Jim Harbaugh just built a national championship team using NIL and the transfer portal. In true Michigan Man fashion, he did it differently and more effectively than everyone else who was trying to do the same thing.

We’ve long understood that Michigan’s strategic disadvantage in the modern Stars Matter, Blue Chip Ratio era of college football is that it’s never going to be able to recruit the way the SEC teams and tOSU do, for all the well-known academic and geographic reasons.

(Side note here to be amused at how two of the most important players last night for Michigan were from the mean streets of traditional football hotbeds like /checks notes West Bloomfield and Grosse Pointe.)

Harbaugh built a very Michigan program focused on finding as many four-stars as possible who were cultural fits, leavened with what five-stars he could find who bought into his vision and rounded out with three-stars that offered enticing developmental upsides.

Sometimes those three-stars turned into high-end starters like Zinter, Jenkins, Harrell, Sainristil, Moore, Barrett, Uche, Paye, Bell, Bush, DJ Turner, etc. Maybe their ceiling was limited by injury or other circumstances to “serviceable player” like Quinten Johnson this season. Sometimes they were someone like Julius Welschof whose potential was just a bit too far out of reach. Other times, they’ve been guys like, say, Ja’Den McBurrows or Kechaun Bennett who haven’t (yet) reached greatness, but stuck around anyway, did the work, contributed when called upon and now have a championship ring to show for it.

Fundamentally, this incredibly dominant team relied on so many players other coaches either couldn't see the potential of or didn't have the patience to invest in developing. Notably, this is a model that requires a coaching staff made up of actual, you know, football coaches who can develop players and aren't just obsessive recruiters. (Note to Kirk Ferentz: This is why you teach your son how to coach football then hire him, not the other way around.)

Blake Corum said it really well at B1G Media Day at the start of the season: “If you can play ball, you can play ball. If a coach can coach, he can coach. You coach a good team and your players buy in. You create a good culture that can’t be breakable. That’s how you play winning football.”

It's perfect for Michigan’s ethos of "Those Who Stay Will Be Champions," but it requires time and patience to build. Warde Manuel, for whatever faults he may have, had that patience and gave Harbaugh that time. (Another side note: This makes me question whether my “Gracefully shuffle Juwan out the door at the end of this season” stance is the right one. But not that much.)

Frankly, I don't think Harbaugh's able to build this Fully Operational Battlestation of Team 144 in a pre-NIL, pre-portal era. Too many key guys would have made the business decision to bolt to the NFL last year; too many holes wouldn’t have been able to be filled with key portal transfers like Henderson, Wallace, Nugent, Turner, Barner, etc.

That’s where Michigan's strategic long game ended up becoming fully apparent. On the outside, all Michigan fans could see for a long time was that we weren’t “doing NIL right,” making us worry that we were going to be at even more of a recruiting disadvantage now that the SEC bagmen were allowed to ply their trade out in the open.

But because of that conditioning and all of the “expert” commentary and outside noise about Harbaugh that had us clamoring to do NIL the “standard” way that everyone else was, I think most of us didn’t recognize for a very long time how Harbaugh and his allies in Michigan’s NIL community pulled an effective NIL play-action by using NIL as a retention tool, not a recruiting tool.

For all his supposed inflexibility, Harbaugh’s proven the willingness and ability over the decades to adapt to the strengths of the players he has on the field and the resources he has available to him – this is a guy who’s won with players as varied as Josh Johnson, Andrew Luck, Colin Kaepernick, Jake Rudock, Cade McNamara and JJ McCarthy as his quarterbacks. He demonstrated that yet again when adapting Michigan football for the NIL era. You have a program that lives or dies on its ability to develop players over the course of multiple seasons? Then use this new NIL tool to keep those guys you’ve invested all that development in around so that these plausibly NFL-quality players are contributing to your team, rather than the NFL or some other college program. Don’t be just another contestant in the rat race of schools that are trying to use NIL to entice bag-chasing high schoolers or money-whip together a team of one-and-done mercenaries for One Big Score. You’ve got the Michigan Money Cannon at your disposal; point it at your guys rather than someone else’s guys.

At the school of “Those who stay will be champions,” Harbaugh’s strategy was effectively, “If we can convince them to stay, we can build them into champions.” I don’t know how many other schools – frankly, how many other coaches – could recreate this model effectively in their programs, but it makes me happy that this very Michigan Man way of running things is what made Team 144 possible.

In the end, those who stayed did indeed become champions.

Go Blue.