Both of the Harbaugh boys would owe their football lives and experiences to their dad, Jack, who was a lifer Midwestern coach mostly for Bo Schembechler at Michigan in the mid 1970’s and later as head coach at Western Kentucky and Western Michigan. Jack Harbaugh took his boys to practice frequently and showed them what life was like in the game. Jack Harbaugh coached every fall of his life from 1964 until 2006 and still got called out of retirement in Stanford in 2009 by his son Jim, who was the head coach in Palo Alto before becoming head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
The Harbaugh family is all about football – it’s all father Jack, and his boys Jim and John ever did in their adult work history. They all ate, slept and worked the football life. They knew of no other life.
John Harbaugh, who many believed was destined to get a head coaching job at a big-time college program, had just interviewed for the top UCLA post two weeks earlier and came from the Eagles coaching tree of Andy Reid that had seen a fantastic run of success. While in Philadelphia, Harbaugh had been coaching in January six out of the past eight years and involved in four NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl loss over 10 seasons.
But Harbaugh was not the sexy candidate to be the head coach of the Baltimore Ravens – far from it. He was a special teams coach. He was an outlier. Special teams coaches don’t usually get the keys to the big office in the NFL.
“I knew it was going to take a pretty special guy to hire me as a head coach in the NFL,” Harbaugh said. “It wasn’t a normal path. It would be hard for an owner or anyone in the NFL to think that way.”
He wasn’t a member of any of the three categories of usual suspects – hot coordinator, former NFL coach or college head coach. Like his boss, Reid, who came to Philadelphia in 1999 as a quarterback coach from the Green Bay Packers and had never been an offensive or defensive coordinator. He had never “called a play.”
Harbaugh’s only real entrée and introduction to Bisciotti had been at a symposium for NFL coaches two years earlier when he’d heard the Ravens owner speak and he’d met him briefly on the field before a preseason game in 2006 when his pal Frank Gansz Jr. was the special teams coach for the Ravens.
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“Steve came up to me on the field and joked with me that the Ravens would be running fakes in the preseason,” Harbaugh laughed. “I knew then that he was in tune with the game and had a sense of humor.”
But it was the speech at the 2005 symposium that really caught Harbaugh’s attention and put Bisciotti on his radar as a candidate to be his boss.
“A lot of coaches didn’t like what he had to say,” Harbaugh said. “It was almost controversial. He was straightforward about it being a tough profession with long hours and total commitment. He talked about the short life span of football coaches in jobs and moving families and what he had witnessed and how different it was from his business outside of football. He said, ‘With opportunity comes risk and with risk comes opportunity.’ He basically said you can’t have opportunity and security at the same time in this profession. It was clear he had an appreciation for football coaches and what we did and what it was like for our families to move so much.”
Bisciotti’s message was so impressive to John Harbaugh that when he got back to Philadelphia that spring he sat at his desk and wrote Bisciotti a hand-written note and said that he learned a lot during the speech.
Harbaugh never heard back from Bisciotti.
“It’s strange because I remember thinking, ‘If I ever get a head coaching job in the NFL it’s going to have to be a guy like that because he’s the kind of risk taker who would hire a guy like me,” Harbaugh said.
So who was this guy John Harbaugh, besides being a long-time NFL special teams coordinator with a more famous brother who was just wrapping up his successful first season as the head coach at Stanford?
8John Harbaugh spent most of his elementary school time as a nomadic coach’s kid going from Morehead State to Bowling Green to Iowa before Jack and Jackie Harbaugh settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1973, coaching the defensive backs for legendary Bo Schembechler at the University of Michigan. Schembechler was known for his fiery disposition and playing fundamentally sound, tough football.
Ask anyone in the state of Michigan and they’ll tell you that Bo Schembechler was a man’s man. “When my Dad got the call to take that job at Michigan our family was sky high,” Harbaugh said. “We were in awe. It was the top of the world.”
Harbaugh was 10 years old when he met Coach Schembechler and spent the rest of his childhood through high school graduation around the Michigan program. He and his brother became hooked on Big Blue football and saw the game through the eyes of their father.
“We’d sit in the coaches locker room all the time,” Harbaugh said. “We were around the players, the film room. Everywhere our Dad went we kinda went, too. We were in the middle of everything that was going on. And we loved it.”
By his own admission, he was never a great football player. He was an undersized but hardnosed defensive back and attended Miami of Ohio, where his idol Schembechler coached in the mid-1960’s. He was not an NFL prospect, but he loved every aspect of football and immediately went into coaching in 1984 as a running backs coach for his father, who got the head coaching job at Western Michigan two years earlier. During those four years in Kalamazoo, while he was coaching for his dad and earning his Master’s Degree in Physical Education, his brother Jim was 103 miles away in his hometown of Ann Arbor setting records with Schembechler and finishing 3rd in the Heisman Trophy balloting in 1986 while leading the Wolverines to the Rose Bowl.
In the spring of 1987, the Chicago Bears made Jim Harbaugh the 26th pick of the first round of the NFL Draft. In the spring of 1987, John went with Jack to the University of Pittsburgh to become the tight ends coach for head coach Mike Gottfried, who is a cousin.
Harbaugh got his first paying job at Morehead State in 1988 as the secondary coach. Because he had been exposed to Scott O’Brien’s special teams schemes at Pittsburgh with Gottfried, he also became the special teams coordinator at Morehead because he was the only one of the staff who knew anything about it. “I think they also looked at me and said, ‘Hey kid, you look like you lift weights,” Harbaugh laughed. “Why don’t you be our strength and conditioning coach, too.” Such was life as a defensive assistant at Morehead State.
8He quickly left for a job on Tim Murphy’s staff at the University of Cincinnati in the spring of 1989. He survived Murphy’s exit in 1994 and remained with new Bearcats’ head coach Rick Minter through 1996 when he took a job as the special teams coordinator and defensive backs coach for the University of Indiana under head coach Cam Cameron.
Cameron came from the same tree, earning his first job at the University of Michigan as a graduate assistant and then as a wide receivers and quarterbacks coach for Schembechler in his last days as the head coach in Ann Arbor. Cameron and Jim Harbaugh were also very close friends and had been since their time together on campus.
“I loved being at Cincinnati,” Harbaugh said. “That’s why I stayed so long. It was a big city. It was close to my family. I always loved recruiting and sitting on kid’s couches and telling them that the University of Cincinnati is a sleeping giant! I always felt like the basketball program there was amazing and the football program would be great someday.”
Despite Harbaugh’s enthusiasm, the Bearcats never played in a bowl game during his lengthy tenure in Cincinnati.
Meanwhile, Harbaugh had fallen in love with Bloomington, Indiana and never wanted to leave.
“The minute my wife and I drove onto that campus we were hooked,” said Harbaugh, who loved the college atmosphere and had literally spent his whole life in that Midwestern environment of academia and hard-nosed football. “I really wanted that job and enjoyed working with Cam so much. (My wife) Ingrid and I told each other we’d be in Bloomington forever unless the NFL calls.”
But much like most football seasons in Bloomington, the 1997 campaign was not kind on the field for Cameron and Harbaugh as the Hoosiers finished 2-9 and lost three games in October to Michigan, Ohio State and Iowa by a combined score of 130-0.
8But, somehow, that magical first call from the NFL still came in March 1998.
Newly hired Philadelphia Eagles pro personnel director Mike Lombardi was at the NFL combine in Indianapolis and looking to help head coach Ray Rhodes fill his staff for the 1998 season and they needed a special teams coordinator and wanted a young, fresh face. There’s no doubt that Harbaugh’s famous last name kicked open a door and at least made his name recognizable.
Cameron told Lombardi: “I see you found my guy Harbaugh, but you’ll never get him outta Bloomington. He loves it here.”
Harbaugh was summoned to the Crowne Plaza in Indianapolis at 7:30 a.m. and drove up from Bloomington to meet with the Eagles’ brass.
“There was a bed in the middle of this hotel room and we had to carry it into the hallway to meet,” Harbaugh laughed. “There were like seven people in the room including their owner, Jeffrie Lurie. It was intimidating and they went after me hard for like six or seven hours.”
It turned out that it was Scott O’Brien, who was then the Baltimore Ravens special teams coach for Ted Marchibroda, who recommended Harbaugh to Lombardi. The oft-traveled Lombardi was O’Brien’s boss during the Bill Belichick-Browns regime and served on the same staff with Ozzie Newsome during Art Modell’s waning days in Cleveland.
Harbaugh went to the Hoosier Dome and watched the wide receivers run and talked about Big 10 players like Tim Dwight that he was very familiar with to Ray Rhodes, Joe Banner, special teams coach Danny Smith and other Eagles personnel.
“It was kind of surreal,” Harbaugh said, “because I never really thought I’d be in the NFL. I was really happy in the Big 10, and we loved our life at Indiana.”
Later that week, the Eagles flew Harbaugh to Philadelphia with his wife Ingrid and toured all aspects of the job. It was like a dream trip and despite being in love with their lives in Bloomington they were intoxicated with the notion that the NFL could be calling.
