jim harbaugh is an actual leader

Harbaugh has been voted the year’s best coach in the country by the Associated Press.

BREAKING: Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh is The Associated Press college football coach of the year, finishing ahead of Cincinnati’s Luke Fickell and others.

Full story and voting breakdown of the award presented by @askRegions: https://t.co/Q3970Z12yu pic.twitter.com/GTnyPKk9cg

— AP Top 25 (@AP_Top25) December 10, 2021

Cincinnati’s Luke Fickell, who took the Bearcats to the playoffs and an undefeated regular season, finished second. Harbaugh received a plurality (22) first place votes of the 53 cast, with Fickell (16), Baylor's Dave Aranda (5) MSU's Mel Tucker (4), and Utah State's Blake Anderson (3) the others receiving more than one vote.

The Football Writers Association of America also named Harbaugh a finalist for their Coach of the Year award, which will be announced on December 20. The FWAA often, but not always, chooses the same winner as the AP. Harbaugh was also Pro Football Focus's choice for the award.

CoY awards usually go to coaches of small schools having historic seasons or coaches of blue blood programs bouncing back from historic lows. Performance relative to expectations is a (de facto) primary component. The last ten AP CoYs were Jamey Chadwell (Coastal Carolina), Ed Orgeron (LSU), Brian Kelly (Notre Dame), Scott Frost (UCF), Mike MacIntyre (Colorado), Dabo Swinney (Clemson), Garry Patterson (TCU), Gus Malzahn (Auburn), Brian Kelly again, and Les Miles (LSU). Harbaugh is the first Michigan head coach to win the AP’s designation, which they’ve been giving out since 1998 (Bill Snyder). The FWAA winners of those years were the same except they chose Bill Clark (UAB) over Kelly in 2018, Kirk Ferentz (Iowa) over Swinney in 2015, and Mike Gundy (Ok St) over Miles in 2011.

Clearly, Harbaugh falls in the latter category. After his 2-4 season in 2020, Harbaugh agreed to a restructured to make him easier to buy out. That also occurred well into January, IE after the NFL coaching carousel stopped spinning. Harbaugh jettisoned several longtime and grizzled assistants—including at OL coach and defensive coordinator—replacing them with guys in their 30s in the mold of his recently Broyles-winning OC Josh Gattis. Needless to say most of the fanbase, including this space, were not optimistic that the gambles would work out.

Harbaugh and his young staff are now Big Ten champions, ranked #2 in the country with a 42-27 win over Ohio State and a berth in the college football playoffs. They’re currently ranked 4th in SP+, with the #16 defense and #7 defense to Bill Connelly, plus the #1 special teams unit to Brian Fremeau’s FEI.

The new contract does have a clause that pays Harbaugh a $75,000 bonus for winning this award, but since he decided to donate all of his bonuses this year to those who took a paycut in the athletic department during last year’s COVID cutbacks, that’s just more good news for them. Harbaugh finished one vote behind MSU head coach Mel Tucker for Big Ten coach of the year.

[Fuller]

Do you have an update on Wilton [Speight] and his condition?

“If we were playing a game this week he wouldn’t be able to play and we’ll assess it as we go.

“Somebody asked me—Angelique?—what I thought of the play. After having seen it now, I thought it was egregious. If I had a stronger word to use I would use it. With all the emphasis on protecting defenseless players, it appeared that the player knew what he was doing, targeted the head and neck area when the player was on the ground, and accelerated into it. Surprised they had two officials standing back there that were both looking at it, plus a review in the press box, that that wasn’t a targeting, that wasn’t a personal foul.”

Is that something that you contact the Big Ten about? There were other hits in that game, too.

“Yeah, yeah. We will contact them.”

What do you get when you do contact them?

“You get a piece of paper back that says they agree or disagree and has a short explanation.”

So it doesn’t really solve anything.

“With all the emphasis that’s been placed on the safety of the game, et cetera, I think it needs to be addressed. Needs to be answered.

“And the other thing, in a very good spirited way, we are gonna look at everything we can do for the visiting team here at the University of Michigan as it relates to a standard of care for the visitors on multiple levels. It’s become apparent after going around to all the visiting schools over the last couple years that [there is] a conscious effort of gamesmanship that is unsportsmanlike. You have locker rooms that are too small; they’re not heated or cooled properly—in this case there’s no air conditioning; such a tight, cramped environment; you’ve got to open the doors to get some kind of ventilation going in a very small area; people are walking by, they’re watching you dress; a number of urinals or bathrooms for the players and staff, I think there was two; there’s not even a private door around it; and then mainly the health and safety of the players. Very small space for a training room to have nothing in it. This is no different than the facility I think I saw when I was there in 1986.

“And not putting this on Purdue, this is league-wide. It needs to be addressed by the league, by the commissioner, and we’re going to lead the way. We’re going to look at what we have, but there needs to be a way to x-ray a player at the stadium. There needs to be a minimum standard of care for the players. Again, we put a lot of emphasis into health and safety of the players, but it doesn’t even seem sanitary. You were all in there. We’ve already talked about the heat, and it seems to be a conscious effort to gamesmanship, to get an advantage over the opponent.

“And I wish I had taken a picture of the actual table that it given to the visitors to put the players on when they’re injured. I mean, it looks like it’s from the ‘20s. It was ripped, it was—it’s just not good. I think that’s a pattern in the Big Ten. I asked Don Brown, ‘Did you see the same thing in the ACC?’ ‘Not to this extent.’ Did not see it to this extent in the Pac 12 when we coached there, and you could keep going on. Injured players who can’t get an x-ray, taken to a student health center in a van, we needed a brace for a player and there wasn’t one at the facility we were taken to. There’s a lot of things that needs to be addressed.

“Talked to Warde [Maneul] about it and I would ask that the rest of the Big Ten coaches look into this as well and make this a priority. We’re talking about all of our players here, and we’ll start first with us and make sure that you have guests, you have visitors that are coming in, that their health and safety needs are being addressed.”

[After THE JUMP: “Gamesmanship should cease at… the point of health and safety for the players.”]

Previously: Podcast 8.0. The Story. Quarterback. Running Back. Wide Receiver. Tight End And Friends. Offensive Line. Defensive End. Defensive Tackle. Linebacker.Cornerback. Safety. Special Teams.

1. Does Michigan have a decided schematic advantage and should I sue you for making me ask that question?

Last year's edition of this post had a question about how Harbaugh's ultra-manball ways fit in an increasingly spread world. Despite my long history of spread zealotry I was pretty sanguine. Harbaugh had a fantastic track record and when I went over some of his Stanford-era games and a couple things stood out. One was yes, this:

The other was that in certain ways the Harbaughffense and spread stuff ended up at the same place despite taking diametrically opposite paths to get there:

Harbaugh's offenses put mental pressure on the opposition in a way that previous manball offenses at Michigan did not. This came up constantly during the Al Borges's tenure; I said that having to dodge a safety near the line of scrimmage sucked while Borges's defenders said they'd take it all day and twice on Saturday. It's clear that Harbaugh is in the former category. Like spread offenses, Harbaugh loves to screw with opposition safeties.

Rich Rodriguez did that by playing 11-on-11 on the ground with Denard Robinson. Harbaugh does it by whiplashing the opposition between jumbo sets and four-wide, by flooding the field with big guys safeties have to get around, by constantly screwing with their keys, and by adding new stuff on the regular.

Last year's UFRs were a ton of fun to do because every week Michigan would come out with a new package of plays I hadn't seen before. The sheer diversity of Michigan's ground game fairly boggled the mind, and I say this as a person who has broken down six or seven seasons of pro style offense. Hell, Harbaugh changed offenses across the league. Michigan started facing down trap blocking at a far higher rate than they ever had before.

UFRs pretty quickly picked up a section about the "Stanfordization" of the offense that detailed the tweaks and new packages I picked up on weekly. After Maryland:

The most obvious new wrinkle was the T set, which Michigan used a couple different ways. A counter iso play was successful when Isaac was not fumbling:

The two ILBs went to entirely the wrong hole, buying Michigan a free blocker, and if the Kalis block had gone a little better Isaac is one on one with the last guy for six points. Harbaugh's ability to buy back the extra defender you have to deal with when you aren't running the spread is a consistent theme so far this year; this is yet another example.

Northwestern had been super successful with aggressive linebackers when they rolled into Ann Arbor, and Michigan had a number of plays that made them pay for it:

I did appreciate the Kerridge fullback dive. Here is the play just before it. Watch the linebackers.

Here is the dive. Linebackers again.

That play exploited the blitz-ball mentality to spring a big gain. It also gave us a brilliant still shot demonstrating how weird this offense is to players born and raised on the spread:

"Wait… he's got the ball? Can they even DO that?"

And I loved Harbaugh's ability to see what his team lacked and game plan around it. This was especially validating against Penn State. A few years ago the infamous 27 for 27 game featured snap after snap on which Michigan ignored the fact that Penn State was playing ten yards off Jeremy Gallon; in Harbaugh's first year he felt his OL was a bad matchup:

So this game was… okay.

It was. The default thing that happened seemed to be this:

And, like, I'll take it.

There weren't actually as many of those as it felt like there were. Michigan threw 8. Those picked up 48 yards, a solid 6 per attempt. One was called back on a ridiculous block below the waist call. One could easily have drawn a block in the back call on Perry.

Those eight screens had a minimum gain of three, that on second and four, and picked up four first downs. They also opened up a couple of actual runs when PSU had to get serious about putting their linebackers over slot receivers. They were successful and easy. PSU's defense wanted to give those yards up, and Michigan took them.

I love that Harbaugh is clear eyed enough to work around the limitations of his team—also a major theme against OSU. He doesn't think "the expectation is for the position," he thinks "we're going to get overrun, let's do something about it."

Michigan's offense was a rock paper scissors winner under Harbaugh. I had the UFR RPS metric positive in 11 games with slight negatives against Northwestern and Indiana, and that hasn't happened in a while. They've been pounded over and over in that metric (and everywhere else) by MSU; that was a slight win. And this is just the first, most screwup-prone version of the Harbauffense.

There's a reason he built Stanford into rushing powerhouse with a bunch of three star guys. Not only is Harbaugh a smart and creative football mind, but he surrounds himself with other guys like that. How many offensive coordinators does Michigan have? Three, maybe four. Harbaugh is one. Drevno is one. Jedd Fisch is one. Nick Baumgardner had an excellent article last year describing the way this works in practice:

"It's unique (compared) to what I've done before," Fisch said Wednesday. "But it's something I would always do from now on."

Instead of designating one person to serve as the team's chief offensive play caller, or limit the discussion to himself and one other coach, Harbaugh keeps an open dialogue going with his entire offensive staff from snap-to-snap on the sidelines during game days.

That is terrific.

So yes, Michigan can expect to win coaching battles now. Not every last one, but most of them. Lloyd Carr didn't even try to do this—congratulations to Mike Debord on narrowly escaping his nemesis last night by scoring 13 regulation points—and Brady Hoke was incapable of it. (RichRod was pretty good at it but let's not open that can of worms again.) They have a decided schematic advantage.

[After THE JUMP: QB theme fight, Smith sustainability, OL panic]