From the unfulfilling conclusion of last season all the way up until the first practice of the new year Monday, Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh spent the 10 weeks in between tearing apart his staff, building it back up and reconfiguring it.
“We’re now set,” he said cheerfully Thursday.
Like a marathoner crossing the finish line, he seemed ready to exhale a deep breath of relief.
It has been a process to get to this stage and even he acknowledged the final arrangement didn’t align with the initial plan — assuming there was one in the first place.
For evidence of that, look no further than pair of emails sent by Michigan athletics in late January.
Spelled out in both those news releases were the assignments of two new assistants and the additional role Harbaugh gave himself.
Ron Bellamy was set to coach the wide receivers, George Helow the safeties and Harbaugh the quarterbacks.
Less than a month later, Helow now presides over the linebackers and Bellamy the safeties, and the most recent addition to the staff, Matt Weiss, has been placed in charge of the quarterbacks.
According to Harbaugh, everyone involved was receptive to the adjustments, especially Bellamy because there had already been discussions about deploying him in the secondary when he was hired.
“Whatever is best for the team,” Bellamy and Helow told him.
“That’s music to my ears,” Harbaugh said. “And it’s a tune you don’t always hear played that often in today’s world. It made me know I have the right guys and I have the right guys on board and working hard and coaching hard.”
But the changes also raise questions about why all this shuffling was necessary, and whether the end result matched what Harbaugh truly wanted when he set out this offseason to change the organizational structure below him, following a torturous slog to a 2-4 record last fall.
The failed pursuit of Florida linebackers coach Christian Robinson, a close friend of Michigan’s new defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, may have created a domino effect that forced Harbaugh to conjure a different vision for his staff. In January, talks between Michigan and Robinson’s camp reached the point that money was discussed, even as the Wolverines still employed an assistant, Brian Jean-Mary, who held the same position Robinson occupied at Florida.
Not long after Robinson elected to stay with the Gators, reports surfaced that Jean-Mary had interviewed with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
That turned out to be a harbinger of what was to come, as Jean-Mary eventually took a job at Tennessee last week instead of finishing out the final year of his contract at Michigan.
The move by Jean-Mary, which netted a $100,000 raise, was telling. He will carry out the same role at a program coming off a losing season, has a new head coach and stands squarely in the crosshairs of the NCAA.
As Jean-Mary’s departure raised eyebrows, Harbaugh acted quickly to fill his vacancy by hiring Weiss, and in turn, abandoning his original arrangement that entailed him absorbing the additional responsibility of tutoring the quarterbacks.
“Like I did throughout through the entire process, I was looking at what coaches would be the best fit for us, best possible coach available,” he said.
In theory, that makes sense.
NFL franchises employ a similar strategy to draft players, taking the top guy on their board regardless of the position.
That, of course, is easier to do when the puzzle being assembled has 53 pieces.
Harbaugh’s coaching staff has 10, and each assistant should have a heightened level of expertise in his area that makes any reassignment ill-advised and the framework of the staff less malleable. At this level of football, a one-size-fits-all model isn’t usually applicable.
But Harbaugh is banking that it will be after an offseason when the best-laid plans seemed to go awry.
“Feel really great about the staff,” Harbaugh said. “I really do.”
Considering the circumstances, it may be the best he could have done.
