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It's a process to rebuild a college football program. It takes at least three years, maybe five, to judge what you have, change a program's mentality, bring in your own players, implement your system and then start winning. That's what coaches have been telling bosses, antsy alumni and frantic fanbases for years, anyway. It buys them time.
Well, Jim Harbaugh is ruining things for all coaches.
Tuesday was Harbaugh's 40-day anniversary of his first game there as coach. Forty days. And already, the Wolverines are the best team in the Big Ten. Yes, the Wolverines, losers last year who fired coach Brady Hoke, are already better than Ohio State, which was supposed to be a no-brainer to repeat as the national champ.
Sorry, Michigan State fans, but Michigan is already better than your team, too. At least your team has a roster full of injuries that you can use to explain away what's going to happen this Saturday in Ann Arbor.
Just think about who's noticing Harbaugh's immediate success: all the same boosters and athletic directors who are also noticing how much money is pouring into the sport because of the new playoff system.
This isn't the best news for Charlie Strong. He saved his job for now with Saturday's upset of Oklahoma, but Texas is still 2-4; are the boosters really going to give him a third year if he can't make a bowl game while Harbaugh has Michigan instantly in national-championship contention?
How soon will there be trouble for Mike Riley, who's 2-4 in his first year at Nebraska? Lane Kiffin didn't make it through four seasons at USC, and Steve Sarkisian didn't make it through two; the next non-interim coach is going to be dealing with that history plus the Harbaugh effect. Why can't we turn things around right away, like Michigan did?
Everyone expected Harbaugh to be a miracle-worker, but that meant two years, at least. Not a matter of weeks.
But here we are, with Michigan looking like it could get some of that playoff money in year one.
So, how is he 5-1 with mostly the same roster that went 5-7 for Hoke last year? The simplest answer is that the players buy into Harbaugh, which allows them to buy into themselves.
To Gerry DiNardo, former LSU and Indiana coach and current analyst at the Big Ten Network, it's also about X's and O's. Habits are hard to break, and DiNardo still studies the same tapes the coaches look at. On Monday, he broke away from studying Nebraska tape to talk about Harbaugh.
"Today, if you wear a visor and run the spread [offense], you're a genius,'' DiNardo said sarcastically. "What Harbaugh is doing runs contrary to that.
"The thing that interests me is that in the day and age of spread, everybody thinks the spread's the best creative thing going, but most everybody's running the same spread and there's very little creativity within the spread. What appears to be perhaps old-fashioned in what Jim is doing, in my opinion, is very creative.''
What DiNardo described Harbaugh doing was roughly the opposite of spreading the offense across the field. He said Harbaugh has been using a second tight end and then putting him in the backfield with a tailback and fullback. Then, at times, the tight end and fullback attack the line of scrimmage near the center, creating different gaps for the defense to have to fill and even different blocking angles for the offensive line.
These are the types of things that pass for exciting to coaches. DiNardo said one of the big criticisms of Michigan under Hoke was that the offensive line wasn't improving. He said the line always had talented players but now is more developed and is running schemes that confuse defenses.
"These are things I didn't see when I was coaching,'' he said. "And I coached for a long time.''
So, just like that, Michigan is better. But does DiNardo agree with me that Michigan is already the best team in the Big Ten?
"It's possible, but I don't think they are,'' he said. "I still think Ohio State's the best team, Michigan State's the second-most talented team and Michigan is the third-most talented. But do I think they're in the conversation? Yes, I do.''
Well, a computer rankings system on Football Outsiders, which tries to use Moneyball-like analytics to rank teams, has Michigan No. 3 in the country, after Clemson then Alabama. Ohio State is No. 15, and Michigan State No. 23. And while Ohio State and Michigan State keep squeaking past mediocre teams, Michigan has three shutouts in row, two against nationally ranked teams.
The Associated Press poll still has Ohio State at No. 1, Michigan State at No. 7 and Michigan at No. 12. But that has to do with the awkward spot of being roughly at midseason. You start the year ranking teams on spec and then slowly replace that with performance.
Most expectations at Michigan were for a mediocre year. Then it lost its first game to a Utah team that was picked by media to finish fifth in the Pac-12 South. No one realized at the time that that was a loss to one of the best teams in the country. Utah now is ranked fourth by the AP and is ninth using Football Outsiders' rankings.
AP voters are still trying to adjust their thoughts and match them with reality, which has changed so much since that loss.
Harbaugh—and, in fairness, Jim McElwain at Florida, too—is showing that you can build a program in less time than it takes for AP voters to adjust their rankings. That's a lot of pressure on every coach around the country that's selling the it-takes-time mantra.
Harbaugh is also showing the value of a coach who wows an introductory press conference with his name alone. It's not just his X's and O's making the difference. When he walked in the door, he wowed Michigan's own players and immediately replaced the defeated attitude in the locker room.
It didn't work that way for, say, Charlie Strong at Texas, where big boosters were publicly talking about buying themselves a Nick Saban. Those boosters made it clear they never wanted Strong, and that message went right to the locker room, telling players they had a second-tier coach.
It has all fit together perfectly for Harbaugh. Miracles happen.
Just don't look for other coaches to admit it.
