I knew this day would come. I expected it sooner. We had more time together than I could’ve hoped.
But now, Jim Harbaugh is leaving the Big Ten to offer odd non sequiturs in another domain and attempt to conquer the one realm he has not. It must be so. Michigan football will never be the same.
This isn’t to say Sherrone Moore can’t ascend to the college football mountaintop someday.
Hell, Lloyd Carr did it, and he was just an anonymous assistant minding his own business when Gary Moeller lost his mind, wildly intoxicated at a big restaurant in front of dozens of patrons.
Carr wasn’t even planning on being a head coach; he’d never been one except two years at the high school level two decades prior when suddenly the job found him at age 50. He didn’t have a big personality. But he grew into the job over time. And then he won a share of the 1997 national title.
Maybe Moore can, too. Even though he’s also never been a college head coach, or one at all except as an interim this year serving for Harbaugh during the Connor Stalions sign-stealing fiasco.
Moore responded well. He might not be ideally cut out for the emotional components of the job, witness his spontaneous bawling after the Penn State win. But hell, if crying after a big game disqualified you as a marquee head coach, Dick Vermeil and Roy Williams never would’ve hoisted a trophy.
So, Michigan might regain its footing after Harbaugh cleans out his locker and heads to Los Angeles. I’m just saying this:
Never will Mittenland find more of a Meechigan Man than it loses today. Harbaugh was the embodiment of the species.
He was smug in that perfectly Michigan way. He wore his exceptionalism with a sort of blasé smirk. Which is the way any emperor of an evil empire should. It was inimitable.
As was his beady-eyed disconnection from the mortal world. He wasn’t one of us. You could almost smell his circuitry.
I mean, if his head had begun to smoke during a press conference and suddenly sparking wires and tubes of blue fluid began protruding from his neck, would you have been completely shocked? That grin after a big win was cutting-edge machine learning, projecting an approximation of human joy as well as any android has ever.
He could’ve subbed in for Ash in Alien, ballcap and all. Except I don’t think Sigourney Weaver wins that wrestling match. Forget the Alien. That’s where the movie ends. Harbaugh subdues the rest of the crew, assumes command, and continues the mission.
What I’m trying to say is, I’m gonna miss him. A lot.
Every conference needs a classic villain. We used to have three – Harbaugh, Meyer and Dantonio. Now, they’re all gone. What’re we gonna do with a bunch of banal standard-issue-quote spewing mailmen headed up by Kirk Ferentz? The only hope is that James Franklin blows a fuse like he did after that Ohio State game five years ago, but what’re those chances?
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