john harbaugh

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The header. Via the University of Michigan Heritage project, that's Eugene Waxman, age 5, acting in his capacity as a "drum minor" in 1949.

A real-life Madden kid. John Harbaugh's got Lamar Jackson and—slightly less important—a guy in the booth punching stuff into a fourth down bot:

One thing Harbaugh has taken a close look at is how he can best give the Ravens an edge with his in-game decision-making. For years, he’s had a staffer in the booth communicating win probabilities to him during games. First, it was Matt Weiss, who has since become the running backs coach. This season, it’s football analyst (that’s his official title) Daniel Stern, a 25-year-old behavioral economics major who grew up in Baltimore, got his degree from Yale and is in his fourth season with the Ravens.

During the week, Stern, Harbaugh and other members of the Ravens coaching staff come up with a plan for how they want to approach each game from a strategic perspective. They decide on a set of rules that will give them the best chance to win, and Stern reminds Harbaugh of those rules on the headset during the game. At the beginning of that drive against the Seahawks, they talked about how they wanted to be aggressive in short yardage. But with a third-and-15 run play called, it seemed unlikely that they were going to be in short yardage. Jackson, as he’s done all season, exceeded expectations with his run. The numbers said to go for it, but it wasn’t a no-brainer.

“There was definitely an advantage to going for it in that situation, mathematically it was the correct thing to do,” Stern says weeks later. “But if it had been fourth-and-4 or fourth-and-5, then it wouldn’t have been the correct thing to do. It was fourth-and-2, I think it was either a long 2 or a regular 2. It definitely wasn’t one-and-a-half. It definitely was a full 2 yards.”

Hopefully the brothers get together and this osmoses its way over to Ann Arbor.

[After THE JUMP: math]

This man's name is Vince Staples. The younglings on the staff inform me he is a rappist of some renown, and he digs Harbaugh, in NSFW style:

This will help his Q score, as one has. Vince Staples will get us in living rooms across the nation because he is going to fight Urban Meyer in an IKEA parking lot. As one does.

Rolovich is impressed. Hawaii's deadpan coach with some high praise:

"I would be much more afraid to play Michigan again than Florida, the '08 team," Rolovich said. The 2008 Florida team went on to win the national title behind one of the nation's best defenses. "The Gators were good. They won the national title, but there wasn't a weakness on the field (at Michigan). Their coaches deserve credit. Their players deserve credit. That's some big-time football right there."

He said this about a Michigan team that was without two potential first-round draft picks.

The Ringer is hitting its stride. See this excellent article from Katie Baker on the tao of Harbagh…

It’s easy to dismiss Harbaugh as a showman, and there’s no doubt he has a great sense of the impact some of his statements, tweets, or music videos will have. Still, a large part of how he comes across is simply who he is. Some of it is the Harbaugh lineage, though much of it is just him.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be in that family,” laughed Michigan defensive line coach Greg Mattison, who in his career has now worked with Harbaughs Jack, John, Jim, and Jay. “When you go to play a pickup basketball game, I got a feeling you gotta be pretty physical.” Indeed, when Harbaugh first met his wife’s large family, he wound up complaining about her sister Amy’s officiating in a 3-on-3 basketball game.

But in contrast to the more reticent John, or the more affable Jack, or the more soft-spoken Jay (whose Twitter bio does include the words: “Relish a good nepotism tweet”; like father, like son), Jim Harbaugh can never just stay put. He points out that he’s the only member of his family taller than 6 feet and ascribes it to a childhood spent downing whole milk and praying for height. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming to think about what it must be like to live inside his brain.

…and the next section, which is our old friend Smart Football. It's not quite Grantland yet but it's not bad except for all the articles in which NFL coaches complain about spread offenses.

They always catch up. Fascinating article by Chris Brown on the decline and fall of Chip Kelly in Philadelphia, which wasn't just based on the imperious personnel decisions and general Jed Yorkery of his term there. Kelly went away from running quarterbacks because the NFL has a salary cap and very few plausible starters at that spot, and teams caught up to his tempo.

Then he started tipping all of his plays and acting like Brady Hoke afterward:

Philadelphia’s opponents seemed to know what was coming throughout 2015, even when he tried to mix in other plays. For example, as long as he’s been in the NFL, whenever Kelly’s opponents have geared up to stop his inside zone play, he has typically gone to his counterpunch, a sweep play in which the guard and center both pull to lead the way. But, tipped off by the alignment of the running back and the tight end, defenses were ready for that, too.

It’s one thing for a team to miss a block or for the play caller to guess wrong, but these are abysmal, totally hopeless plays rarely seen in the NFL. Yet Kelly repeatedly deflected criticism that his offense had become predictable by saying that the issue came down to only one thing: “We need to execute.”

If you stay static, the hyenas download you and take over. Michigan's offense has to move as much as anyone else's—one reason I think the fullback traps might go on vacation this season. They haven't shown anything new so far and won't this weekend. Starting with Colorado the wrinkles will start to work their way in.

Hopefully you run into Scarlett Johansson. Zack Shaw on Gardner and Gallon's Japanese adventure:

Wary of the likelihood tryouts and camp invites actually led to something, Gardner’s agent pitched a new idea to Gardner this spring: Go be a star … in Japan.

“He said he had an interesting idea after someone had given him a call about it,” Gardner said. “It was (pitched as) a chance to see a new place, get back on the field again for some time because I hadn’t played in a while.”

The next day, Gardner was on a flight to Japan. He signed with the Nojima Sagamihara Rise a couple weeks after that, and was asked if he knew of any American players that would also be interested. Though the X-league is competitive, players from the United States typically thrive against less-experienced competition, to the point in which the league put a cap on four Americans per team.

So Gardner had to pick his receiving target wisely, but it wasn’t a hard call to make.

Large profile of interest. We took their Kaiju, only fair we give back.

Wait, what? Apparently basketball coaches are bracing for a transfer free for all?

While the overwhelming belief of the college basketball coaching fraternity is that players being able to transfer without having to sit a year is imminent, NCAA chief legal officer Donald Remy told ESPN he isn't ready to go that far.

"I am confident we will be victorious in these cases," Remy told ESPN. "If they win, we wouldn't be able to have the rule anymore.'

I'm very much on the pay-these-men-their money side of things but that sucks. I'd like to draw a line somewhere more conservative than "anything at all that can be construed as a benefit for athletes is what we should do," and both transfer restrictions and the sit-out year are things that I think are reasonable. (To be precise: I don't think teams should be able to restrict players from teams not on their schedule the next year.)

We're already seeing a ton of guys bail on their mid-major teams to go play a year or two at bigger schools, and this would only accelerate that. A separate article by Jeff Goodman goes over the parlous state of incentives in college basketball:

Another mid-major head coach, who lost one of his best players to a BCS school this past offseason, told ESPN he would be "slowing down the graduating process" for his players in order to ensure that he doesn't lose another to the high-major ranks.

When asked to elaborate specifically on what "slowing down the graduating process" would entail, he said instead of enrolling a player into a pair of summer school classes in two sessions, they might not have that particular player take summer school at all -- or take just one class per session. Another prevailing thought is to put players in just the minimum 12 hours of classes each semester.

"What kid is going to argue and want to take more classes?" one mid-major coach said. "There aren't many."

That's bad for the sport since it paves an even easier path to the top for the top schools and reduces the number of upsets that make the NCAA tournament so fun:

A year ago, Cleveland State head coach Gary Waters could have trotted out a starting lineup that included Trey Lewis and Anton Grady. Instead, Lewis spent the season at Louisville. Grady took a grad transfer year at Wichita State and Waters went just 9-23 and will have some pressure on him this season instead of working on a contract extension. Both Lewis and Grady are playing professionally overseas this season.

There's a totally legit competitive balance argument here. And you can't even make that academic argument that is offered up by defenders of the grad transfer rule. Switching schools in the middle of a degree will make things tougher. (Unless you can't do algebra and transfer to MSU.)

If we could just admit that basketball players are majoring in basketball and that this is completely fine a lot of balderdash could be excised from these discussions. Basketball players transfer because of basketball. Therefore it is proper to consider the effects on basketball these transfer rules have.

Unintended consequences. NFL players and owners conspire against players yet to join the league by agreeing to a CBA that pays rookies vastly below market value for four or even five years. Artificially under-valued players thus pile up across the league, forcing veterans out. Coaches then bitch about how young everyone is. If only someone could have seen this coming.

Also in that article, it runs in the family. John Harbaugh might not be the craziest Harbaugh, but he's a Harbaugh:

On March 18, 23-year-old Ravens cornerback Tray Walker died from injuries suffered in a motorbike accident in Miami one day prior. Eight days later, at the funeral in a Baptist church in south Florida, Harbaugh approached the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith. “I said the rules have to be adjusted for first-, second-, third-year guys,” Harbaugh said, referring to rules that limit offseason contact between players and coaches. “The rules are built for guys who have families and need time off.”

Smith said the interaction was brief. “One, we were at a funeral,” he said.

Knives out for Les Miles. This Bleacher Report article features several former LSU players expressing their concern with the direction of the program in uncommonly blunt and clear terms:

"There were players running free, and it was from experienced players not adjusting to a blitz," said Hester. "It wasn't a situation where they were doing something tricky or mugging up in the A-gaps and bringing somebody from somewhere else. It was literally linebackers blitzing from depth when the ball was snapped. Those are things that you expect experienced guys to pick up.

Already in the meat of the season there's not a lot that LSU can do, and the bet here is that with Tom Herrmann out there, Miles won't survive any forthcoming misstep. One dollar says LSU gets blown out by Alabama and there's an interim the next day.

Etc.: Remy Hamilton, named after cognac. Identifying pass defenses is damn near impossible in many cases, contra a couple people who are absolutely certain about things they shouldn't be certain about in UFR comments. A highly timely Hawaii recap. Also another one from Holdin' the Rope. Phelps's son will go to Michigan. Luck can read the standings.

[Barron/MGoBlog]

Playing three different positions in three years isn’t usually the recipe for success, but what about defensive end works for Chase Winovich that you think he’ll fit better there?

“Well, Chase has had a very good spring. We saw that in the bowl practice, and that’s why bowl games are so important. I’ve always felt—I recruited him, and I always felt he had a real high motor, he’s a very, very tough young man, and he can really run. When we got a chance to get him back on defense we just put him in in practices and I would have played him in the game. I would have put him in the bowl game at the end except our offense did such a great job of controlling the ball I didn’t have time to get him in at the end. Then this spring, he’s added some weight. He’s got a lot of learning to do with the technique but he’s willing to, and I think you’re going to be—you know, he’s got a very high ceiling and I’m excited about it.”

How about Bryan Mone? Is he at full health?

“Yeah. Bryan’s, you know, he’s rusty; you don’t take a whole year off [without rust]. But every practice you see it getting more like the guy when he was a freshman but older, and he’s working really hard. I’m very pleased. Obviously he’s very hungry. You know, you take a year away from a young man, it’s hard. And he seems to be really excited about what’s happening, and he’s getting a lot of great reps.”

On the other side of the ball, can you talk about what you see in practice from Chesson and Darboh and Butt in terms of they’re so experienced and so talented that whoever the quarterback is how much they’re going to help that guy?

“Yeah, again, you’re talking about three guys that are veterans now. They’re very talented. I don’t follow our offense. You know, you’ve got so much to do with your own side, but they just have such a great attitude and they seem to be the ones that make the plays. And they’re leaders. They’re leaders by how they play, leaders off the field, leaders in the cafeteria. They’re big-time guys and it’s fun to be on a team with them. I’m really excited about what they’re going to do this next year.”

You’ve talked a lot over the years about how you remember coaching Chris [Wormley] and Hurst when they were really young. Now they’re old. This is the most veteran line you’ve had. Are your expectations, I assume, that much higher?

“Yeah, very high. You know, they know me that if a guy shows that he has talent that I’m going to expect him to get all the way to the top of that talent, and so sometimes things that might be acceptable some places are still not acceptable. I’m always after them for perfection. I want them to be as good as I know they can be, and that’s hard to do in a four-hour practice but they’re being pushed to do that.

“You see those guys, you know, Glasgow, he can’t go right now but he’s doing some things that he wouldn’t get injured with. But all those guys, Taco, it’s four years for them now and you’ve seen them. It’s funny because when you see a Shelton Johnson or a Carlo Kemp or Winovich, you see a young guy and you remember that’s just what they looked like, so you want to get them there faster so they can be up with them. But it’s good. The bar is very, very high for this defensive line.”

[After THE JUMP: If tickets for the Rashan Gary Hype Train weren’t already sold out…]