From the Editor: We're about to launch into the season preview week, so what better time  to yell "Here's some important reading material!" at you. Fact is, the preview is going to be as useless in a week's time as the notes an author took in 2020 while preparing to write a book about Harbaugh's program at Michigan. Friend of the blog Ben Mathis-Lilley, who's written for Slate, the NY Times, MGoBlog, and some publications that don't make you throw things, has written a book about Michigan and being a fan of it. Last year he spiraled through Michigan's program, from the outer rim of insane fandom (IE an MGoBlog game thread) to the core of Schembechler Hall, to capture all the frenzy, absurdity, and potency of college football as an institution, specifically ours.

What follows is an excerpt from this book, which is called THE HOT SEAT, A Year of Outrage, Pride, and Occasional Games of College Football. It can be purchased in myriad mysterious ways like giving money to an online bookstore, giving money to an electronic bookstore, or transacting with a purveyor of audiobooks.

There are also two Live Events for this book that may be in your proximity and featuring guests of interest:

	ANN ARBOR	BROOKLYN
When	August 30 (tomorrow), 6:30pm	September 13, 6:30 pm
Where	Literati Bookstore 124 E Washington, Ann Arbor 48104	The Dram Shop 339 9th Street, Brooklyn 11215
With	Austin Meek of The Athletic	Jane Coaston of the NYTimes
Link?	Link!	Link!

Also we might have him on MGoRadio, as soon as we figure out if we're doing that in-person this year.

Anyway, I said there would be a sample. It's from the part that's mostly interviews with people who know Jim Harbaugh personally, like Josh Metellus, Donovan Peoples-Jones's mom, and Ben Muth, a star tackle for Harbaugh at Stanford who's now a writer for Football Outsiders (IE the place that's qualified to call Michigan the #1 team in Special Teams). In classic Ben Mathis-Lilley fashion, he got all these guys talking all about who Harbaugh really is as a person, then convinced them not to take any of it back, probably because it was only going in a book and not some website that everybody reads.

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Ben Muth heard about Jim Harbaugh’s high standards before offseason workouts had even started. “I was at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas right after they announced that they hired him. Just there as a fan,” the former Stanford tackle told me about the winter of 2006, before his redshirt junior year, when Harbaugh was hired as the Cardinal’s new coach. “I must have been wearing some Stanford stuff or something, because some guy came up to me, some kid came up to me, and was like, ‘Oh, I saw you guys hired Harbaugh,’ blah blah blah—‘He’s an asshole.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I think he had gone to Drake or Dayton, somewhere that had played USD [the University of San Diego], and I guess USD had really run the score up on them that year. The coach came over to him after the game and was basically like, ‘What the fuck, Jim?’ Jim allegedly—and this is secondhand knowledge—Jim allegedly blew up on him, like, ‘It’s not my job to stop us. It’s your job to stop us.’”

He paused. “That was really the first thing I had heard about Harbaugh as a coach,” he said. “I remember liking it.”

I had asked Muth to explain what it meant, in tangible terms, that Harbaugh turned teams around by imbuing them with “competitiveness.” He gave me another example. “In the winter you do a bunch of agility drills, both conditioning and agility drills. He posted the results of those in the locker room. Where it really stood out, I remember, was our first spring ball on special teams. Special teams is supposed to be pretty much the whole team, but a lot of guys don’t really want to mess around with it. After the first week of practice, the coaches announced, ‘All right, here’s who competed in this many special teams drills. This is how they did.” It was really noticeable that certain guys didn’t get out there. He called them out on it.’”

When Harbaugh arrived at Michigan before the 2015 season, former tight end Jake Butt told the Big Ten Network in 2016, he demonstrated a particular type of basic block on his own lectern in a meeting room, repeating it and becoming more and more animated until he smashed it off its bearings, across the room, and into a wall.

To Michigan, after Brady Hoke was dismissed, it was important that Harbaugh embodied the kind of toughness and intensity that is demonstrated when a 52-year-old man attacks and destroys a heavy wooden object. But he was also, by the standards of sport, a public intellectual. He is obsessed with winning and football, but he has an awareness of the wider world that to me seemed unlike a football coach.

Muth disagreed when I phrased the issue to him in that way. “No, no, no. I think the difference is what you consider a football coach and what Jim Harbaugh considers a football coach are different things. To Coach Harbaugh, a football coach is a spiritual mentor. It’s a teacher. It’s life in general. He truly believes a football coach can probably do more good than maybe anyone in the country, except for the president,” he said.

He was saying I had it backward: Harbaugh isn’t a well-rounded person who coaches football but rather someone who is so serious about coaching football that he feels it incumbent upon himself to be well-rounded so as to be able to pass that on to his players. Said Muth, “I think he likes coaching at Stanford, and USD is a great academic school, and Michigan, because he thinks part of being a good football coach is making sure your guys are good students. He thinks that’s just part of the job. He thinks making them into good men is part of the job.”

Before the 2015 season started, a reporter asked him if the attention on the team was overwhelming to players. He responded, “You want to be at that big-boy table—big persons table, might be better to say. There’s another table over there in the kitchen for those people that aren’t seated at that big person’s table. If someone wants to go over there, no one’s going to be upset if they do. But this is what we signed up for, this is what I signed up for, and I know a lot of our players did.”

Ambitious, yes, robustly so, but sensitive to changing notions of gender equity. It was all a good fit for a school that wants to rival Ohio State in the field of hitting things and Harvard in the field of advancing the human condition.

Said Muth: “What I would say, and just kind of summarize my thoughts on Jim, is, he’s said it multiple times, and the first time I heard him say it, I laughed, but now I know this is 100 percent who he is as a person. He said, ‘I figured my life out when I was six years old. You play football for as long as you can. You coach football for as long as you can. Then you die.’ That is 100 percent what he wants to do. If it goes bad at Michigan, he’ll take another job, whether it’s in the NFL or in college. He’ll stay there if he likes it for as long as possible, and if it’s not going good, he’ll take a smaller job. It would not shock me if Jim Harbaugh is eighty-five years old coaching some small Catholic high school in whatever town he happens to be living in.”

For some period of time, in fact, it had been conjectured that Michigan administrators wouldn’t want to bring Harbaugh on as a coach because he’d said in 2007 that the university didn’t take academics seriously enough relative to Stanford. “College football needs Stanford,” he said then. “We’re looking not for student-athletes, but scholar-athletes.” He told the Ann Arbor News in a follow-up interview that he’d been told not to major in history as a U of M undergrad because it would take up too much time.

The Michigan football team’s NCAA-tracked graduation success rate (GSR) in the most recent data set was 96 percent, only one percentage point below Northwestern among Big Ten teams (and higher, in this one year at least, than Stanford). The regular contributors on the 2021 team—that is, players who actually saw playing time on the field—included majors in political science, English, African American studies, economics, and mechanical engineering. Harbaugh-era defensive lineman Carlo Kemp (political science major, business minor) told me that in the program, “being in class was something that was talked about all the time.” And not merely being present: “That you were participating, that you were active in it.” (For the sake of comparison, Louisiana State’s GSR has never been above 78 percent in any of the seventeen years the NCAA has data for.)

From a distance, Harbaugh might seem like he lacks a sense of humor or irony, but that’s not quite it. What’s going on, rather, is that he never calibrates his demeanor or opinion because it might create a backlash, and he never says what a person is “supposed to” say in a given social situation. He’s decided who Jim Harbaugh, Football Coach, is going to be, how he’s going to act, and what he’s going to care about, and that’s that. If he decides he doesn’t have anything to say at a certain time, he stops talking rather than filling the air, which can be awkward.

Says Muth, “Your first impression, it’s weird, because he’s almost such a cliché of a football coach, it seems kind of full of shit at first. I think the longer you’re around him, it’s like, oh, no, this is who he is. He comes in, and he talks a big game about what he’s going to do and what we’re going to do as a team, but he backs it up. He lives it. I don’t think he’s ever said something that he didn’t really and truly believe. I think the most recent thing I heard was, ‘Beat Ohio State or die trying.’ [Harbaugh had, in fact, said this at Big Ten Media Day in July 2021.] It’s one of those things where it’s a cliché, but I 100 percent believe that’s how Jim Harbaugh feels. He would stay at Michigan until he beats Ohio State or dies, if it’s entirely up to him.”

I have seen this clarity of purpose in action. In June 2016, Harbaugh and other Michigan staff members were doing a tour of football camps for high school players around the country—long practices, essentially, but without pads on and focused on the more fun, competitive kinds of drills. One was held in suburban Paramus, New Jersey. I was already trying to scheme up some way to write about him, so I borrowed a friend’s minivan and drove there to observe.

It was an unusual opportunity to see someone of his notoriety up close, because the media side of the event was run by the high school, Paramus Catholic, and they didn’t have either the manpower or the inclination to put as many parts of it as possible off-limits, which seems to be what college and pro teams (and anyone else who handles celebrities) regard as the best way to handle things. So I got to follow around Harbaugh and a bunch of other coaches from Michigan and a number of other schools for several hours in the parking lot, hallways, cafeteria, and such.

The event was open to any college that wanted to send staff members, and there were head coaches from other major-conference programs present too. Generally, there were a lot of extremely large men in circulation with intensity in their brows and bone-crushing strength in their grips. (Football coaches were once football players, and football players are big. This was somehow not something I had put together before seeing it in person; I had expected, I guess, that when they went from playing into the white-collar profession of coaching, they would shrink to regular size. This is possibly because they look small on TV next to players wearing pads and helmets. Anyway.)

Harbaugh, despite being a relatively slight figure by the standards of the day, was its center of energy. The high school kids, a group of a few hundred, had assembled in the gym before the practice started. Pat Narduzzi of Pitt welcomed them and gave a pep talk about effort, hard work, and so forth. It was pretty standard stuff. Then Harbaugh spoke, and he began by describing, if I recall, something he’d read or heard about the way a horse’s heartbeat can be seen through its skin as it’s preparing to run the Kentucky Derby. It was a visceral account. There may have been something about the physical size of the organ, maybe something about sweat. And it went on for a while. His point, he ultimately said, was that this was how excited he felt any time he got the chance to be on a football field, and it was how excited he was, that minute, to be at a practice for teenagers in New Jersey.

When everyone got to the field, he proved his point, putting himself in charge of dividing the players into heats for sprint competitions, acting as the starter for each race, and declaring and congratulating the winners. A man in his element. After a while, I walked to the middle of the field for a better angle on the “finish line,” which was marked by an assistant standing with his arms outstretched. Or at least I thought it was an assistant. When I got closer, I realized that the low-key human traffic cone was Jim’s brother John, who had won the Super Bowl as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. He and a few other Ravens staffers had come up to help out. No one in the crowd of aspiring NFL players and football reporters had noticed him yet. He looked amused.

John also figured in a Harbaugh story I heard from former Michigan safety Josh Metellus, who as of the time of this writing plays for the Minnesota Vikings. Metellus is from South Florida and said that one of his first interactions with his college coach was an in-home recruiting visit involving two of his other high school teammates who also went on to attend U of M. Jim arrived in a car driven by John, who had just coached the Ravens in a game against the Dolphins in Miami. John dropped Jim off as if he were a fifteen-year-old arriving at a friend’s house. Then Jim and the three teenagers played the card game Spades for several hours, and that was the entire recruiting visit. Metellus said Harbaugh paid close attention to the outcome of each hand. “I loved it,” he said. “I was like, if our head coach is this competitive, we’re going to win games.”

But as Harbaugh’s teams on the field wobbled and then collapsed in 2020, his character traits were reinterpreted as flaws. You could see it in the online reaction to the first half of the  Washington game, and even afterward. Michigan finished that contest with fifty-six rushing attempts to only fifteen passes, which is a preposterous ratio, even in the Big Ten. This kind of imbalance, so enraging to Thicc Stauskas, was said to be a consequence of Harbaugh’s obsession with individual character and aggression and was proof that the team wouldn’t be able to pass if it ever needed to. His diversity of interests, creative energy, and fixation on fundamentals (trips abroad, complicated plays, blocking lecterns into walls, etc.), in reverse polarity, constituted disorganization, a short attention span, and an inability to prioritize. (The team did, in fact, often seem confused on the field, with the offense failing to snap the ball in time and the defense in turn failing to get itself set up properly when the opposing offense played quickly.) His directness and lack of guile became an unwillingness to form and manage the necessary relationships with players and others at the university.

This last one was a big one. Before the 2021 season, the Wolverine Digest website calculated that sixty players had transferred out of the Michigan program since 2018, one of the highest numbers in the Big Ten and twice as many as had left rivals Ohio State and Michigan State in the same period. Twenty-one had left in the previous year, the most in the conference. Some had been well-regarded recruits and on-field contributors at positions where the team could have used them, particularly on the offensive and defensive lines. Fans complained that top prospects were alienated by Harbaugh’s inflexibility and that top offensive players in particular avoided Michigan because of the aforementioned running-game fixation. A number of the best football prospects in the state of Michigan came out of a Detroit-area high school named Belleville; they had stopped attending U of M, going instead to programs like Michigan State, Penn State, and Kentucky, for reasons that neither Harbaugh nor Belleville’s head coach explained.

What frustrated a number of the younger alums I interacted with who were unhappy with Harbaugh was the idea of being associated with an institution that was both arrogant and dumb. Matt Campbell, the Iowa State coach, was a perfect foil: He was from Ohio, did not have elite educational credentials, was said to have great relationships across the region, and carried himself with the relentlessly positive attitude of a church youth group leader. He was, or was imagined to be, someone nice and humble enough to do the easy, smart thing.

Some of the people I spoke to confirmed the long-discussed allegation that Harbaugh can “rub people the wrong way.” Said Metellus, “There was a lot of times as a team we bumped heads, and there wasn’t a lot of slack given on his end. It was his way or no way.” I made a comment about the coach seeming like “a pretty intense dude” to be around. “Yeah,” he said. “Especially for four years.”

I also spoke to the mother of former Michigan wide receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones, Roslyn Peoples, who became known as an advocate for players’ rights vis-à-vis the NCAA when her son was in high school. Peoples-Jones was an elite prospect at Cass Tech High School in Detroit and has become a big-play threat for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, but he caught only thirty-four passes in his last season at Michigan (2019), which is not that many for a player of NFL-caliber talent.

I asked Peoples if her experience with Harbaugh’s program had been a positive one. “Well, now, there’s a politically correct answer, and I’ve been trained if you can’t say anything good, just don’t say anything,” she said. I prompted her with the idea that the coach specifically overburdened his players because he feels that they should be 4.0 GPA superhumans at the same time they’re winning Big Ten titles. “I will say that a lot of their players had hamstring injuries,” she offered. (Peoples-Jones was frequently listed on injury reports as having a strained groin, which could have been the result of overwork.)

Muth is a big fan of Harbaugh’s but explained to me how his relationship with players can sour: “If he thought you were doing things right on the football field, he loved you. If you weren’t, and he thought you could do things better, he let you know about it,” he said. “The relationship could get frustrating. Something that may be a very small detail to another coach is a big deal to him. He’s a detail guy a lot of the times on the football field—what your stance should look like, this is how a cadence sounds if you’re a quarterback, all of that. Sometimes guys may not necessarily agree that that’s the most important thing, and you feel like you’re being picked on because your bad habit just happened to be a pet peeve of the head coach. But he has a lot of pet peeves. He’s going to let you know about it, and it’s not going to be fun until you get it corrected.”

The best theory of the 2020 season I was able to develop is that Harbaugh had accumulated too many assistant coaches who were a bit too much like him in this way. That year’s team was “wildly burned out,” one person who was around the program at the time said to me. Defensive coordinator Don Brown, sixty-seven years old, was described to me as “inflexible” and a “his way or the highway” kind of ol’ cuss. Cornerbacks coach Mike Zordich (who was fifty-nine years old and had played 185 games in the NFL) had “pissed off all of Detroit” for saying former star and city native Lavert Hill needed to “learn to play with some nicks” instead of sitting out practice. (This had happened in 2018. Said the source, “Detroit . . . they hold grudges.”) Regarding offensive line coach Ed Warinner, a sixty-year-old football lifer from rural Ohio, “No one liked him. No one liked him, at all.” Those three coaches were replaced after the year with younger and purportedly more “relatable” ones.

But I was surprised to find that no one within the football world whom I talked to, on or off the record, was as critical as fans were about Harbaugh’s capabilities or demeanor, or how they affected his chances of turning the ship around. After all, it is the rare football coach who doesn’t wear on a certain number of the dozens and dozens of players he’s in charge of each year. “For the most part, I felt like he did a good job,” Metellus said, later adding, “He’s the head coach, so it is his way or no way. Anybody is going to bump heads if you’re with each other for that long.”

Said Muth, “One thing about college is there is a lot of turnover from year to year. The guys that are coming into the program are guys that decide to play for him. There’s always going to be some level of buy-in on a college team. I think it can turn around. It would not shock me if they had a good year.”

I asked him if he thought Harbaugh’s subdued, almost introverted public demeanor of late was a sign that he’d lost his enthusiasm for the job.

“I think Jim is a guy that doesn’t necessarily feel like he’s earned the right to take shots at Ohio State when he hasn’t beat Ohio State,” he said. “I don’t think Jim’s ever been one for idle trash talk. I think he talked trash before, when he’d first gotten the job, before he had a chance to back it up, because he truly believed he was going to back it up. I think he feels guilty right now throwing any barbs at Ohio State, because he feels like he hasn’t earned it. I think if Michigan goes 11-1 this year and beats Ohio State, I think he will let people know that it was a job well done.”

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Postscript: San Diego did beat Drake, in Iowa, 37-0 in 2006. No one currently employed at Drake or USD’s athletic department could confirm the story. But I believe it.

This article has been adapted from The Hot Seat: A Year of Outrage, Pride, and Occasional Games of College Football by Ben Mathis-Lilley. Copyright © 2022. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.