It has to be and it will be. 49-11 at home. You cannot lose a game at home 49-11 at Michigan. Not when you're the Savior. Not to Wisconsin, coached by a man who started the there the same year you did at Michigan. Who has a much better record coaching in Wisconsin than you do coaching at Michigan. Not when Wisconsin has lapped your program at Michigan. Not when you've gone 0-5 against your biggest rival.
So enough with the reasons. This post is what its title says it is. It fascinates and perplexes me both the extreme difficulty it is for college administrators to hire a successful tackle football coach. A president has a fucking university to run, (s)he has an interest in the high-profile, lucrative sports but he or she does not have any expertise in the Department of Football any more than in the Department of Biochemistry. That's one reason for that. Hiring an elite tackle football coach is expensive. The coach will be paid multiples of the president's salary. All universities have budgets, the $5M per year you spend on an elite football coach would fund whole departments. Presidents are likely to get squeamish there. So that's another reason. Then there is expectations. If you're Temple's president you have some awareness of Temple's "natural level" in matters pigskin. You don't expect to win a national championship in football at Temple. Having a winning season and going to a third-tier bowl game is the ceiling on expectations at Temple. So that's another reason why Temple is not going to hire an elite coach and those are enough reasons on the difficulties of hiring successful professors of pigskin.
For the University of Michigan has none of those difficulties. Your president makes him or herself expert in hiring the right football coach. Money is no object and your expectations are to win a national championship and beat Ohio State.
And Michigan acted on those embarrassment of riches in hiring Jim Harbaugh. Lured him away from the NFL! Paid him $8.1 million per year. Because Harbaugh was the perfect coach for Michigan: a man who had won, and won big, everywhere he had coached: at the University of San Diego, at Stanford, in the NFL where he took a team to the Super Bowl, and in Ann Arbor! Jim Harbaugh has won ten games three times at Michigan, nine games once and eight games another. Here is a man who has had one losing record in sixteen years of coaching, who is the son of a legendary college coach, and who played QB at...Michigan.
They hired him. Michigan got their Savior. There were zero doubts about Jim Harbaugh at Michigan, I mean zero. What was there to doubt? You see a hole in his resume? Some red flag anywhere? Age? Maybe an old guy, the game had passed him by? No. Harbaugh was 52 when Michigan hired him, half Mack Brown's age, he's only 56 now. That is the prime of a coach's life! He does have a very, very good record as coach at Michigan, but it is not elite. He has never beaten Ohio State, has never won a B1G conference title, has taken two of his teams to the College Football Playoff, losing both, never coming within a country mile of a national championship, is 1-4 in bowl games and has never beaten Ohio State. That is not elite, that is not what the expectation was, that is not what all of that money was supposed to buy, that is not the work of a coaching Savior. And that was all before 1-3 in admittedly surreal 2020 and 49-11 at home to Wisconsin.
It is the most perplexing thing I can remember in college football, the failure of Jim Harbaugh to coach Michigan back up to a national elite level. The answer to the question/title is: Nothing.
