1984

A series of things worth your time in the absence of sports.

Paul Zimmerman's, AKA Dr. Z, New Thinking Man's Guide To Pro Football is not the best book in history. Neither is it the worst named. But this space is willing to wager that it would place top ten in a good book : bad name ratio competition. Throw in the cover, which is a football helmet/brain divided into areas labeled with a jumble of football phrases ("player to be named later", "skill positions"), inanities ("D (DEE-FENSE)"), and non sequiturs ("interest-free loan," "no-cut")…

…and we are rapidly approaching a world record for most disservice done by a publisher to an author.

In any case, the NTMGTPF is a 1984 book that is a modernized version of the original 1971 edition that goes over football position-by-position, from the quarterbacks to the linebackers to the special teams lunatics to the officials and press. I do not read sports books I do not have to for the same reason dentists don't hop into bed and start poking at their spouse's teeth, but when I picked up NTMGTPF I quickly found out it was something different.

I got into reading about sports in the mid-to-late 1990s, and writing about them a decade after that. One of the great early kerfuffles in the now-defunct Newspaper-Blog War Of The Aughts (losers: everyone) was newspapermen and women rattling on about bloggers in their underwear typing from mom's basement, and how they could never know the vital heartbeat of sports reporting that came only from being in a locker room.

[After THE JUMP: Vince Lombardi asks a delicate question, undelicately]

I was bouncing post ideas off my brother last night when he mentioned he didn't know much at all about Jim Harbaugh's playing career. I realized that outside of the pre-OSU guarantee, I didn't either—after all, Harbaugh's senior season occurred a year before I was born. I'm sure I'm not alone here, so I thought I'd do a series of posts on Harbaugh's best games at Michigan, with a huge assist from the incomparable WolverineHistorian.

The natural place to begin, of course, is Harbaugh's first start, when Michigan opened their 1984 season against the defending national champion Miami Hurricanes.

The Highlights: Part One, Part Two (WolverineHistorian)

The Setup: After winning the 1983 national title under Howard Schnellenberger, Miami looked to continue their dominance with Jimmy Johnson at the helm after Schnellenberger bolted for the fledgling USFL. By the time the 'Canes traveled to Ann Arbor, they'd already begun the season 2-0, defeating #1 Auburn and #17 Florida to rise to the top of the polls—and extend their winning streak to 13 games.

Michigan entered the game ranked #14 in the country after going 9-3 in 1983. Much of the pre-game attention centered on Harbaugh, the kid with deep Michigan roots making his first start after attempting just five passes as a freshman backup to Steve Smith. Bo Schembechler went so far as to say his team could throw the ball around 25, maybe even 30(!), times in a game.

[Hit THE JUMP.]