good dolphin wrote:
Harbaugh's work at Michigan has been mediocre. Until this year, he was an automatic fade in any big game. He bumslayed to winning but irrelevant records and couldn't develop a QB to save his life.
His work before that was impressive.
This evaluation means nothing to me. For starters, we already know what he can do in the NFL -he was fantastic in the bigs. We also know what he can do in terms of assemble a coaching staff around him at the next level, which is what so many people overlook as far as something that is important to being a coach at any level. Harbaugh is plugged into the coaching world like very few coaches that will be candidates for openings this year so..
..He should have little trouble putting together a good coaching staff after getting hired. This is especially important when it comes to the identity part of the team -Harbaugh is going to know not only what he’s going to want to do as far as the type of team he wants to build, but he’ll know how to go about doing it. We are coming out of 4 years of watching a coaching staff that couldn’t figure out how to become the type of offense it wanted to be. I’m not worried about that with a guy like Harbaugh.
Another problem I have with the college evaluation is recruiting. And recruiting your talent doesn’t matter at the NFL level because for the most part it doesn’t exist outside of the odd free agent -and money does most of the talking there. You can be a better coach than the guy across the field from you at the college level but it might not matter if the talent gap is too wide.
Give Jim Harbaugh an NFL team on Sunday and Kirby Smart an NFL team on the opposite sideline and see who wins that game -you’d be a fool to bet against Harbaugh because he’s the better coach between the two.
Lastly, Harbaugh hasn’t been a world beater at Michigan but he hasn’t been a disaster either. In any event there are just too many reasons I don’t care about Jim’s final success at the college level because I’ve already seen what he can do at the NFL level. They are different games, and there’s many reasons as to why -and Harbaughs coaching translates better to the NFL game.
Oh, and 1 more reason -his record at Michigan is far better than what he did at Stanford where he really only had 1 good season (his final season there). And if this is his final season with Michigan, this will also be his best season (his final season). So again, using what he’s doing at the college level doesn’t hold much water with me.