CHICAGO -- We’ve reached the point in Harbaugh Hysteria where Jim Harbaugh’s impact on college football gets compared to the impact the computer mouse had on office furniture.
Laugh if you must at the comparison, but Michigan interim athletic director Jim Hackett has seen both inventions. For years, Hackett was CEO of the office furniture giant Steelcase, getting to know technological pioneers in the 1990s like Apple founder Steve Jobs and IDEO founder David Kelley. Steelcase bought IDEO, which created the first Apple mouse.
“We partnered up in the ‘90s as Steelcase was wrestling with how technology would change the office and we wanted to get ahead of it,” Hackett said. “So that alignment surprised our industry as much as Jim has probably surprised this industry.”
By now, the college football world knows there is nothing conventional about Harbaugh. He can be charming. He can be flaky. He can intelligent. He can be entertaining. He can be demeaning. And he can do it all in one day, as evidenced Friday at Big Ten media days as reporters and cameras documented every move Harbaugh made in a massive convention center as if they were trailing Tiger Woods a decade ago.
The media buzz Harbaugh has generated is “unprecedented in my career,” Hackett said. The only thing comparable I have experienced covering college football was Nick Saban’s hiring at Alabama in 2007.
Alabama desperately needed Saban. Michigan desperately needed Harbaugh.
On Friday, a student for Michigan’s campus TV station asked Harbaugh about student ticket sales increases since his arrival. Harbaugh gave a thoughtful response that he loves how this generation’s young people think about others first, and then asked the student his opinion. Harbaugh gushed at the student's response.
“Whew, I feel like I’m going to throw up,” the student said quietly after he asked his question. “I have a man crush on him. I had that question in the back of my throat for like 10 minutes.”
Sarah Harbaugh, Jim’s wife, teases him about how big he has gotten in Ann Arbor, where words like Messiah are tossed around. Jim keeps his head on straight, Sarah said, but she has nerves because he has never worked at a high-pressure job quite like coming home to Michigan.
“I’m a little bit nervous,” Sarah said. “I feel a lot of pressure for him. He doesn't seem as nervous as I am. I’m excited for the fans. I just hope it turns out the way everybody’s thinking that it will. Anytime I get worried about it, I think about everything he’s done in the past and every school he’s been at and the 49ers and I’m like, ‘OK, you can do this.’”
Mostly, Michigan cares about this: Harbaugh can win football games. He’s really, really good at winning football games.
“Not striving to be creating any buzz,” Harbaugh said. “Just striving to coach the football team. Not trying to be popular or anything. Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked. So just coaching football.”
That’s the answer Hackett likes to hear. Harbaugh will still need to actually turn around Michigan, not just have everyone assume it’s going to happen because he’s there. That’s a problem the Wolverines have run into through the years.
Michigan’s attempt to return to prominence has tried a hot, outsider coach in Rich Rodriguez; flashy marketing under former AD Dave Brandon; and a Michigan man in Brady Hoke. None of it worked. There has always been an assumption that Michigan will return to prominence simply because, well, it’s Michigan. Now that assumption is inflated even higher, understandably so, given Harbaugh's track record.
“There’s zero guarantee you’re going to be who you were, and when you look back and find out why you were who you were, it’s due to hard work,” Hackett said. “I love Jim’s thinking here -- just thinking about practice tomorrow. Because if you go broader than that, you rationalize yourself into this state that you’re good enough, and really, you’re never good enough -- not in sport. Every day you’ve got to get better.”
Consider this line of thinking Michigan’s version of the Saban process. Harbaugh will needle competitors and media a little, and then turn around and say with a straight face he didn’t know something like his satellite camps this summer made waves in the SEC.
“Probably people made more of a big deal out of it than it was,” Harbaugh said. “I’ll tell you this, those days, those weeks, that’s as much fun as I’ve had in I don’t remember.”
Even Ohio State coach Urban Meyer acknowledges there’s a media-generated buzz that’s brought something different to the heated Michigan-Ohio State rivalry.
“I do check the Internet to see what’s going on in this world and, boom, there it is — and it’s real,” Meyer said. “How real is it? I don’t know. But it’s real. That’s our job to monitor everything that goes on (at Michigan), and that’s their job to monitor everything that goes on with us, too.”
There was very little actual football information Harbaugh provided on Friday. The “changing the culture” talk at Michigan? “I think everybody kind of uses it a lot as a buzz word. We’re just working.”
One reporter asked if a particular Michigan player could use his size as an asset, trying to get any kind of nugget about football information out of Harbaugh. “He certainly can use it,” Harbaugh said condescendingly. “He has the license and ability to use it.”
Harbaugh’s past leads to his most entertaining and thoughtful answers. He lives about five houses away from where Bo Schembechler lived and says he often thinks while driving to work, “Well, Bo probably took this right on to Washtenaw or took this left onto Hill.”
Harbaugh showed the media a Mike Ditka jersey he received from his former Chicago Bears coach on Thursday night at dinner. “I’ll be proud to wear that,” Harbaugh said.
Michigan fans eat up the history. They have a Michigan Man, but also an outside-the-box coach who, for better or worse, doesn’t conform to what people might expect from a contemporary head coach.
The Harbaugh Effect? It’s real at Michigan, which reported its 89,975 season-ticket sales are the school’s most since 2012, according to The Associated Press. Michigan’s 72,076 non-student season tickets are its most since 2009. Students claimed 17,899 tickets, up from 11,597 last season. Harbaugh will make $7 million this year -- a number he has said he’s not worth.
“In business, if you say a payback (on your return of investment) is less than two or three years, you do it,” Hackett said. “Ours are less than a year (with Harbaugh). What you say in business is keep giving that more money, whatever that is, because the return is so good.”
Hackett quickly caught himself, perhaps thinking he was being too candid about the multi-billion-dollar college sports industry, which labels itself as a non-profit. “But I want to be really clear: This is different than just business. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s about creating a college experience.”
This is true, to a degree. It’s about Michigan reinventing Michigan -- the past, present and future blending into Harbaugh Hysteria, which is now apparently as big as the invention of the computer mouse.
Speaking of mice, Sarah Harbaugh said Jim caught one the other day at a restaurant and became the big hero. The guy who has been everywhere this offseason -- he even helped a motorist in a highway crash -- took a to-go box and chased the mouse around the restaurant.
“I think it actually hopped in, but he’s like, ‘I caught a mouse,” Sarah said. “I was trying to tell him don’t broadcast that.”
Too late. There’s no stopping this reality show in Ann Arbor.
