Within this calendar year, responses to the announcement of Jim Harbaugh’s reduced-salary contract extension on this site included words and phrases like “apathetic,” “off the rails,” “laughingstock,” “worst deal any coach of a major program has ever signed,” “none of this matters,” “mediocrity personified,” “failing marriage,” and “weird, quirky, catatonic failure.” Now he is a Big Ten champion; his seat is only hot in the sense of being warm and comfortable. It may vibrate a little, to gently massage his buttocks, which are lean and healthy this season.

Elsewhere, coaches with less impressive résumés are getting larger contracts, while coaches with comparable résumés are getting waaaaaaaay larger contracts. Harbaugh and Michigan’s response was to announce that he will be giving the performance bonuses he earns this year, which are already substantial, to athletic department employees who have had pandemic-related pay reductions. It’s a classic Harbaugh move, justified in the abstract but also seemingly intended to really needle the hell out of someone, like, say, a rival school that may have signed its own coach to a 10-year, $75 million extension during its team’s second straight year of having a losing record in conference. It’s also—and look, I was as tired of talking about this trope as anyone else, but I have to call ‘em like I see ‘em—the ultimate triumph of the Michigan Man (and Woman).

A year ago the University of Michigan’s entire philosophical deal, which Harbaugh embodies, appeared outdated. Without rendering any political judgment on the hows and the whys, we can likely agree that the concept of “meritocracy” has become an increasingly controversial one at the same time that long standing American institutions which rely on rules and “norms” have become less stable. This puts a tradition-obsessed institution like Michigan, whose self-conception involves meritocracy and rule-following, but also being the best at everything, in a tough spot.

[After THE JUMP: Sorting out trite from faith]

Trends were also concerning on the granular level. After 2020 a number of players who had started games transferred off the team, which was a reminder that Harbaugh has always been said to “wear” on those around him. It was predicted, not unreasonably, that his cheap-to-terminate contract would be off-putting to potential assistants and staff members mindful of their own job security. It seemed like one thing or the other had to give: Either the football program could start recruiting even more nationally and less selectively, drop some of its emphasis on academics, and perhaps adopt a passing-spread offense, or it could stop playing a video before each home game in which James Earl Jones stated a goal of competing for national championships.

This seemed so obvious as to be conventional wisdom to many outsiders, myself included. What I found in conversations with people around the program was that it was emphatically not so to them. Like, it hadn’t even crossed their minds. Both university regent Jordan Acker—a U of M sports fan who speaks regularly with Warde Manuel—and author John Bacon told me not just that the decision to retain Harbaugh had been made at Manuel’s sole discretion, but that they believed Manuel’s decision was based mostly on his conclusion that while the record on the field needed to be improved, “student-athletes” on the team were still well-served by the type of program Harbaugh operated. Which is one in which players are expected not just to play football but to go to class (in person) and represent the university by being confident, well-spoken role models. “In terms of priorities and all that, they actually do believe this stuff,” Bacon told me. “They want to do it the right way.” I asked Acker if he worried about whether Harbaugh’s motivation may have waned after six years of being called a disappointment by, among others, many people at the alma mater he’d passed up NFL opportunities to work at. Acker said he did not. “That's what's so crazy about it. He really believes, honestly, that he can turn this around and fix it.”

Michigan’s AD wasn’t grading on the cherry-picked stats rivals love to share. [Bryan Fuller] 

But Manuel wasn’t just making a statement about Harbaugh’s vision being worthwhile. A principled stand and 25 cents hasn’t even been enough to make a phone call since, as it happens, 1997. He was also counting on other people being willing to work with Harbaugh to advance the cause.

There’s more than one way to win in college football; to illustrate the point to me, 247 pundit and recruiting expert Bud Elliott contrasted Alabama and Clemson. They’ve been about equally successful in the last decade, but while Dabo Swinney has run Clemson as an extended, (unofficially) Christian summer camp at which recruits are judged on whether they hold doors open for the people behind them and assistant coaches are encouraged-slash-pressured to stay forever, Nick Saban sells Alabama to recruits as the premier pre-NFL training academy and treats assistants and schemes as interchangeable so long as they serve the purpose of winning. Lane Kiffin and Kirk Ferentz personify opposing viewpoints about offensive strategy and public demeanor, and both of their programs won ten games this year. A head coach has a recursive job: If he can persuade people his way of doing things is a winning one, it probably will be. The question 2021 Michigan posed was whether Harbaugh could persuade anyone besides Manuel.

Could he ever! It turned out that a certain kind of Football Guy still appreciated the chance to work with him. For one, a coach’s credibility erodes more slowly among other coaches, apparently, than with the media and public. The Harbaugh family has something like a combined 98 years of experience in the business and, in retrospect, it should be unsurprising that Jim Harbaugh’s 2020 did not outweigh the rest of them in the estimation of collaborators like Mike MacDonald and (quarterbacks coach) Matt Weiss. “Jim is a winner,” former assistant and current Ole Miss defensive coordinator Chris Partridge told me with matter-of-fact patience in August, as I doubted him internally, like an idiot. “He's always been a winner and he still is a winner.” (Partridge added immediately afterward, in a way that testified to the enduring power of Harbaugh’s “on the field and in the community” worldview, that “he develops the program, and does the right thing, and guides the kids such that, when they leave his program, their parents can be happy about what he's created.”)

There are also some who find Harbaugh’s transparent single-mindedness refreshing. Offensive tackle turned graduate assistant Grant Newsome told me that players sometimes discuss the distinction between the “recruiting coach” who meets parents in living rooms and the “actual coach” who runs practice. Said Newsome, “They're one guy when they're trying to get you, when you're not bound to be there, and then as soon as you get there, they're a different kind of person.” His point was that this is not a concern anyone has, for better or for worse, about his current boss.

Newsome thinks Harbaugh’s authenticity doesn’t translate well through a media ecosystem built to exalt phonies, but the players recognize it.[Patrick Barron]

Harbaugh-era Stanford offensive lineman Ben Muth, now a writer for Football Outsiders, put it in a similar way: “He's almost such a cliché of a football coach he 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, then he backs it up. He lives it. I don't think he's ever said something that he didn't really believe and truly believe. He’s just incredibly passionate for it. I think the most recent thing I heard was ‘beat Ohio State or die trying.’ I 100 percent believe that's how Jim Harbaugh feels. He would stay at Michigan until he beats Ohio State or dies.”

Our conversation took place before this season, and Muth told me that he believed if Harbaugh did leave Michigan, he would take the next best available job coaching, and if he left that he’d take another one, and down the line, to the point that “It would not shock me if Jim Harbaugh ends up 85 years old coaching some small Catholic school in whatever town he happens to be living in.” (Muth also said he believed Harbaugh’s restrained public presence in recent years was a function of on-field results rather than a loss of passion, and that “if Michigan goes 11-1 this year and beats Ohio State, he will let people know that it was a job well done.” One for one on that prediction!)

The media focus on Harbaugh’s quirks is understandable; he’s a singular person who made about the same base salary this year as Bret Bielema. What it obscures is that perhaps his greatest asset as a coach—and certainly what revived his career this year—is the network of collaborators that he’s able to click with and listen to. In fact, Muth told me Stanford’s adoption of the original “manball” running game, featuring many pulling guards and tackles, was the result of a meeting Harbaugh had with Stanford’s offensive line after his first season, when the team’s offense had been built on “West Coast” timing passes and zone runs. “He's like, all right, I think this is one of the better units on our team. What do we do? He literally just asked us what we wanted to run more. That's what it was.” A source who’s been around the program told me he believed that part of the reason Don Brown was dismissed was that he didn’t take enough input from other coaches. Harbaugh’s own take on what made this Michigan team better than previous ones, filtered in aggregate from a year of press conference coachspeak, is Pete Carroll-like: It’s led by mutually committed players and coaches whose talents and ideas are flowing back and forth.

But even if the roster and staff are vibrating with Harbaugh Guys and Gals, he’s not what the team and program ultimately revolve around. That would be Michigan itself. Contra fan anxieties about a losing-related irrelevance spiral, the university still has the same hold on some that it did on a younger Jim Harbaugh when he was, perhaps (amateur psychoanalysis incoming), looking for an institution to attach himself to that would provide outside validation of his worth relative to an older brother who moves through the world with more ease than he does. (John went to Miami of Ohio.)

The Michigan football program is unnecessarily inscrutable—after inquiring earlier this year about the possibility of observing an event involving players, I was told by a team spokesman that “we do not have availabilities open to the public, game week or otherwise”—in a way that obscures how comically simple, relatable, and renewable of a resource it runs on, which is that being invited to attend a well-regarded university in a diverse, culturally bustling town that’s pleasant to walk around is an opportunity that appeals to people and makes them feel good about themselves.

According to Carlo Kemp, for instance, he was interested in Michigan because his mom always told him that “school always comes before sports.” Donovan Peoples-Jones’ mother Roslyn told me with pride that her son routinely beats her at Jeopardy and then reminds her that he has a Michigan education. Josh Metellus wanted to challenge himself, to thrive somewhere that was dissimilar to the towns in southeast Florida where he grew up. Jon Jansen, the son of two teachers, said that when he was initially recruited by the school for football “all I could think about was what it would mean for me to have a degree from the University of Michigan.”

Kemp and Metellus are two players who found the program’s academics mission much more than pretentious bluster. [Barron]

Many people learn to be embarrassed by these kinds of cheesy thoughts and ideals. But people are embarrassed by the things that mean the most to them, because so much of themselves is at stake. Moreover, a theme that kept coming up in my conversations with people in the academic and college football communities outside Michigan was that Michigan fans who feel burdened and self-conscious about the school’s insistence that it cares about “more than just sports” should be careful what they wish for. There are worse fates than having donors who have never been to a football game, or than having a coach who is unlikely to become the subject of a New York Times series about hiding evidence from law enforcement.

When a college football team is losing, its community sees the worst of itself in the program and hears the worst about itself from everyone else in the country. Michigan fans have had many self-loathing Decembers in which to ruminate on the relationship between pride, tradition, delusion, and terminal decline. (A major reason for the team’s success this season is that its committed individuals, flowing in harmony, manifested values like attitude and toughness that tradition demands without perpetuating the stubbornness and predictability with which it has often been confused.)

But from time to time—maybe only once every 18 years—fans might have the opportunity to congratulate themselves. They may enjoy the chance to feel good about being part of an institution that brings interesting people from around the country and world together in a charming, overpriced town to celebrate the ideals of learning and shop for expensive cheese. It may have been proven that enough interesting, highly motivated people who also play or coach football exist, and are willing to work with someone who just took a huge public pay cut to make an 1890s-era point about merit, to give a college football team a decent shot at winning a national championship in 2021. Who knew? The Michigan Men did. May God help us all.