Why Michigan is the perfect place for Jim Harbaugh ... NFL suitors be damned
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Jack Harbaugh is reclining on a couch in Schembechler Hall, ruminating on his familial full circle.
The father of the head coach of the Michigan Wolverines hangs out here at the football facility almost every day. He swaps Bo Schembechler stories with Jon Falk, who was Bo’s equipment manager – “stories we’ve told 30-40 times,” Jack says. He gets a workout in on the elliptical machine. He checks in with son Jim to see what’s going on and whether he needs any feedback, on messages to the team or X’s and O’s.
Then 77-year-old Jack is out the door at 3:15 so he can get home in time to catch “Judge Judy” on TV. That’s non-negotiable.
The old coach doesn’t stick around for practice because he can watch the video of it at home at night on his computer. That’s just one of the ways things have changed from 40 years ago, when Jack was an assistant coach at Michigan on Bo’s staff.
Back then, the practice film had to be taken out to a local developer every afternoon. That provided about a 90-minute window for Schembechler’s staff to go home for dinner and see the family, before they would return to break down the film and plan the next day.
“I’d sit down in my chair and be so tired, I’d just want to close my eyes for a minute,” Jack recalled. “Then they’d come up and grab my arm, saying, ‘Dad, dad, let’s play catch.’ “
And so Jack Harbaugh would wearily rise from his chair and play catch in the yard with his boys, Jim and John.
John would go on to become a Super Bowl-champion head coach in the NFL. Jim would go on to become the starting quarterback at Michigan, then a starting quarterback in the NFL, then the head coach at San Diego University and Stanford and the San Francisco 49ers. And then in 2015 he came home, to Ann Arbor, and completed the circle.
“The kid was on the practice field all the time,” Falk recalled of little Jimmy Harbaugh 40 years earlier. “Then he would run around the locker room every day picking up sweatpants and gloves. I’d tell him, ‘C’mon, Jimmy, get out of here.’ “
He would come back. As a young adult playing for Bo. Then again as a middle-aged man tasked with returning the Michigan program to the heights of his youth.
Along the way, Jim Harbaugh is driven to keep Bo’s legacy pulsing through the building that bears his name. That’s one reason why his father now lives in the adjacent property to him in Ann Arbor, and comes to the facility every day. That’s also why Harbaugh brought Falk out of retirement in something of a consultant role.
Ten years after Bo’s death the day before one of the biggest of all Ohio State-Michigan games, he lives on in unquenchable spirit.
“Jimmy told me one day, ‘Just having you and Dad around every day, I know Bo Schembechler is still here,’ “ Falk said.
“The higher you go up the ladder, the fewer people you have around who don’t want anything from you. There’s fewer people you can trust. I think that’s why Jimmy values having us here.”
The Harbaugh family tree extends everywhere in Ann Arbor – from Jack to Jim to son Jay, who is the Michigan tight ends coach, and on to Jim’s second set of kids, with his second wife, Sarah. They have three young children and a fourth is on the way. Jim will become a father for the seventh time, at age 53, early in 2017.
Jack and his wife, Jackie, watch the younger ones come charging over the hill from Jim’s house to theirs and joke about being invaded. They’ve lived all over the country, but this is where they feel grounded.
It all comes together here, with Bo as the connective thread.
“We moved around so much,” Jack said. “You were always in the process of trying to find your way. Jackie put houses together, bought houses, sold houses, negotiated the sale of washers and dryers. She put kids in school, pulled them out of school.
“But here, the day Jim got the job, when we walked into that press conference and looked around, we didn’t see faces. We saw stories. Everyone had a story.”
They had stories about Jim the little kid and Jack the assistant coach, from that glorious stretch from 1973-79 when the Wolverines went 66-13-3. Or about Jim the Michigan star quarterback who led the team to a 21-3-1 record his junior and senior seasons.
Falk has a ton of stories from both those eras.
He first met Jack Harbaugh in the 1960s, when he was a student manager at Talawanda High School in Oxford, Ohio. The team was playing a game at Eaton High, and when they arrived at the stadium they discovered they forgot to bring any footballs.
Falk was dispatched to beg the home team for a football for warmup drills. Eaton coach Jack Harbaugh gave him one.
A few years later, Falk was a student manager at Miami (Ohio) under coach Bo Schembechler, before Bo moved to Michigan in 1969. In 1974, Schembechler summoned his old student manager to be the equipment manager of the Wolverines – which is where he was reacquainted with Jack Harbaugh and introduced to Jack’s energetic boys.
The Harbaughs moved to the West Coast by 1980, but Jim’s recruitment brought him back to the Midwest. One of the schools he looked at early on was Miami (Ohio). Falk remembers telling Schembechler about that, and Bo responding, “Jim Harbaugh is coming to Michigan. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
That prophecy came true. But Jim’s return to Ann Arbor and rise to star quarterback status wasn’t a completely smooth path.
In 1984, Schembechler kicked Jim off the team for reasons that remain unclear more than three decades later. Harbaugh came into the locker room to talk to Falk about it, and the equipment manager said, “I know. I just cleaned out your locker.”
Shortly thereafter, Falk suggested Jim spend part of spring break that year with him. The two wound up driving to Ohio for a while, then traveling to Bloomington, Ind. There, Falk introduced Jim to a friend of Bo’s named Bob Knight. Falk explained that Schembechler had kicked Harbaugh off the team.
“Boy,” Knight told him, “you listen to what Bo Schembechler says.”
When they got back to Ann Arbor, Falk went in to see Bo and lobby for Jim’s reinstatement. Bo dismissed Falk and said he would be the only person who decides who is on the Michigan football team.
Three days later, Bo reinstated Harbaugh.
By the end of Jim’s Michigan career, he’d grown so fond of the man who once booted him from the team that he personally raised $500 from his fellow seniors to buy a plaque honoring Schembechler for his 166th victory, making him the winningest coach in Michigan history.
The plan was to present the plaque after he broke the record when the Wolverines beat Minnesota on Nov. 15, 1986. Except Michigan didn’t win, losing in a 20-17 upset.
Coming out of that shocking defeat and needing to win in Columbus to capture the Big Ten and go to the Rose Bowl, Harbaugh guaranteed victory. Then he backed it up in a 26-24 triumph, and he got to present that plaque to his coach one week later than planned.
Then, as now, the Ohio State game remains the standard by which Michigan seasons are judged. It’s the same in Columbus, of course.
“Every one of you was hand-picked,” Schembechler used to say, to players and coaches alike, “to beat Ohio State.”
Now it is Jim Harbaugh who is hand-picking his people in the quest to beat the Buckeyes. Michigan hasn’t done it since Urban Meyer arrived in Columbus in 2011, a bitter truth for the Wolverines to deal with. It won’t be easy this year, especially if starting quarterback Wilton Speight remains out, as expected.
But Michigan and Jim Harbaugh are conceding nothing as they head to the Horseshoe on Saturday. The traveling party will include a few people who know what it’s like to beat the Buckeyes – including the head coach, and the head coach’s dad.
Bo’s flame remains lit within the Harbaughs, the Michigan football family that has come full circle.
Popular college football video on Yahoo Sports:
