Jim Harbaugh's CFP national championship at Michigan adds to family's title-winning legacy
At NRG Stadium in Houston Monday night, Jim Harbaugh stood atop his sport as he hoisted the College Football Playoff championship trophy following his Michigan team’s 34-13 victory against Washington in the national title game.
It wasn’t the first time Harbaugh had won a championship of some kind as a player or coach, but it did mark the first time the Wolverines’ coach had been able to claim the top prize of his sport, whether it was in college or the NFL.
Because of that, he joins some elite company — in his own family.
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The Harbaughs were already synonymous with coaching success even before Michigan’s triumph on Monday, but Jim Harbaugh’s championship became the latest for a family with coaching titles across multiple generations.
Harbaugh family championship history
Jim Harbaugh’s older brother, Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh, won Super Bowl XLVII — and did so by defeating Jim Harbaugh’s San Francisco 49ers — and could soon add another trophy to the case. The Ravens and likely NFL MVP Lamar Jackson hold the No. 1 seed in the upcoming NFL playoffs.
If the coaching success of the Harbaugh sons seems as though it was passed on to them, it’s because it was. Jim and John Harbaugh’s father, Jack Harbaugh, was a longtime college coach who most notably won a Division I-AA (now FCS) national championship in 2002 at Western Kentucky.
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Jim Harbaugh was well aware of that championship lineage and his role in it as he spoke after the Wolverines’ win.
“Personally, I can now sit at the big person’s table in the family,” Harbaugh said at his postgame news conference. “They won’t keep me over there on the little table anymore.”
Though he didn’t win a championship, the Harbaugh family also includes former Indiana, Marquette and Georgia men’s basketball coach Tom Crean, who is married to Joani Harbaugh, Jim and John’s sister. Crean guided Indiana to two Big Ten regular season championships and, led by a junior guard named Dwyane Wade, took Marquette to the Final Four in 2003.
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Before the start of this year’s College Football Playoff, Jim Harbaugh already had his share of accomplishments over the course of his coaching and playing careers.
At Michigan, he had led the program to three-consecutive Big Ten championships. While he came just shy of a Super Bowl at the NFL level, he got there after guiding the 49ers to an NFC championship. He helped previously woeful Stanford win the Orange Bowl at the end of the 2010 season.
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As a member of the Indianapolis Colts, he won the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year award in 1995 and, while a quarterback at Michigan, he helped pilot the Wolverines to a Big Ten championship and a Rose Bowl appearance as a senior during the 1986 season.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Jim Harbaugh CFP national championship adds to family's titles history
