Anthony Wilson
Adapted from The Price: What It Takes to Win in College Football’s Chaos Era by Armen Keteyian and John Talty to be published by Harper Books, August 27, 2024. The Price is an in-depth look at an inflection point in college football where name, image and likeness, the transfer portal and conference realignment transformed the sport upside down.
Written by six-time New York Times bestselling author Keteyian and award-winning national college football reporter Talty, The Price features comprehensive reporting from coast to coast that includes more than two hundred in-depth interviews with coaches, athletic directors, commissioners, conferences, administrators, politicians, power brokers, stakeholders, thought leaders, agents and media executives at a time of tumultuous change in major college football. These interviews revealed never-before-reported details about key players like Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh, Jimbo Fisher and Lane Kiffin, as well as the behind-the-scenes story behind Georgia quarterback Jaden Rashada. decision to sue Florida coach Billy Napier in unprecedented lawsuit.
You can pre-order a copy of The Price here.
As soon as Jim Harbaugh hoisted the national championship trophy, members of his inner circle advised him to ride off into the sunset.
With good reason. Ultimately, Harbaugh found himself pressured from both sides — by a process he hated and a place he loved.
Following the Connor Stalions sign-stealing investigation, NCAA authorities made yet another sweeping request for Harbaugh’s personal and school-issued cell phone records dating back eighteen months. In response, Harbaugh’s attorney Tom Mars wrote a scathing email, saying he would need to review 6,199 emails plus text messages, and by the way, his request is illegal under Michigan privacy and employment laws,” outrageous and offensive and without probable cause.” (And it wasn’t just Harbaugh. The NCAA demanded similar records from the entire coaching staff only to drop the request.)
In the end, Mars knew that Harbaugh would end up facing two Committee on Infractions hearings in front of what he considered a hostile crowd and a certain suspension that could cost him half a season — or more.
“I’ll tell you something,” said Mars, “I said [Harbaugh agent] Don Yee and Jim as clearly as I could, more than once, more than twice, that in my opinion if he remained in Michigan. . . the IOC will punish Jim under coaches’ vicarious liability legislation, and he is dealing with an IOC that clearly expresses prejudice against him. He will be out for four games, maybe six, and whatever we do, the IOC will find him guilty.”
On the other hand, by this point, Michigan had offered to make Harbaugh the highest-paid coach in college football — a five-year contract extension north of $11 million a year, plus additional performance-based bonuses. In return, university lawyers pushed for termination language that would protect the school in the event of an unforeseen twist in the sign theft investigation.
“I think the obstacle was trying to find the best way to deal with any additional information from the second case that we didn’t know at the time of the investigation. [contract] signature”, the athlete’s director Warde Manuel told us.
“So to your question, did that affect Jim’s decision to go to the NFL? I don’t know,” said Mars. “But I know I told him, under the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine any reason why he wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to go to the NFL if it presented itself.”
In the hours and days after the national championship game, Harbaugh erased all doubts about his future — “I just want to enjoy this,” he said. “I hope you can give this to me. Can a guy have it?” — opting instead to beat a familiar drum, suggesting 5 to 10 percent cuts to coaches’ salaries and television deals to create a pot to pay players.
“There was an old saying: old coaches – my dad used it, my brother used it – we’re all robbing the same train here,” he said. “Like coaches, administrators, media, television stations, conferences, NCAA. And those who are actually robbing the train, those who could easily get hurt, are getting a very small piece.”
Back in Ann Arbor, Harbaugh and the team returned to a hero’s welcome. At the end of a raucous national championship parade before tens of thousands of adoring fans, Harbaugh, true to his peculiar inquisitive nature, invoked, from memory, part of King Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, as written by William Shakespeare. , inserting some of its stars at the top.
JJ McCarthy, the MVP. Corum and Sainristil. Keegan and Zinter. Jenkins and Barnett.
Be in your fluid cups, freshly remembered. This story the good man will teach his son; and Crispin Crispian will never pass away again. From this day until the end of the world, but we will be remembered in it; we few, happy few of us, are the band of brothers; for he who sheds his blood with me today will be my brother; he will never be so vile. This day will soften his condition.
And the gentlemen in England now bedridden will consider themselves cursed for not having been here, and will consider their manhood cheap as any who fought with us on St. Crispin’s day speak.
Team One-Forty-Four. We salute you: a band of brothers.
Thanks.
That left Manuel to answer the question that the athletic director said he only heard about five hundred times riding alone in the back of a pickup truck—can you believe it—on the parade route that day:
“I’m working to get this man a new contract.”
During a two-day getaway with his wife Sarah on Coronado Island off the coast of San Diego, Harbaugh unloaded on longtime friend Todd Anson. He told Anson that he wanted to remain at Michigan, but believed that Manuel—regardless of his public pronouncements—was not the advocate he needed at his side, especially before the Board of Regents. He also raged against Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, who before the Big Ten’s three-game suspension had promised to meet Harbaugh in Ann Arbor and brief him on what the conference was doing, just to support him. [Through a spokesperson, Petitti declined an interview request.]
The day after his outburst with Anson, Harbaugh had an initial interview with the Los Angeles Chargers. Afterwards, his tone softened. Inclined to take the NFL job if it were offered to him, he rejected Manuel’s rhetoric, no longer interested in a potential legal battle and fighting against people he later said were “shooting at me.” He suggested in attitude and tone that his days in Ann Arbor were numbered.
In fact they were.
On Wednesday, January 24, news broke that Harbaugh had agreed to a five-year contract to be the Chargers’ next head coach, worth an estimated $16 million per year. Finished with the NCAA and U of M’s frustrating contract chatter, thrilled to be approached by the Spanos family, intrigued by the prospect of taking Justin Herbert, the team’s young, dynamic quarterback, to another level.
Manuel told The Athletic’s Austin Meek that he was “at peace” with the effort to retain Harbaugh, despite a torrent of criticism circulating on U of M blogs and websites.
“I heard about what was happening on social media, some of the language and things that people directed at me,” Manuel said. “That doesn’t take away from the effort we put into this. They have no idea the communication and conversations we had.”
Was Manuel surprised by the news? “I don’t want to use the word surprised,” he told us. “This was the third year Jim has spoken to NFL teams. I can see where people would be interested. Like I told Jim, ‘I’m sad for us, happy for you, if that’s what you want to do.'”
Jim Harbaugh’s favorite television show was “The Rockford Files,” a 1970s crime drama whose star, James Garner, played a private investigator who lived in a mobile home in a Malibu beach parking lot. After signing with the Chargers, Harbaugh asked his brother-in-law and two friends to drive his 31-foot Quantum Thor Motor Coach cross-country to an RV campsite he had rented across the Pacific in picturesque Huntington Beach, per U.S. $2,700 a month, an effort to decompress after a stress-filled season that forced a Michigan man from the arms of a university he loved.
“I’m just trying to be happy,” Harbaugh told former Michigan assistant Jim Hackett, ironically, the man who hired him.
