Before Michigan’s heartbreaking Fiesta Bowl defeat to Texas Christian last December, I questioned Jim Harbaugh about the terrible 2020 season that turned everything around.
The Wolverines were in their second consecutive College Football Playoff quarterfinal and were the reigning Big Ten champions. Everything has changed for the better.Since winning had become contagious, Harbaugh was ready to give credit to everyone who helped him and the players who had bought in, as he was anxious to win the biggest prize in college football.
Unaware of what lay ahead, he even circulated bumper-sticker phrases like “the time is now” to further express his sense of urgency.
“I don’t think we needed it,” Harbaugh essentially shot down the question’s premise. “I took a broad view of the pandemic year. You will be destroyed if there was genuinely nothing excellent about your organization. You know, you would survive if it was excellent. However, an excellent company will not only endure, but also grow and prosper.It would have been difficult to locate someone who would have called Michigan football’s current situation in 2020 “great” or even “good.” Players spoke of a fractured culture, a disorganized and indifferent locker room, and mounting losses in the years that followed. Whether or not Harbaugh was willing to acknowledge it in retrospect, it worked as a paid advertisement for him to bring back the hard-hitting, physical style of football that had won him the championship. In response, he called Baltimore and proceeded to make drastic changes to his coaching staff in an attempt to bring in new blood and ideas.
Under the direction of coaching gurus Dean Pees and Don “Wink” Martindale, his brother John had built up the Ravens, a team noted for its stingy defense and tough-as-nails attitude, with a collection of bright, young up-and-comers studying underneath. As a last-ditch attempt to slow the potent Ohio State offensive and turn around his team’s performance, Harbaugh sought to bring a variant of the Ravens’ defense to Ann Arbor.
A contract was arranged for Mike Macdonald, the 33-year-old linebackers coach for the Ravens, to come in and implement a disguise-based, multifaceted, unpredictable scheme. Even though Macdonald was only at Ann Arbor for one season, it was enough to provide the groundwork for Jesse Minter, another assistant with the Ravens and the current d-coordinator for Michigan, to take over in 2022.
Regarding the challenge at hand, Minter remarked, “No. 1 defense in the country, top-5, etc., but is it set up to beat the team that you know you have to beat, that you’re going to play in the last game of the season every year?” “They asked me, ‘How are you going to beat Ohio State?'” during my interview.
