Jim Harbaugh isn’t the only Michigan football coach to ever consider or pursue another job while leading the Wolverines.
An Ohio State football coach of the modern era came very close to leaving for another job. And considering how OSU treated him less than a year later probably should have left.
Joe Paterno had at least five chances to leave Penn State and seriously considered at least one of those opportunities.
And Harbaugh isn’t the first Big Ten coach to go into an interview and discover that the people doing the hiring didn’t want him as much as he wanted them and then have to go back and coach the players he would have left behind.
His swing and miss at the Minnesota Vikings’ head coach’s job last week is similar to Glen Mason unsuccessfully pursuing the Ohio State job in 2001 while employed as Minnesota’s head coach.
In 1982, Texas A&M pitched an offer to Bo Schembechler that would have made him one of the highest paid, if not the highest paid college football coach in the country.
His interest was strong enough that he called a meeting with Michigan’s assistant coaches and asked how they felt about making the move, Lloyd Carr recalled at a 2006 memorial for Schembechler at Michigan Stadium the week after he died.
“I could tell he was conflicted,” Carr said in his speech at the memorial. The staff was divided whether to go or stay but in the end Schembechler’s decision was to remain in Ann Arbor.
There is a video on the Internet in which Schembechler says he debated the offer longer than he thought he would.
“I came to the conclusion that there are things that are more important to me and one of them is Michigan. With that in mind I’m staying where I belong, which is right here,” he said.
In January 1987 Earle Bruce was in a hotel in Tucson, Arizona, where he had traveled to discuss becoming the head football coach at the University of Arizona. According to a 2018 story in the Tucson Daily Star newspaper, Bruce and Arizona had reportedly reached agreement on a contract for him to replace Van Wert’s Larry Smith, who had just been hired as USC’s football coach. But Bruce decided to stay at Ohio State, where he was fired 11 months later.
Paterno seriously explored an offer from the New England Patriots to become their coach and general manager in 1973 before turning it down. He was offered the Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coaching job in 1969 before they hired Chuck Noll, according to a 2016 story in the Harrisburg Patriot News.
When Ohio State fired John Cooper after the 2000 season, its final two candidates to replace him were Mason, a former OSU player who had turned around struggling programs at Kent State, Kansas and Minnesota, and Tressel, who had won four Division I-AA national championships at Youngstown State.
Many people thought Mason’s experience in the Big Ten would give him an edge but OSU chose Tressel. Mason stayed at Minnesota and coached the Gophers until he was fired after the 2006 season.
In 2001, he described his players’ reaction this way: “We had an open discussion and they vented some frustration in my way, which I thought they had every right to do.
“I said, ‘If you think I’ve been disloyal to this program and you don’t think you can play for me and don’t want me to be head coach, take a vote. If the majority says I should go, I’ll resign on the spot.’ ”
There was not a vote, which is not surprising. Most players then and now would probably prefer to stick with the guy who recruited them and whose good points and faults they already know.
Will Harbaugh need to have a meeting for players to vent after his interview with the Vikings? Or in 2022 with the transfer portal and such things, do players care less about loyalty issues for themselves and their coaches than Mason’s players did two decades ago?
Maybe he needs to mend some fences with his coaches. Offensive coordinator Josh Gattis left on Sunday to become Miami’s offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald left before Harbaugh’s interview.
Harbaugh told Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel that his discussion with the Vikings is the last time he will try to get an NFL job, that he’s in Ann Arbor as long as Michigan wants him to be its coach.
We’ll see how long that promise lasts and how well the idea it wasn’t a rejection, it was a revelation plays after a couple of losses to Ohio State and Michigan State.
Some Ohio State fans see a long run at Michigan for Harbaugh, who is 1-5 against the Buckeyes, as good news. But the better news for OSU last week was that Ryan Day said he expects to be in Columbus for a long time.
In an interview with the Big Ten Network, Day said, “I love Ohio State. I love this place. My family loves it here. I tell recruits all the time, if I was to go take another job, I’d be going by myself because my family’s not leaving Columbus. And that’s the truth. They love it here.”
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