	$8,000,000 (12/31/23)
2023	$1,500,000 (1/11/24)	$1,500,000 (1/16/24)	$2,000,000 (12/31/24)
2024	$750,000 (1/11/25)	$1,000,000 (1/16/25)	$1,000,000 (12/31/25)
2025+	$0  (1/11/2026)	$1,000,000 (1/16/26)	$1,000,000 (12/31/26)

The dates matter. Franklin’s new deal came with a “you ain’t going nowhere this offseason” end date of April 1, 2022, for that $12 million (the dates for the other buyout points are all December 31), while Tucker’s deal set the date at a late-for-college January 16th. Also keep in mind that Penn State and Michigan State, to different degrees, are worried about their coaches leaving for more desirable college jobs, whereas Michigan’s only competition would be an NFL job. Having to wait to announce until January 16th to save half a million might deter a hypothetical SEC or ACC school interested in Tucker, whereas any NFL team is naturally operating one row down on the chart.

If you’re a 2023 recruit, you’re going to look at that and see it would cost Harbaugh less than $1 million to leave after your true freshman season, and nothing to be gone by the time you’re likely to be on the field. In other words, it’s a negligible deterrence.

3. How much to fire him?

The other fear, of course, is what if 2021 was a one-off and the program descends into mediocrity. As I read this contract, there's a very hefty buyout to fire Harbaugh on the surface, but if you dig deeper they would realistically not have to pay it. Let me explain: 

One of the benefits of the extension they signed a year ago, for Michigan, was that it made it a lot easier for them to broom out Harbaugh and his assistants if things didn’t go well. Technically, that is no longer the case, simply because these terms didn’t change…

…and now we’re talking about a lot more money.

Season	Contract Dates	Base Salary	Add'l Compensation	If fired right after...
2022	Today-1/10/'23	$655,000	$6,395,000	$36,680,000
2023	to 1/10/2024	$655,000	$6,535,000	$29,630,000
2024	to 1/10/2025	$655,000	$6,678,000	$22,440,000
2025	to 1/10/2026	$655,000	$6,824,000	$15,107,000
2026	to 1/10/2027	$655,000	$6,973,000	$7,628,000

The school would be let off the hook if Harbaugh were to take a head coaching job in the NFL or college football. The contract provides for relief by whatever he’s making, but in practice (e.g. when we had Jedd Fisch), whoever would hire him in that case would sign him to a minimal deal and let Michigan cover the bulk.

Importantly, the dates of the contract don’t change, so Michigan would have to wait until January 11th to roll over a season, IE they would be jumping into the head coaching market late in the cycle. If say Michigan didn’t make a bowl game in 2022 or 2023, they would be faced with a choice between an almost $30 million buyout in early December, or waiting another 6 weeks to get that down to $22.4 million.

More realistically, in the case that they want to fire Harbaugh, the school would find some way to do so for cause, or more likely, to use the threat of it to negotiate a settlement. Anything from breaking recruiting rules, to getting fined, looking for an NFL job without telling Warde personally, or “offends public decency or morality, as shall be determined by standards prevailing in the community” could trip the “for cause” clause. Via one attorney, “a halfway decent lawyer could drive a truck through that,” and I take it that Harbaugh is aware.

Overall thoughts?

What this means is that the contract was signed with a Big House’s worth of good faith between the parties. Harbaugh knows Michigan can screw him if they want, and is comfortable that they won’t. Michigan knows Harbaugh could be very expensive—and litigational—to be removed, and doesn’t really anticipate having to make that call.

From Harbaugh’s point of view, this is the kind of contract you sign if you want to keep a door open to the NFL, and want to be compensated like Michigan has themselves an NFL-caliber head coach who wants to be at Michigan.

From Michigan’s point of view, this is the kind of contract you sign if you believe you won’t have to fire your head coach, but understand there’s a risk that you might have to. What they did not get in this contract was much assurance that Harbaugh will stop flirting with the NFL. Their buyout is high; his is low.

Fortunately for them, we just went through a cycle with a very good mix of conditions to draw Harbaugh back to the NFL, and the interest in him just wasn’t there. Unfortunately for them, an “Our coach wanted to go to the pros, we won’t stop him if he does, and the only reason he hasn’t already is they don’t want him” truth isn’t as ideal as “Michigan beat out the NFL for our coach” on the recruiting trail.

The likelihood is good that Harbaugh will fulfill the terms of this contract, at least  until it’s time in a few years to extend it or negotiate a new one to reflect a new truth at that time. His rivals will continue to tell recruits that Harbaugh’s leaving for the NFL any day, because his rivals evidently believe they have to lie to convince recruits not to go to Michigan. I think Harbaugh helped himself a lot by being honest with his 2022 class about his NFL interest, and I don’t think “Your head coach might be in a position to draft you” comes off as negatively to prospective NFL players as it does to those of us who know we’ll get left behind.

Certainly, those of us who cover the team, especially the insider services, are going to pay more attention to those questions and be on the lookout for any signs that Harbaugh’s wavering from promises made after the Vikings job fell through.

Just because his buyout gives Harbaugh a path to the NFL doesn’t mean the weirdo is not absolutely serious about his intention to coach Michigan for the duration. A contract is a legal document that becomes most relevant in the eventuality of a bad breakup that requires legal intervention; it’s not a full representation of the parties’ faith in each other. Two attorneys I’ve spoken to characterized this contract by its informality, or for having a stunning lack of specificity. It speaks to a negotiating stance between both of them that there’s a lot more to the working relationship between Michigan and Harbaugh than what they could be bothered to put on paper. The “what if you screw me” clauses are perfunctory, open, or boilerplate, while the “What do we want from each other?” parts focus on things like academic performance, a comfortable retirement, health care, can I run my football camp, how many tickets can I give out, and “please don’t embarrass us.”

This is really just a guess, but I would bet Harbaugh got his low buyout because Michigan was willing to gamble that the peak of the NFL threat has passed, and Michigan got their easy out clauses because Harbaugh was willing to gamble that he’ll never give them reason to want him gone.

For Jim, that means he gets to go coach Michigan again for as long as he doesn’t blow it. For the athletic director and the regents he answers to, it means they should plan on having Harbaugh around for awhile, but also have a playbook ready just in case the NFL ever changes its mind.