The Five: "Today, I do not apologize."
The Five: "Today, I do not apologize."
Jim Harbaugh, Richard Nixon, and the erosion of American morality.
This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
If you like what you read, please click the button below, join the mailing list for FREE and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing.
And if you’ve been reading for a while, please consider a paid subscription to keep this thing going—you’ll also get full access to the archive of over 175 articles, like this one:
I.
Fifty years ago this August, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency after being exposed as a liar and a crook, and a former University of Michigan football player named Gerald Ford took his place. It was a curious and angst-ridden time in America, as The Atlantic’s David Frum noted this week. “Watergate became a scandal because political norms in the United States dramatically shifted,” Frum wrote. “What had once been acceptable ceased to be acceptable.”
But now, in 2024, Frum continued, all of the things that had happened during Watergate had unhappened. Standards had loosened; ethical frameworks had been disregarded. The old rules had been scrapped, and morality had given away to the inherent American penchant toward corruption. Winning took precedence above all else.
Which brings me, of course, to Jim Harbaugh.
II.
That day in August 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Jim Harbaugh was 10 years old. My guess is he didn’t spend much time pondering the moral quandaries brought about by Watergate; my guess is that young Jim was mostly hyped that this new president ordered his staff to play the Michigan fight song instead of Hail to the Chief whenever he entered a room. Harbaugh’s father, Jack, had been hired as the defensive coordinator at Michigan the year before; Michigan would go 10-1 in the fall of 1974, coming one missed field goal against Ohio State short of an undefeated season under head coach Bo Schembechler.
Years later, Jim Harbaugh, while coaching the San Francisco 49ers, would refer to Schembechler’s moral code as “next to the word of god. It’s not the word of god, but it’s close.”
"You want to be above reproach,” he would say, “especially when you’re good, because you don’t want people to come back and say, 'They're winning because they’re cheating.' That’s always going to be a knee-jerk reaction in my experience, since I was a little kid…If you don’t, if you cheat to win, then you've already lost, according to Bo Schembechler.”
III.
Last week, the NCAA hit Jim Harbaugh with a four-year show-cause penalty for recruiting violations while he was the head coach at Michigan. Just to clarify, this actually has nothing to do with the sign-stealing scandal that occurred in the wake of those alleged violations (see the link at the top of this piece); this actually has to do with other (alleged) transgressions committed while recruiting during COVID, when in-person visits were prohibited but when Harbaugh seemed to presume the rules didn’t apply to him. He either lied about those visits (which, among other things, involved the purchase of a very controversial bacon cheeseburger, as Austin Meek’s excellent Athletic story details), or conveniently forgot about them when asked by the NCAA.
Theoretically, this show-cause penalty would mean that if any college team hired Harbaugh in the next four years, he would be suspended for the first full season and then barred from athletics-related activities. What this penalty actually means, though, is nothing, because Harbaugh fled for a job with the Los Angeles Chargers of the NFL after winning a national championship last season. And so he will get away scot-free, with any impact falling upon the coaches and players who are left behind.
Jim Harbaugh reacted to this development with his typical aplomb: He not only refused to accept any blame at all, but he continued to insist that he had done absolutely nothing wrong. He acted as if he was above reproach, just a regular old milk-drinking, khaki-wearing all-American boy who could never transgress in such a blatant manner. And if you didn’t believe him, he said, that was your problem, not his.
IV.
“Never lie. Never cheat. Never steal. I was raised with that lesson. I have raised my family on that lesson. I have preached that lesson to the teams I’ve coached. No one’s perfect. If you stumble, you apologize and you make it right. Today, I do not apologize.”—Jim Harbaugh, August 2024
“The former recruiting director (at Michigan) told the NCAA, “The culture (in the football program) wasn’t to be safe, the culture was to go to the line and cross it if you had to.”—Austin Meek, The Athletic, August 2024
V.
Harbaugh’s lawyer, Tom Mars, responded to the NCAA’s punishment with a creatively tinted and overtly combative Twitter statement straight out of the Trumpian playbook, and then everyone moved on, because what else was there to do, really? Jim Harbaugh had gamed the system; he had used his quirky personality as a shield for his pathology, and he had won a championship, and he had escaped just in time to avoid any real punishment. He had made himself happy, and he had made Michigan fans happy, and he had exposed the NCAA, once again, for its own toothlessness in the midst of a decades-long identity crisis.
In retrospect, it’s laughable, the way certain prominent and otherwise respectable Michigan stans in the media business insisted upon contorting their ethical lenses in order to defend such a blatant charlatan. But I suppose that’s where we are now. The Harbaugh chapter is pretty much closed. Michigan has its championship, and Harbaugh keeps coaching. What was once unacceptable is now acceptable, and all we can do is wait and hope that things come back around again for a man who is either so duplicitous or so utterly oblivious that he completely forgot the lessons that he says he learned as a little kid.
This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Reply directly to this newsletter, contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and share it with others or consider a paid subscription.
Comparing Harbaugh to Trump on the same day he offers Kaepernick a job...and despite all the spin and the NCAA leaks, this remains about a cheeseburger in a time where recruits drive out of signing day events in lambos.
Your writing is good, and I get hating on a rival, and I get my bias because I root for the school he brought back to prominence. So with all those caveats I say with true respect and affinity, I think this piece is a stretch.