Jim Harbaugh's power
After dabbling in the spread, Michigan is playing old school football and they're doing it exceedingly well.
Jim Harbaugh is pretty underrated as a head coach.
The reason for it is simple, his Michigan tenure hasn’t been quite as good as anticipated when he was initially hired. It’s not been bad, he won 10 games three of the first four years and eight (8-5) the other year, went 9-4 in year five, then dipped hard to 2-4 in 2020.
He didn’t have any Big 10 Championships but every season (save for 2020) the Wolverines played hard, competitive football and won a lot of games. They just never won THE game. Harbaugh opened 0-5 against the Buckeyes as the head coach at Michigan and after a couple of hard fought losses, slipped hard and went down to Ohio State 62-39 in 2018 and 56-27 in 2019. The teams didn’t play in 2020 as COVID shortened the season and the Big 10 did all they could to help Ohio State reach the playoffs so they could exact revenge on the Clemson Tigers for multiple playoff losses and be embarrassed by Alabama in the Final.
The losses to Ohio State (and Michigan State for that matter) obscured what were consistently strong teams. Harbaugh’s challenges dealing with a football-ambivalent University administration (at least relative to a place like Ohio State) are typically overlooked. He’s generally been competing with Ohio State without the full weight of Michigan’s resources behind him while Ohio State’s whole-hearted focus every year is always fixed on Michigan.
Entering 2021, Harbaugh had already wrapped up his initial contract and been signed to a four-year extension that was set up to be easier for Michigan to buy out than the previous deal should he stumble again. It was a make or break year for the Harbaugh era, and he made a number of significant moves.
The Wolverines jettisoned spread guru and inside zone maestro Ed Warriner from offensive line coach and sacked “man coverage or die” defensive coordinator Don Brown. He brought in a number of new assistants including Baltimore Ravens’ assistants Mike MacDonald (new defensive coordinator) and Matt Weiss (new quarterbacks coach) while promoting Sherrone Moore from tight ends to offensive line.
Michigan surged to 11-1, avenged themselves on Ohio State 42-27, won the Big 10 Championship, and then got clobbered in the playoffs by Georgia to finish 12-2.
After the season the Wolverines lost offensive coordinator Josh Gattis, who’d been brought in four years prior to help Michigan move to more of a RPO spread system. But they didn’t lean fully into the RPOs in 2021 and in 2022 they don’t look much different than in 2021 when they broke out.
What propelled their rise in 2021? Well they’ve played much better defense, using a pro-style 2-4-5 nickel package and match coverages, but they also got back to Harbaugh’s roots. With zone run game guru Warriner gone, Michigan returned to what they’d done initially under Harbaugh. Running the power.
It was as though Harbaugh said, “if this is my last chance at my alma mater, I’m going out with what I know and love best.”
After their success a year ago, it’s now the foundation of their offense. Weiss and Moore are co-coordinators on offense and are building on the 2021 offense. With those changes and J.J. McCarthy at quarterback, it looks more similar to Baltimore’s power-spread, or Harbaugh’s old power run game at Stanford, and it’s working.
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