Bill Barnwell from Grantland.com wrote a really good article on the whole Harbaugh situation.
"It seems incredible that Jim Harbaugh is actually leaving the NFL to go coach at the University of Michigan, as multiple reports are suggesting. I didn’t believe it would actually happen until the moment the story broke on Saturday evening, and even then, half of me expected that we’d hear in the morning that Harbaugh wasn’t leaving after all. It only really hit home when Craig Dahl handed him the game ball after the safety’s game-sealing interception Sunday. It’s obviously Harbaugh’s right to take whatever available job he wants, and nobody can truly understand the pull his alma mater has on the departing 49ers coach. But this just doesn’t happen every day.
For one, coaches this good just don’t leave their jobs, let alone the NFL. Harbaugh is not Nick Saban, who went 15-17 with the Dolphins before returning to the NCAA ranks with Alabama. He’s not Butch Davis or Steve Spurrier. He took a 49ers team that had been wandering in the desert for nearly a full decade and came two turnovers away from leading them to three Super Bowls in his first three seasons. The professional ranks did not expose his weaknesses. They confirmed his strength.
Harbaugh leaves the NFL after Sunday’s win over the Cardinals with a 44-19-1 record and the fourth-best win percentage for a coach in modern NFL history (minimum: 15 games). As disappointing as San Francisco’s 8-8 record in 2014 has been, the idea that Harbaugh is anything but one of the best coaches in football at any level is downright absurd. In fact, there virtually aren’t any coaches in NFL history who compare to Harbaugh. NFL coaches who are this successful, this quickly, almost never leave this fast.
The most obvious coach with a similar story would be Barry Switzer, who went 34-14 during his first three seasons with the Cowboys and won a Super Bowl before leaving after a 6-10 season in his fourth and final NFL campaign — but even his career path comes up short to Harbaugh’s. Switzer took over a team that had won consecutive Super Bowls and all but retired at the age of 60 after leaving the Cowboys. Pete Carroll was fired by the Jets after one year and went 27-21 with the Patriots before being let go for Bill Belichick and taking over USC as a third or fourth choice, which isn’t the same. Red Miller went 40-22 with the Orange Crush Broncos, but he was fired after an 8-8 season and would coach only part of a USFL season before becoming an investment broker. Harbaugh’s path — take over struggling NFL team, produce dominant results, leave to rebuild a college team — is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in modern football.
So why now? Why would Harbaugh do something that nobody expected? Well, given that most coaches who start 44-19-1 with their new teams don’t leave very frequently, it has to start with his current position becoming untenable. There was smoke surrounding Harbaugh’s tenure with the 49ers dating back to February, when rumors of a failed trade to Cleveland prompted stories about the split between Harbaugh and general manager Trent Baalke. Those stories have continued to sprout up during the 2014 season. It would be fair to conclude there was some fire to them.
Harbaugh might have also expected the San Francisco job to look less attractive in years to come. The 49ers have already committed $151 million to their 2015 cap, a figure topped by only the New Orleans Saints. The 49ers can create cap space by cutting Stevie Johnson (saving them $6 million), Ahmad Brooks ($6.6 million), and Phil Dawson ($2.6 million), but they also haven’t re-signed key contributors like Mike Iupati, Perrish Cox, and Frank Gore, while Justin Smith is reportedly retiring. There’s reason to believe the 2015 49ers won’t be as talented as the 2014 49ers. That alone might have been enough to encourage Harbaugh to seek greener pastures.
Expecting to leave, Harbaugh would have surveyed the NFL scene and rightly wondered if there was an available job worth taking. The Dolphins were seen as a natural landing point, given owner Stephen Ross’s public flirtations with Harbaugh in January 2011, before the pleated one chose to join San Francisco. You could make a tangible case that it would be a decent fit for Harbaugh; the Dolphins have a reasonably talented young quarterback in Ryan Tannehill, stars on both sides of the football, and appear to have stagnated at or around .500 under Joe Philbin.
But when Ross went in the locker room after last week’s win and proclaimed that the Dolphins were going to retain Philbin for another season, it appeared to bring the Harbaugh-in-Miami story to a close. It was, in hindsight, the first piece of critical evidence that Harbaugh was probably leaving the professional game. Ross surely wanted to get ahead of the story and make it seem like the Dolphins had turned Harbaugh down, even if that hadn’t been the case behind closed doors.
Harbaugh was otherwise most commonly linked to the Raiders, but that was always going to be a desperation ploy from Oakland. From Harbaugh’s perspective, why would he prefer the Raiders job to the gig at Michigan? The things that made the Raiders job palatable are also available at his alma mater. Harbaugh would have likely been in a position to demand full control of player personnel in Oakland, but he obviously will get that at Michigan.
A desperate Mark Davis surely would also have paid Harbaugh top dollar to stay by the Bay, but Harbaugh isn’t leaving any money on the table by going back to college. Rumors suggest he will sign a six-year, $48 million deal with Michigan, a deal that blows his five-year, $25 million deal with the 49ers out of the water and compares favorably to any coach’s contract at any level. Harbaugh would become the highest-paid coach in college football at $8 million per year, and while NFL coaching salaries aren’t public, published reports suggest that the highest-paid NFL coach is Sean Payton, who also makes $8 million. Harbaugh was reportedly miffed that the 49ers wouldn’t pay him the going rate for Super Bowl–caliber coaches. Now, he’s getting paid like he’s won one.
Harbaugh won’t be the last NFL coach to see those sort of opportunities become available and be interested, either. The playing field between college and pro opportunities has been leveled to an extent that simply hasn’t been the case in decades. Top college jobs will match the money available to even the highest-paid NFL coaches while simultaneously offering greater job security.
Harbaugh would have likely found it difficult to extract a six-year deal from another NFL team, while the likes of Bob Stoops and Saban have recently received extensions through 2020 from Oklahoma and Alabama, respectively. And that’s before getting into the 10-year deal Charlie Weis signed to stay at Notre Dame through 2016. It would be foolish for an outgoing NFL coach to not at least consider using a college gig as leverage. And if the pieces come together as perfectly as they did for Harbaugh, it’s no longer out of the question for a coach to actually take the job and see it as a step forward.
As for the 49ers, the happy face they’ve placed on what amounts to a firing doesn’t make the task ahead any easier. Hiring Harbaugh was a transformative move for this organization, especially after the struggles of previous head coaches Mike Nolan and Mike Singletary. The odds San Francisco will find another leader of Harbaugh’s caliber are virtually nil, if only because a coach as good as Harbaugh simply doesn’t come around very frequently."
