This is beyond a cool story! #GoBlue
No coach in college (or pro) football is like Jim Harbaugh. Perhaps Mike Leach was in terms of uniqueness, and likewise, Harbaugh dances to his own drumbeat.
Whether it was the proliferation of satellite camps to his one-time transfer rule to his much-derided recruiting with sleepovers (which had a near 100% hit-rate, by the way), the Michigan football head coach always thinks outside the box.
And one of his former players has a story to further illustrate how.
Jake Butt (who we partnered with in 2021) played for Jim Harbaugh for two years in Ann Arbor, and there was immediately a stark contrast between him and his predecessor, Brady Hoke. One of the seemingly oddball things that Harbaugh did once arriving in 2015 was instituting four-hour practices — grueling to be sure, but there was a method behind his madness.
Butt explained on Twitter:
Our first spring ball as a team after he got hired he told us we needed to improve across the board (he was right). So per NCAA rules each team is allocated X amount of hours per week and the maximum per day was 4 hours.
Most teams set it up to be 1.5 hours of meetings and 2.5 hours of practice. Harbaugh told us you get better at football by playing football. So he confirmed all 4 hours could be spent on the field. Not only that, and here’s the grey area, it was 4 hours per each individual player.
So he divided the team into 2- an A and a B team. The B team would practice by themselves for two hours from 1-3 pm. Then the A team would join them from 3-5 for two hours. By then the individuals on the B team had completed their 4 hours, so the A team stayed out for the last 2 hours by themselves.
That meant the coaches were out for 6 hours total coaching both teams. We got an insane amount of reps.
He’d call us up at the 3 hour mark and make a point: he didn’t need 100 guys. If you didn’t want to be here then don’t be here. He needed 30 warriors. 11 on offense. 11 on defense. And a few more in special teams. We could win with that. The 4 hour practices, and it’s a point I’ve emphasized on here, we’re a psychological experiment.
Everyone says they want to win. Everyone says they want to play in the NFL. Everyone says they want to contribute. In that fourth hour your words meant nothing and it became clear who could be counted on.
That first spring, to me, is the first instance of belief being instilled into the renewed Michigan program. There is a price to success. We didn’t achieve the ultimate success, but what I love about the current program is how they embrace challenge. The guys don’t blind. The leadership is phenomenal. It’s organic. Those kind of things can’t be quantified or measured, but it’s clear as day when you see it.
His methods worked. Michigan went from being 5-7 in 2014 to 10-3 immediately — in a year where many pundits said that Harbaugh’s best-case scenario in 2015 would be to get the team to simple bowl eligibility.
It may have taken him some time to get over the hump and the Wolverines are still working toward a national championship, but it’s another indication that there’s no one who quite thinks outside the box as much as Jim Harbaugh.
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