Tag: Jim Harbaugh

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Who will be the Next College Football Coaching Giant?

For college football in the early ‘70s, it was a time when college football icons roamed the sidelines on Fall Saturdays. So familiar and synonymous with their school that one needn’t hear their surname to identify them. Bo, Woody, Joe, Ara, Bear, and Darrell were coaching legends and they ruled the college football landscape, and out on the West coast, John McKay at USC was dominating the Pac-8 Conference. Yes, the Pac-8 Conference.

For those who are too young to remember that would be Bo Schembechler at Michigan, Woody Hayes at Ohio State, Joe Paterno at Penn State, Ara Parseghian at Notre Dame, Paul “Bear” Bryant at Alabama, and Darrell Royal at Texas.

Not long thereafter, other coaches rose to national prominence, namely, Tom Osborne, Barry Switzer, Bobby Bowden, Lou Holtz, Lavell Edwards, Vince Dooley and John Robinson. In time, Steve Spurrier, Phillip Fulmer, and Mack Brown would eventually join the exclusive national championship coaching fraternity.

Last year saw long-time sideline stalwarts Frank Beamer and Spurrier retire from the coaching ranks. So what coaches today would be considered coaching giants? Certainly Nick Saban of Alabama, with five national championships, ranks amongst the all-time greats. Saban’s five national titles trails only Bear Bryant who won six.

Ohio State’s Urban Meyer, with three national championships, one at Ohio State and two while at Florida, is certainly another. Saban and Meyer are in a class by themselves with multiple national championships. In addition, Meyer ranks third in all-time winning percentage (.8508) trailing only Knute Rockne (.8811) and Frank Leahy (.8643).

In the next group of coaches that have won a national championship and multiple conference titles would include Bob Stoops at Oklahoma, Jimbo Fisher at Florida State and Les Miles at LSU. Stoops has brought Oklahoma back to prominence and has one national championship and the Sooners are a perennial national power winning nine Big-12 titles during his tenure.

Florida State under Fisher has won three ACC titles and like Oklahoma, is also a perennial national contender. Miles has won two SEC championships (2007 and in 2011), which are not easy to come by especially when you face Alabama and Saban every year. Another national championship for any of these three coaches would elevate their status to that of a coaching giant.

Saban and Meyer have won seven of the last 10 national championships. Stoops, Fisher and Miles would love to join them as multiple national championship winning coaches. College football playoff appearances may soon become a coaching measuring stick much like Final Four appearances are for college basketball coaches.

Then you have the group of coaches that have won multiple Power Five conference championships: Bret Bielema (formerly Wisconsin now Arkansas), Marc Dantonio (Michigan State), Kirk Ferentz (Iowa), Mark Richt (formerly Georgia now Miami), David Shaw (Stanford), Bill Snyder (Kansas State), and Dabo Swinney (Clemson). Bielema, Shaw and Swinney are all in their 40s. More on that later.

Shaw and Dantonio are known to consistently do more with less than most other coaches, having regular success by getting more out of their players than some other coaches might. Despite not winning a conference championship, when it comes to coaches doing more with less Pat Fitzgerald of Northwestern has to be near the top of the list as well.

If Bielema can revive the Arkansas program and win an SEC Championship, he would separate and distinguish himself from the shadow cast by Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin. By winning conference championships in both the Big 10 and SEC conferences Bielema would then join Meyer with that unique distinction and certainly elevate his coaching level status.

As for the current top coaches that haven’t won a conference title, that would include Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly because of Notre Dame’s independent football status and Jim Harbaugh (formerly at Stanford and now at Michigan). Harbaugh’s Wolverines will be one of the favorites, if not the favorite, to win the Big 10 title this year.
It’s not always easy for successful college coaches to avoid the siren call of the NFL. Saban, Spurrier, and Bobby Petrino each took their shot in the NFL and were unsuccessful and returned to the college ranks. Harbaugh is one of the few that had success at both the college level and in the NFL.

For a coach to average 10 or more wins a year puts them in select company. The following coaches at major college football programs are in that group: Fisher, Marc Helfrich (Oregon), Tom Herman (Houston), Meyer, Chris Petersen (Washington), Shaw and Stoops. Three of those coaches are in their early 40s: Helfrich, 42, Herman, 41, and Shaw, 44 in July. Herman has been a head coach for only one season, but it was quite a head coaching debut as the Houston Cougars went 13-1 last year with a 38-24 victory over Florida State in the Peach Bowl. Petersen, 51, is 12th all-time in winning percentage with a .8168 mark.

In case you were wondering, Meyer, Shaw and Stoops are ahead of Joe Paterno’s pace to win 409 games, provided they decide to coach that long. It certainly helps that there are more football games now than back in the ‘60s and ‘70s when 11 and 12-game seasons including bowl games were the norm. Now, some schools have 13 and 14-game seasons.

Meyer turns 52 in July. At the end of last season at the age of 51, Meyer had 153 wins in 14 seasons as a head coach. Paterno, at age 51 had 112 wins, and after his 14th season had 131 wins.

After his fifth season at Stanford and at the age of 43, Shaw has 54 career wins. After his fifth season at Penn State and at the age of 44, Paterno had 42 wins. Shaw turns 44 this July.

Stoops has coached at Oklahoma since 1999 and will turn 56 this September. After 17 seasons, Stoops has won 179 games. After 17 seasons and at the age of 56, Paterno had won 162 games. Stoops’ winning percentage of .7956 is 17th all-time amongst college coaches.

Fitzgerald, 41, has 70 wins in his 10 seasons at Northwestern. Kelly, 54, has won 226 games in 26 seasons as head coach, with 118 of those while at Division II Grand Valley State University.

As for the best young coaches in college football, and by young, meaning in their 40s, Shaw, Swinney and Herman are in that group.

Swinney, 46, once again this year will have Clemson in the national championship picture and could join the exclusive list of coaches to win multiple conference championships and a national title. Don’t be surprised if in 2016, Swinney and Harbaugh continue their ascent on the college football coaching mountain.

John Baranowski is a sports historian and contributor to newspapers, sports publications and sports websites.

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Harbaugh on Recruiting– I Need Tough Guys and Good Students– Take This Job and Love It! Jim Harbaugh Excerpt– Order to Support ChadTough

I need good students, tough guys- Jim Harbaugh

ALL IT TAKES IS ALL YA GOT- JOHN DUERR

John Duerr’s childhood was in Southern California, but he graduated from St. Alphonsus High School in Dearborn, Mich., before walking on at Michigan. Duerr lives in Auburn Hills and works for Chappell Steel Co. in Detroit.

Hardly a day goes by that somebody—a customer of mine, a friend, whoever—doesn’t ask, “Well, is Harbaugh going to do it? Is he going to get that place turned around?” The answer is yes, not because he coached in the NFL or because he coached at Stanford. It’s because of what he learned at Michigan. One thing I know for a fact is you’re going to see effort, tenacity. You’re not going to see guys mail in a block. Just like we learned from Bo, you’re not going to see guys start game in and game out if they aren’t performing. That has happened a little bit too much for our liking. I’m sure that Jim learned it from his dad, and all of the coaches that he was around, and his older brother, John—everything that he absorbed when he was a kid.

I was there with Jim three years, and under Bo for four. I went on to coach high school football. Everything that I know about football, I learned from those guys, the same teachers that Jim had. Now, he is 1,000 times more advanced than I am, but I don’t care what level you’re at—you’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to bust your butt. You can’t mail in a block. You can’t sulk. Those are the things that Jim learned. That’s why

Michigan football is going to be good, because they’re going to do it the right way. There is no alternative.

We had seven-on-sevens in the summer of ‘86, and we had off-season workouts. There wasn’t a lot of talking. It was just go do it. You were expected to do it. Go do it. Guys like Harbaugh and Jim Scarcelli, they held people accountable. You didn’t even need the coaches around. Those guys would make sure that you were living up to the standard, and if you weren’t, they were going to call you out. That was the thing that made all of these guys who played at Michigan successful in winning titles like they did.

My junior year, we played in Hawaii after the Ohio State game. Scarcelli and Harbaugh and I were at a place, and he asked these girls at the bar, “You know who that guy looks like? Who does that look like?” He says I look like Huey Lewis, so he liked to introduce me as Huey Lewis’ cousin.

Jim’s senior year—it would have been the ’86 season— right around the time when we started camp. At that time, we voted on captains. We’re at dinner in South Quad. We’re at dinner with all of the guys—you just gravitate to the guys that you hang out with, whether it’s your roommate or guys who play the same position as you. I always ate with the same guys, the Stites brothers, Don Lessner, Scott Harrala, Kyle Anderson, this group of walk-ons. We’re sitting at our same dinner table that we sat at all of the time. Lo and behold, Harbaugh pulls up a chair to eat with us. Well, we both were captains a few days after that. We all thought that was peculiar, that he would choose that day to sit down with a bunch of walk-ons. The Stites boys called him out and he swore he was just looking for a place to sit.

When Harbaugh was coaching at San Diego, there was a guy I worked with whose grandson was a good football player. I emailed Jim and said, “Hey, I got a guy here that might be the guy you’re looking for.” Jim emailed back, “I need tough guys. I need good students, tough guys.” The kid ended up playing lacrosse for Penn State.

I teach my kids things Bo taught me and things I learned playing football as part of a team—the whole team concept. I preach to my kids that you have to remember that the world doesn’t revolve around you. At some point, you’re going to be part of a company or a team, and you’re going to be responsible for a certain aspect that the whole team’s success is based on you doing your job. It doesn’t matter what job you have. It doesn’t matter what company you work for. It doesn’t matter what you do. You have a responsibility for the betterment of the team, and if you don’t do your job, the team is not going to succeed. I’m glad that I got that experience around those people, in that stadium, on that campus. Michigan runs through my blood, and I try to pass it onto my kids.

I still hang out with those guys, those walk-ons that I told you about, that sat at the table where Harbaugh came. Those guys, we all still hang out. If I’m up in Ann Arbor, I’ll call and we’ll go to lunch. One of the guys lives in Cincinatti, and when I’m down there on business, I stay at his place. The other guy is here locally and we go and hunt together. On November 15, all of us get together over by Grand Rapids and have hunt camp. I bring my son and he gets to enjoy these guys that I played football with 30 years ago. I wouldn’t trade a second of what we had to do to make it. These guys mean that much to me. The experience that we went through together means that much. I love them.

The greatest play I ever saw Harbaugh make was that 77-yard TD pass to John Kolesar in ‘85 against Ohio State. He stood there in the pocket and took a shot right in the head as he released the ball. Kolesar was running toward the north end zone and caught that ball. That’s the loudest I have ever heard Michigan Stadium. That was beautiful, man. That play was just phenomenal. What a great pass, under pressure, in a big game like that. Man.

My old teammate, Mike Reinhold, was moved from linebacker to nose guard. He said, “You know the difference between linebacker and nose guard? Nose guard is you’re at a party every day that you ain’t invited to.” I never forgot that line. I used to tell that to every kid I had who played nose guard: “You’re going to a party and you ain’t invited.” He was a good guy. Reiny was a good guy.

Please order Take This Job and Love It- Jim Harbaugh here to help support ChadTough Foundation.

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Super Bowl Foreshadowing– Offense or Defense– Take This Job and Love It! Jim Harbaugh Excerpt– Order to Support ChadTough

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“Here’s the situation. It’s the biggest game. It’s the Super Bowl. Do you want the ball and be behind to win the game? Or do you want your defense out there with the lead?”

A ROOMIE WITH A VIEW-  JERRY QUAERNA
“Q,” as Jerry Quaerna is known, grew up in Janesville and Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. He was recruited by all the Big Ten schools, but once he walked in The Big House, it was all over for the other schools. Q lives in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and commutes to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is a vital cog working for the Department of Homeland Security.

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.…Jim offered to have me go home to Kalamazoo and spend Christmas with his family for two days. Yeah, I don’t want to be stuck in a hotel. Sure, I’ll go home with you 90 miles to Kalamazoo.

So we got there, and I met the Harbaugh family. Very hospitable. Very tight. I got to meet John for the first time. John is different from Jim. John is a little more laid-back. He’s more of a diplomat. Jim is more fiery. We were having a big debate inthe basement. Jack was there, John was there, I was there, Jimwas there. What were we discussing? We were discussing if thegame were on the line, do you want to be behind and have the ball or do you want to be ahead and be on defense? We’re getting into this knockdown, drag out thing. I knew what position I was going to take.

Jim phrased it, in the heat of the moment. He said, “Here’s the situation. It’s the biggest game. It’s the Super Bowl. Do you want the ball and be behind to win the game? Or do you want your defense out there with the lead?”

I said, of course, I wanted the defense. Defense wins championships. I gave him that whole spin. John agreed with me.

He wanted the lead, and he wanted the defense out on the field. Jim was doing cartwheels, because he took the opposite side of that debate. He said, “I want the ball.” Now remember, he phrased this one, “The game is on the line, and it’s the Super Bowl.” We were going back and forth, and it was heated. Jack was sitting right there, but he wasn’t chiming in. He was just sitting back and enjoying it. He was soaking it up.

Here was when it went really ugly for me. I was ready to just throw it out and sink Jim’s ship. We were debating fiercely. I said, “All right, Jim.” Jim’s guy was John Elway. He loved John Elway. Elway wound up finishing second in the Heisman Trophy voting his senior year. That would have been the year Jim and I were freshmen—1982.

Jim talked about Elway quite a bit. Jim was a big Joe Montana fan, too, and he had a picture of Joe Montana on the wall. He also had…was it Joe Montana’s girlfriend or Dwight Clark’s girlfriend? It was Dwight Clark’s girlfriend, Shawn Weatherly, Miss Universe. Very aesthetically pleasing.

Anyway, Elway put up some pretty good numbers. Jim watched John Elway play at Stanford when Jim was playing at Palo Alto High. I was going for the knockout blow. I said, “Okay, Jim, what just happened with your boy Elway, perhaps the greatest college quarterback who has ever played the game? Why didn’t he go to any bowl games? It wasn’t because they weren’t scoring points. It was because they weren’t stopping people.” I was thinking, okay, that was a point for me. The place got real quiet. Deathly quiet. Jim and John both looked at me, stared at me and said, “Damn, that’s just cold, Q.” Okay, I just won the debate. What’s so cold about that? Unbeknownst to me, Jack was the defensive coordinator for Stanford for Elway’s sophomore and junior years. Here I was, being taken care of really well by this family, and I just threw my foot in my mouth big time. I’ll never forget that moment in my entire life. I had the debate won, and the next thing you know, those guys are looking at me and the conversation just ended. On a dime.

Flash forward years later. I was watching Jim and John coach against each other in the Super Bowl, and I was thinking, okay, I remember this. That was the context of that conversation that went horribly wrong for me. I watched the game, and it looked like it was on the verge of a blowout. The Ravens were going to win big. Then the power went out at the Superdome. When play resumed, Jim’s 49ers started creeping back. I was thinking, holy cow. That was what transpired. Jim’s team was coming from behind, and they had the ball with an opportunity to win at the end of the game. That discussion just came full circle. It was just astonishing to me. But I assure you, it happened. I will never forget it. Perhaps John and Jim and Jack don’t remember the time the Big Cheese stuck that size-16 right in his mouth to finish off that debate. It was really weird. I don’t know if they remember that. They were so busy and so accomplished, maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal. But for me, it seared into my skull. Here I was, being hosted by a marvelous family, and I just had that huge gaffe. I will never forget it untilI hit the grave.

Please order Take This Job and Love It- Jim Harbaugh here to help support ChadTough Foundation.

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Michigan vs Ohio State Football – Looking Back – 1986

The fifth and final installment of this year’s series looking back at the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry takes us to 1986. The national economy was booming, the Mets won an absolute classic of a World Series, President Ronald Reagan was dealing with the Iran-Contra controversy, and Microsoft Corporation issued its initial public offering of shares. In college football, Michigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh guaranteed that his team would beat archrival Ohio State. Guaranteed.

The history of sports guarantees has been checkered over the years. Joe Namath made his legend when the New York Jets fulfilled his guarantee of victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, but Patrick Ewing guaranteed that his New York Knicks would defeat numerous opponents, and his guarantees almost always fell flat on their face. So when Harbaugh guaranteed a Michigan victory in “The Game”, it grabbed sports headlines with the subtle attraction of a magnet. Harbaugh’s guarantee assured only one thing: Either his legend would be defined, or he would look like a fool.

As it turns out, he came very close to looking like a fool. Fortunately for Harbaugh and all the Maize & Blue faithful, the Michigan defense had his back, particularly when it counted most. With Ohio State driving in the final minutes, Buckeye quarterback Jim Karsatos threw a long pass for the end zone, and had a man open, but Michigan safety Ivan Hicks got his hand on the ball and knocked it away. Then, on a third down, Karsatos connected with Cris Carter, who headed for the first down marker, but was tackled a little more than two yards shy of the first down by Erik Campbell, who went on to became an excellent wide receivers coach. The yardage necessary was more than Ohio State coach Earle Bruce was comfortable with, and he sent out Matt Frantz to try a 45-yard field goal. Almost immediately, Frantz’s kick started to hook, and it veered wide of the goal posts, allowing Michigan to run out the clock for the victory.

Michigan finished the season with an 11-2 record. Oddly, the Wolverines had one regular season game left on the schedule after Ohio State, and they enjoyed their trip to sunny Honolulu, beating Hawaii 27-10. The Rose Bowl wound up being a disappointment, as the Wolverines fell to Arizona State, 22-15. Harbaugh was named to the All-America team, as were Garland Rivers and Jumbo Elliott, an offensive tackle who went on to a tremendous career in the NFL. Ohio State rebounded nicely to top Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl, 28-12.

This year, as we approach The Game, the atmosphere is more somber. An Ohio State student passed away during the school’s annual student tradition of jumping in Mirror Lake during the week leading up to the Michigan game. Please keep that student’s family and loved ones in your thoughts and prayers. We’d also like to thank the Ohio State and Michigan State football teams, who showed tremendous compassion and support for Chad Carr during his fight against cancer.

Thanks to CBS Sports and youtube poster Wolverine Historian. As always, I own nothing, nobody profits off this blog post, and everything here is done strictly for your enjoyment.