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Analyzing Harbaugh

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Shock-G's picture
December 23, 2014 at 10:08am
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Working and living right outside of Ann Arbor the giddy screams of "Harbaugh" are really starting to wear a guy down get old. Should Michigan pull it off and hire Harbaugh what will they be getting? Should Ohio State fans worry about his presence in Ann Arbor?

Short answer, they will be getting a coach who will get his teams ready to play and play hard. Generally speaking, his teams are successful and tend to improve year over year. Should Ohio State fans worry .... no. I took a deeper look into his time at Stanford to try and come to a deeper understanding of Jim Harbaugh -the college coach. 

Prior to his arrival, the Cardinal went 1-11 in 2006 and had the 118th ranked offense and 97th ranked defense (according to archaic NCAA statistics of total offense and total defense). The 2006 recruiting class, according to Rivals, was ranked 54th in the country. 

Over the next four years Harbaugh's record at Stanford would improve, from a mark of 4-8 in his first season to 12-1 his final season in Palo Alto. Offensively speaking his teams improved each season.

Harbaugh's Offense at Stanford
Year Total Offense FEI S&P+
2007 107 61 83
2008 67 48 31
2009 19 1 6
2010 14 5 3

I've included the advanced metrics, FEI and S&P+, to allow for a better understanding of the improvement seen in Harbaugh's offense aside from the ancient NCAA way of tallying up total yards. Computing these metrics is way over my head but I frequently look to http://www.footballoutsiders.com/ for added understanding. During Harbaugh's final two seasons at Stanford he had the benefit of having Andrew Luck at QB. Luck would go on to finish as the Heisman runner up in both the 2010 and 2011 balloting. 

Defensively, Harbaugh's teams were a mixed bag of success. During his first three seasons the defense largely performed the same before seeing major improvement in his fourth season.

Harbaugh's Defense at Stanford
year total defense fei s&p+
2007 98 49 85
2008 75 80 87
2009 90 91 113
2010 21 6 6

During his tenure Harbaugh coached the Cardinal to two upset wins. In 2007 his Stanford team defeated #2 USC, in the Coliseum, 24-23, in what many call the biggest statistical upset in college football history. In 2009, Stanford upended #7 Oregon 51-42 in what would be the Ducks only conference loss that season (the Ducks would later lose to Jim Tressel and the Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl). While Harbaugh did lose 21 games as head coach at Stanford there was only one game that one could consider an upset loss, a touchdown loss to Wake Forest early in the 2009 season.

Harbaugh finished ranked in the top 25 once at Stanford, his final year, that saw the Cardinal earn a final ranking of 4th nationally. During his final two seasons, his most successful in Palo Alto, no more than 2 teams from the Pac-10 conference (as it was called at the time) finished ranked in the top 25. He never won the conference title in his four years.

As a recruiter Harbaugh saw only relative success with classes ranking (according to Rivals) 51st (2007 class that he had little time to finish), 50th, 20th, and 26th, nationally. He started work on the 2011 class, before he left for the 49ers, that finished 25th nationally. One could argue, correctly, that Stanford is one of the more difficult institutions to recruit to considering their high academic standards. The 2007 and 2008 classes made up the majority of those that impacted the successes of the 2009 and 2010 teams leading me to believe that Harbaugh and his staff can develop their teams to compete within their system (think similarly to how Mark Dantonio has been successful at Michigan State).

How does this translate to Michigan? 

Clearly I think a Harbaugh hire will energize the fan base, the football student-athletes, and the Michigan community in general. I think they immediately become a better football team because they will have a better coach at the helm.

Recruiting to Michigan will be easier for Harbaugh than it was at Stanford as he will have greater leeway at getting guys admitted into UM than he did in Palo Alto. Not only that but Michigan's tradition and facilities are, far and away, better than those at Stanford.

However, Harbaugh's success at Stanford came in what was largely a watered down Pac-10. His two best seasons, 2009 and 2010, came on the heels of USC's freefall from the top of college football's hierarchy and the annual contests with Notre Dame came before the Fighting Irish's recent resurgence under Brian Kelly. It is hard to draw a lot from what we have seen from Harbaugh as a college head coach. 

In the grand scheme of things this would be a very good hire for Michigan but at the end of the day Urban Meyer is still the head coach for the Buckeyes. Urban's record in rivalry games and in the month of November more than speaks for itself. Could Michigan be back on the rise with Jim Harbaugh? Absolutely. Is that reason for Buckeye fans to be worried? Absolutely not.

This is a forum post from a site member. It does not represent the views of Eleven Warriors unless otherwise noted.

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