Michigan Is About To Fire Jim Harbaugh
Michigan is about to fire Jim Harbaugh, that much is clear.
Harbaugh, 55, entered this season with a lot of hype and expectations.
Everyone had sort of come to terms with the fact that he would never be able to beat Urban Meyer, but given Meyer’s decision to step away last year, the Big Ten appeared wide open for the Wolverines.
Unfortunately, roughly two weeks into the season, it became clear that this was going to be the same ol’ Harbaugh team that everyone has seen since the beginning of his reign.
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Offensively, the Wolverines were inept. Defensively, they were okay – but not good enough to shut down the conference’s more potent offensive attacks.
Michigan barely beat Army 24-21 in Week 2, and that point everyone knew what was coming the following Saturday.
Surely enough, Wisconsin absolutely thumped Harbaugh and Co. in a 35-14 rout that was nowhere near as close as the final score indicates.
In the following three weeks, Michigan beat up on a hapless Rutgers team, won ugly in a 10-3 showdown versus a gritty Iowa squad, and then more or less smashed an Illinois team that has underperformed for most of the season.
Last week, against Penn State, the Wolverines fell 21-0 early before ultimately scratching and clawing their way back to a 28-21 defeat.
Michigan currently sits at 5-2 – good enough for third place in the Big Ten East.
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At this point the Wolverines are a virtual lock to lose to No. 8 Notre Dame this weekend and then No. 3 Ohio State on Nov. 30.
That means come season’s end, Harbaugh will have four losses on the year, minimum – assuming he doesn’t also drop a game somewhere along the line to Maryland, Michigan State or Indiana.
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That simply will not cut in in a year where the Big Ten was supposed to go through Ann Arbor.
This week, ESPN analyst Paul Finebaum spoke out against the possibility of Harbaugh remaining Michigan’s head coach in the future.
“I could pick up the yellow pages of college coaches right now, close my eyes and pick a better coach than Jim Harbaugh.”
–@finebaum pic.twitter.com/6ogw0jzDwz
— Golic and Wingo (@GolicAndWingo) October 22, 2019
“It’s become a loser mentality at Michigan. I’m not necessarily blaming Harbaugh.
“I don’t even think Harbaugh, sometimes, knows or is cognizant of what’s being said around him because he lives in a different world than the rest of us,” Finebaum continued.
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“This attachment to Harbaugh is really downright sick. Like, Michigan doesn’t think it can go out and get a better coach.
“I could pick up the yellow pages of college coaches right now, close my eyes and pick a better coach than Jim Harbaugh.”
Michigan simply will not be able to justify keeping Harbaugh around if he has four-plus losses on the year – which he probably will.
Harbaugh will get fired at some point in the near future.
It is now a question of when not if.
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A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
