jim harbaugh retention saga

[Ed-Seth: If you like Harbaugh stories and want to support #ChadTough, read on.

Take This Job & Love It! is a collection of Jim Harbaugh yarns from his friends, family, coaches, teammates, and former players. A small sample of contributors: Shemy Schembechler, Jon Falk, Todd Anson, Jamie Morris, Jerry Hanlon, Bump Elliott, Mike Ditka, and Tappan Junior High coach/Phys Ed teacher Rob Lillie. The book is only available in Michigan stores or online.

The author Rich Wolfe is an old friend of Jack Harbaugh, and he’s written 50 other quasi-biographies like this, where he goes around to his subject’s friends and prints their stories. One is on Tom Brady, before that first Super Bowl.

For this one he called me with an idea: post an excerpt on the blog, and if anyone bought the book from that we’d donate 100% of the proceeds to #ChadTough. So here’s a few bits from a long section titled “A Roomie With a View” by former Michigan player and Harbaugh roommate Jerry Quaerna. If you’d like more, head to www.chadtoughharbaughbook.com. Or you can find it in some stores in Michigan but it’ll be more expensive that way.]

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Excerpts from ‘A Roomie With a View’

By Jerry Quaerna (at right)

1. YOUR DADROCK IS UNACCEPTABLE

I was recruited to play football at Michigan. When I went there, Jim was my roommate. Jim and I were paired up as freshmen. We didn’t know each other. Then we lived together as fifth-year seniors. I got to see Jim before he was a big star and after he was big time. I had a long trip over from Wisconsin. I got unpacked, and I was sleeping on my bed in the dorm when Jim showed up with Jim Minick. He grew up with Minick in Ann Arbor. Minick spent 26 years in the Marines and is now Jim’s right-hand man on his Michigan staff.

I woke up and introduced myself to these guys. What was the first thing Jim did? This was back in the day. This was ’82. We had LPs. I was into music, and I had about 20 LPs and my turntable. Those were going to go out the window in three or four years, but I had a nice collection of vinyl there.

After Jim shook my hand, he went straight to my vinyl collection, and he critiqued it. I’m not kidding you. I had good stuff. I had the Doors, I had Jimi Hendrix. I had plenty of Beatles. I’m a big Beatles fan. Jethro Tull. I had Hot Rocks from the Stones. I loved that album. I had Black Sabbath. I had some great independent records. I had some Priest.

Jim is going through my records, and he’s saying, “Yep, no, yep, no. Doors, no. Beatles, nope. Jethro Tull, no.” When he’s done critiquing my collection, he goes, “You don’t have any Who.”

[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of this and some other stories, or hit THE LINK to get them all]

Pretty much

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.

Scott

What's going on with Rudock?

Brian - you made some comments today on the podcast about how Jake Rudock's inability to hit the deep ball has finally bitten us in the collective asses, which I agree. You also mentioned that when you watched him last year, while he wasn't dead-on every time, he was able to hit the deep pass from time to time - something he clearly can't do this year.

My question is this - to me, this does not seem like a 'new coach, new system' type of a problem. Those issues seem to be the ones where he fails to even attempt a throw to a wide open receiver (which he does all the time - but I give him more of a pass for that as the "new system / new coach" issue). But when he throws the deep pass, only inaccurately - that suggests to me an issue with maybe his mechanics or something else that has thrown off his accuracy past 15 yards. Any thoughts why that might be? If anything, I would expect his deep accuracy to improve with a guy like Harbaugh teaching him the fundamentals. Again, I separate this from other issues such as "stares down Butt" or "ignores screamingly open routes every once in awhile."

Thanks,
Jeff

Yeah, you got me. Some of the Rudock problems are issues that make sense given what we saw from him at Iowa. Not throwing at sort of covered Jake Butt on second and goal from the 18 is a Rudock problem I can understand. That is his reputation. Rudock not  finding receivers is a problem I can understand. He's in a new system.

Rudock underthrowing Amara Darboh by about 20 yards is inexplicable. Any quarterback is going to be off on some long throws; to miss as often and as badly as Rudock has is not something that I saw last year. That's not just homerdom. Preseason, PFF put out an article titled "Michigan can win with QB Jake Rudock" that noted he was 12th in downfield (20+ yards in the air) accuracy by their system last year. In the Maryland game, BTN had a similar stat:

The disparity is certainly bigger now.

I don't know if he's hurt or his mechanics are messed up or what, but for whatever reason his ability to hit downfield passes has collapsed. Why? I dunno. Is there something different in what he's doing here?

2014

2015

Since one is in the middle of the field and one on the sideline. Those are throws of about the same length. Am I crazy or does the 2015 video look like a guy who's loading up to get it as far as he can while 2014 sees Rudock make a throw that's comfortably within his range? I dunno.

Something is wrong. A problematic injury, possibly one that caused the weird Iowa QB depth chart thing, is a possible explanation. The other explanation is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ref hot take

Brian:

Having read Seth’s analysis of the officiating (and you really should make him do that weekly) my question is why – why did this happen to us?  If you ascribe these “errors” to incompetence, shouldn’t there be an equal number of blown calls going in our favor?  Incompetent referees should be just as likely to screw things up for team A as team B and over the course of a 60 minute game shouldn’t it balance relatively out if they are simply incompetent?

The obvious alternative to incompetence is the officials had an agenda and carried it out.  Granted, we still should’ve won the game but with so many critical calls being made against Michigan it made the game much closer than it needed to be and allowed the last play to finally tip the scale in MSU’s favor.   And if it’s an agenda – why does it exist?

What say you?  Incompetence, agenda or something else?

MGrowOld

If you flip a coin a million times there are going to be stretches in there where you get a long series of heads or tails. Michigan just ate an game that was virtually all tails. There's no need for a further explanation. Over the past decade or so it's been definitively proven that the replay officials are not good enough at their job, but that's all. The Big Ten tends to use retired referees in the booth, with evidently disastrous results.

If there was any sort of "plan" here Michigan wouldn't have gotten a free touchdown when their receiver barely scraped the pylon a few years back in this very game. Remember that? That call was overturned from the correct call to free TD. Replay officials should no longer be people with rotary phones. Actual officials are probably the best we've got. That sucks; not much to do about it.

[After THE JUMP: HSPs future, Whoville analogy, we should have done this or that]