Mitch Albom: Jim Harbaugh leaving Michigan football was how fairy tale season was destined to end

Jim Harbaugh walked away from a dream job to take a job he couldn’t stop dreaming about. That’s all there is to say. There was never a doubt in the minds of those who knew him that Harbaugh would eventually return to the NFL, because he is not someone to leave business on the table, and he’s had unfinished NFL business for a long, haunting time.

People forget that in 1996, as quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, Harbaugh had a ball in the air that could have taken his team to the Super Bowl, a Hail Mary on the final play of the AFC championship game that hit a receiver in the chest before dropping to the turf. The Pittsburgh Steelers went on to the Big Game. Harbaugh went home, never to come that close as a player again.

Seventeen years later, this time IN the Super Bowl, Harbaugh, then coaching the San Francisco 49ers, had another ball in the air that could have won it, this one in the final two minutes, when Colin Kaepernick tossed a fourth-down pass a mere 5 yards from the end zone. It landed incomplete. Moments later, Harbaugh watched his brother, John, head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, feted off the field by his players.

Jim, again, went home.

If you don’t think those memories created a permanent campfire in some darkened cave of Harbaugh’s brain, you don’t know the man. And that fire remained lit the entire time he was in Ann Arbor.

This week, he finally acted on it.

As Porky Pig used to declare, that’s all, folks.

He accomplished the mission in Ann Arbor

“The only job you start at the top is digging a hole,” Harbaugh said in a statement released after he accepted the Los Angeles Chargers head coaching position for a reported five-year deal. “We know we’ve got to earn our way. Be better today than yesterday. Be better tomorrow than today.

“My priorities are faith, family and football, and we are going to attack each with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.”

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This is vintage Harbaugh. Bromides. Bluster. And while success-starved Chargers fans may eat it up, Michigan football fans wince knowing he used the same lines here. Sorry, Jim. But it can’t be “enthusiasm unknown to mankind” if you’ve already known it in another state.

This is part of what stings some U-M loyalists today. They thought all those impassioned Harbaugh lines were hatched in the Big House. They naïvely believed it was Michigan that fueled his ambitions, instead of the other way around.

Look. No one should begrudge Harbaugh making this move. If winning is justification for your employment, and winning it all is the brass ring of that employment, Harbaugh leaves having done both. An 86-25 overall record? Three straight wins over Ohio State? Three straight College Football Playoff appearances? A national title after beating college football’s gold standard, Alabama, and the year’s best quarterback, Washington’s Michael Penix Jr.?

No, Harbaugh aced his exam. But it did bother me to see both Warde Manuel, Michigan’s athletic director, and Santa Ono, the university’s president, sound almost apologetic. Both claimed they’d worked feverishly on a contract that would have made Harbaugh the highest paid coach in college football –— as if to scream to angry fans “We TRIED!” — and both bent over backward to throw hosannas at what the coach did during his time in Ann Arbor.

It kind of made you wonder who was the employer and who was the employee.

Who needs a guy with a wandering eye?

Yes, Harbaugh won it all in the end, and he’s leaving with a title glowing as the predominant memory. It doesn’t hurt that the Detroit Lions have everybody so buzzed around here, it’s hard to feel any football pain right now.

But don’t forget, there were many times in his tenure where it was Harbaugh who should have been thanking Michigan, having showed patience when other schools might have cut bait.

Harbaugh lost a bunch of games to Ohio State before he started winning. He missed out on plenty of Big Ten titles before he captured them. He went 2-4 in the COVID-19-shortened season. And he surprisingly failed to develop a single star quarterback before J.J. McCarthy brought his talents to town.

Harbaugh also tested the resolve of his bosses by constantly dallying with the NFL, even when he said he wouldn’t. He zigged and zagged when asked to explain certain things. And while he took a pay cut and a contract laden with incentives as penance, he also left behind a legacy of avoiding straight answers on topics like Connor Stalions and NCAA investigations. Those pending issues, still unclear, are no longer his problem. In cowboy talk, he’s gittin’ while the gittin’s good.

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Now, I am no fan of the silly, hypocritical rules that still — barely — govern college football. But even the most ardent Harbaugh fan must admit the man was not exactly forthright in certain matters. Don’t be fooled. When Harbaugh gets that faraway look and starts waxing on until you’re a good half mile from the subject, he knows what he’s doing. Avoidance is as much his talent as tackling.

He used that talent the last few weeks, suggesting he was just enjoying the afterglow of a championship while the whole time jockeying for several NFL slots. Hey. That’s his right as a professional.

But here’s the thing: The Michigan job is a plum one. A position rich in tradition and opportunity. Ono and Manuel would be well within their rights to say “Hey, if Jim doesn’t want to be here, we’ll find someone who does.” Bo Schembechler, Harbaugh’s mentor and hero, said as much when Bill Frieder wanted to coach the Wolverines in the NCAA tournament despite accepting greener pastures in Arizona State, remember?

“A Michigan Man will coach Michigan!” Bo declared, pounding a podium. And while that smacks of a certain arrogance, don’t you want your alma mater to set high standards for itself? To demand a certain loyalty?

Well, for better or worse, those days are gone. Coaches jump. Players jump. You even wonder about that phrase “A Michigan Man” anymore. Harbaugh would have seemed to fit that description perfectly. Played here. Came back to coach here. Yet this job was never the end game for him the way it was for Bo or Lloyd Carr. To them, the maize and blue whistle meant they’d arrived at their final destination. For Harbaugh, it meant another cool stop along the way.

Times have changed, but his top goal hasn't

And now he makes another stop, back to the pros. The Chargers will be the fifth team Harbaugh has head coached, his second in the NFL.

“Nobody has built a team more successfully, and repeatedly, in recent history than Jim Harbaugh,’ gushed John Spanos, the Chargers’ president of football operations. “Jim is one of one.”

Well, aren’t we all? Spanos, having watched the Chargers slip from promise to obscurity, is understandably excited about a hire that actually got him some headlines in LA, a town that is much more interested in the Rams (and the Oscars.)

But I smile when people say this is some kind of lock. There is no guarantee Harbaugh will do more with that franchise than others before him. Anthony Lynn coached the Chargers to a 12-4 record and a first-round playoff bye; two years later he was gone.

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There’s also Urban Meyer, who, like Harbaugh, rode his string of Big Ten success into the NFL, only to fail miserably with the Jacksonville Jaguars, a young team seemingly made to respond to a former college coach.

Now, people rightly point out that Harbaugh, unlike Meyer or Lynn, has head-coached in the NFL before and won. And that’s true.

But he coached only four years, and he didn’t walk away on his own terms. He was fired, because the front office had enough of him and reportedly so had some of his players. At 60, Harbaugh is now on the older end of the spectrum in a league that is increasingly responding to coaches in their 30s and 40s.

So this is no gimme, because the NFL is never a gimme. In fairness, neither is college football anymore. Truth is, it’s getting awfully hard to tell them apart.

And maybe that’s why Harbaugh bolted. As former Wolverine Jim Brandstatter said Thursday when I asked about the days when Bo or Lloyd would never have left: “Guess what? That college football is gone.”

What remains is piles of NIL money and endless portal transfers and a Big Ten schedule that pits U-M against Washington, USC and Oregon next year and a 12-team playoff field — oh, and a furious Ohio State program that, while Harbaugh was busy shopping himself, seemingly spent every minute luring major talent from other programs to come play in Columbus.

Given all that — and the fact that the absolute best you could do is repeat yourself — mightn’t you, too, bolt for a place where you can only go up?

Harbaugh did everything he was asked to do here, except stay. The bond, it turns out, was not unbreakable. I remember talking to Schembechler once about the little parts of his job he loved most. He said when former college players came back to visit, and he got to see the men they’d grown into. Not the ones who played pro ball. The doctors, the businessmen, the family men. He said it made him proud that he’d had a part in shaping them.

Once upon a time, we might have imagined such things would be enough for Harbaugh. But it is his own drumbeat that he marches to.

RAINER SABIN: Life after Jim Harbaugh? It's hard to picture Michigan without him

In the 1950’s there was a songwriter, crippled by polio, who, at his wedding, had to watch from a wheelchair as his new wife danced with many guests. Wistful, he grabbed a napkin and wrote down some lyrics, saying she could enjoy every partner, but don’t forget who’s taking her home.

The song was called “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Michigan fans may have hoped the last few weeks were just another flirting tango, but Jim Harbaugh’s last dance will now be with somebody else, still chasing those balls he left in the air.

That’s all, folks. It’s a familiar story, coach and team go their separate ways. Time will tell who misses who more.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Jim Harbaugh leaving Michigan football feels like it was destiny