Former Michigan head coach and legend Bo Schembechler once recalled in his autobiography "Bo" (with Mitch Albom) how Jim Harbaugh pleaded with him to remember him following an injury suffered against Michigan State. From his hospital bed in 1984, Harbaugh - with tears in his eyes - said, "hey, Bo - don't forget about me, okay?"

"How am I going to forget about you, Jim?" Schembechler responded.

He didn't, of course, Harbaugh led the Wolverines to a No. 2 national finish in 1985 and to the Big Ten title in 1986. And Harbaugh didn't forget about Schembechler on the 10-year anniversary of the coach's death.

“I think about Bo most days, almost all the time. [Equipment manager] Jon Falk is right outside of my office, and he and I are the ones who talk about him the most, and my dad and I," Harbaugh told the Detroit News this morning. "It’s almost every day there’s a story. Most of the time I’m doing something, trying to decide something, I’ll bounce it off Jon or my dad or anybody who knows Bo, and they’ll invariably say, ‘Bo had a similar thing, and Bo did this.’

"It’s awesome. I wish he was here. I wish I could be going through this with him. How cool would that be?

“That’s the thing I think about - I wonder what he would think of it (the job he’s doing at Michigan). I’d want to know. I’d like to think he would think I was doing a good job. The thing we all look back on, and I speak for myself, but I’m so thankful, so obliged when I think that to be tested by Bo was the making of my soul. I'm obliged and thankful for the hard service he laid down. It was what he expected, and it’s what I expected he would do.

"I expected him to be that way, and he was. The counsel you always got from him, he never led you astray. You knew it would be hard to take the path he told you to take, but you knew you would come out on the right side. It was going to be good for your soul. You knew it was going to be hard, that there were sacrifices that had to be made, but you were going to come out of it on the right side. And it was going to be good for you. He had a tremendous moral compass."

It wasn't going to be the easy way, Harbaugh noted, and it's why he's hard on his team, too. Freshman running back Chris Evans found out the hard way recently, he said, when he simply wore the wrong pair of shorts to a practice.

But as Schembechler's players have noted repeatedly over the years, it helped make them all better men.

"That’s what you’re thankful for. That’s the way he drove the ship – the right way, the best way," Harbaugh said. "Somebody on a ship is in the crow’s nest, and you were happy he was. You knew the direction was going in the right direction.

“Like every other person that’s known him, I’ve been a follower of him. I aspired to be like him - there’s no question about that. He’s tested me. I feel like everyone else would feel. He’s changed me, he’s forged me and I’m proud of that. I know I can look back and think at times, ‘What would Bo do in this situation?’ I have throughout the years, and still do today. Would he approve of the way we’re doing this?

“It doesn’t seem like 10 years because you have so many reminders of him in the way you act yourself and the way we all act. He was a great coach, a great teacher. I’ve learned so much. You learn so much around him. He’s the greatest coach you’ve ever known and one of the greatest men you’d ever hope to be around. He was great on a different level. You aspire to be good like he was. He’s as good as they go, as there ever was, ever will be.”

For an outstanding read from the News' Chengelis on Schembechler, click here: DETROIT NEWS ON BO