Michigan Wolverines head football coach Jim Harbaugh, redshirt sophomore running back Hassan Haskins, junior defensive end Aidan Hutchinson and redshirt junior linebacker Josh Ross represented the Maize and Blue in Indianapolis this week for Big Ten Media Days.
The quartet spoke with the media at length, and discussed the Wolverines' squad ahead of the 2021 season. With that, top storylines — that are currently being batted around by the media — came about. Here, we've provided a look around the internet at what they're saying about Michigan football coming off an eventful day in Indy.
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Amid the football talk, Jim Harbaugh cheerfully volunteered a mountain-climbing story, which seemed appropriate. The Wolverines have been climbing and slipping, climbing and slipping, for much of his six seasons. You do it long enough without reaching the top, you might be inclined to surrender.
Harbaugh has surrendered some things, including hubris and salary. He has altered his look — no omnipresent Block M cap at the podium at Big Ten Media Days. He completely altered his coaching staff, adding six new assistants. In some ways, Harbaugh has bowed to decorum, and with all the changes, admitted to faults.
But don’t misread it. He’s still committed to climbing, and invigorated to try again. He stood Thursday on the Lucas Oil Stadium field in Indianapolis, the figurative mountaintop, site of the Big Ten championship game, a place the Wolverines have never reached. If anyone expected a defeated or defiant Harbaugh, not there. He was upbeat and engaging as he spoke to the assembled media, a positive demeanor that doesn’t guarantee success, but is far from surrender.
“I'm here before you as enthusiastic and excited as I ever am, even more, to have at it, to win the championship, beat Ohio and our rival Michigan State, everybody,” Harbaugh said. “That's what we want to do. And we're going to do it or die trying.”
This sounds like one more shot, all the chips pushed in. Adapt or die, right?
The Wolverines are 2-10 in the games against top-10 competition. That mark, and the 0-5 record against the Buckeyes, are the evergreen criticisms of Harbaugh.
To win those games, Michigan needs to have an elite defense. The 1997 national championship team with Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson remains the standard. The 2006 and 2016 teams had good defenses, too, but they couldn't stop Ohio State.
The bottom dropped out last year during a season impacted by COVID-19. The Wolverines struggled so much that linebacker Josh Ross decided to return before the season ended.
"I made the decision I was coming back way before coach Brown was gone," Ross, a fifth-year senior, said. "I had to. It was a no-brainer to me because that wasn't Michigan."
[Mike] Macdonald was an assistant with the Ravens from 2014-20, so a connection with Harbaugh's brother John is easy to make. The Ravens have ranked in the top three in scoring defense in the NFL the last three seasons. John told Jim that Macdonald was being groomed to be the Ravens' next defensive coordinator.
"[John Harbaugh] said [Macdonald] is really smart and was on the ground floor with the Ravens when they changed their defense, invented their defense and their scheme," Jim Harbaugh said. "Very detailed and very good teacher."
Why would John Harbaugh let his brother have Macdonald? The reason was contained in a personal message.
"'Well, I really love Michigan football and I really love you, so I want to see you both be successful,'” Jim Harbaugh said.
If you’re grasping for optimism, here’s one way to look at it: By bottoming out in 2020, the Wolverines had no choice but to make the hard changes that might have been avoided with a more respectable finish. Harbaugh fired defensive coordinator Don Brown, whose defenses were exposed the two previous years by Ohio State. Harbaugh’s coaching staff got considerably younger, and Michigan’s recruiting operation got a needed makeover. It’s hard to say if any of that will work, but it’s true beyond a doubt that the Wolverines weren’t going to succeed by doing the same things they’ve done in the past.
Of course, they still have the same person at the top. Harbaugh’s return came with a fair dose of skepticism about his chances of pulling off a mid-career renaissance. True to character, Harbaugh interprets the hot-seat chatter as a personal test of will.
“It’s almost like World War II propaganda machines: ‘Stop. Quit. No need to try. You have no chance. Don’t even try any further,’” he said. “We don’t subscribe to that at all. We try to get to the top.”
Whatever else anyone wants to say, Harbaugh is no quitter. He has all the money anyone needs in a lifetime. He could have walked away from Michigan, lived in that house by the ocean, enjoyed his retirement and avoided a potentially ugly ending at his alma mater. Instead, he’s still up on the mountain, still counting his steps, determined not to turn around. Call it a family trait, the internal drive that keeps him pushing toward the top, convinced the summit is around that next bend in the trail.
The climb is only getting steeper.
The Wolverines, picked by the media in the preseason poll to finish fourth in the Big Ten East, have plenty working against them. Like every other team in the Big Ten, they are objectively less talented than Ohio State, a recruiting superpower that routinely sports one of the best rosters in the nation every season. U-M is coming off a 2-4 season that led to wholesale changes on defense, with a first-year defensive coordinator implementing a new scheme, and six new assistant coaches in total.
“You look on social media, you look anywhere, you can’t find a good thing about Michigan football on social media anywhere,” Hutchinson said. “And that’s great. I love it. This is the first year in Michigan football, for me, that we’ve been seen as underdogs. Usually we are ranked top 15, top 10 sometimes.
“This year, we’re not even ranked. I love it. ... I love being seen as the underdog. ... Usually, we’re seen as contenders or whatever. Now, we’re going into this year and people think we’re about to win six games. I eat that up. I can’t wait to put on a show. That’s all.”
Hutchinson, Haskins and Ross all spoke about a heavier emphasis being placed on the Ohio State game. They want to prove that the 2020 season was a fluke. They want to reach the top of the Big Ten mountain.
Or?
“We’re going to get there or die trying,” Ross said. “That’s our motive."
To pull off those wins, the players, and the leaders of the team, have taken on more responsibility to hold everyone accountable. They believe that if the result is going to change on the field, it's going to come from them.
"The amount of positivity, how people are attacking what they're doing, getting extra work in, happy to be there, no negativity," Ross said. "The culture of our program right now is the highest I've seen since I've been here. People are going to see, we've been working."
The players acknowledged that the message of change and a new result has been there in the past, but the difference to them this time is in the attitude of the players and the willingness to take on the responsibility of making the change happen.
"What that resulted from was 2-4, bad season and guys just want to play ball," Hutchinson said. "We came out in spring ball popping, energy was there, and the good thing about it was, from what I observed, was we stayed consistent with it all 15 practices.
"Anyone can be hype on the first day of full pads, but the good thing about what we did was we kept with it."
Harbaugh praised the offseason work to this point.
"Maybe we're the Rocky Balboa of college football, you know, beat up and and angry," Harbaugh told ESPN. "... That's what I've been seeing now is half the battle is the offseason, you know, but that's just half the battle. I think we won half the battle."
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“Ever notice that once you get to the top, it never stops?,” Harbaugh said. “You think you’re at the top — but you’re never quite at the top.”
That line sums up Harbaugh’s coaching tenure thus far. He took the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers to three conference championship games and a Super Bowl, but was never able to win the ultimate prize. And up until last year, Harbaugh had Michigan respectfully competitive — the Wolverines had amassed three 10-win seasons and tied for first-place in the Big Ten’s East Division in 2018 — but was unable to qualify for the conference championship game.
This fall begins a second act for Harbaugh, who was thrown a life preserver this offseason in the form of a new contract — one that extends his tenure at Michigan through 2025 — and spent much of the offseason overhauling the coaching staff. He hired a new defensive coordinator, Mike Macdonald, with hopes of fixing a broken culture on that side of the ball, along with three other assistants, while adding Michigan’s all-time leading rusher, Mike Hart, and shuffling the staff on offense.
“All the outside noise is outside noise for a reason,” linebacker Josh Ross said. “We know what’s going on inside our building. We know how we changed. We know how we got better. We know how we’ve grown. And everybody is going to see that when the season comes.”
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