Jim Harbaugh is a very good football coach. He built a great program at Stanford, a place which hadn’t seen greatness since its Pop Warner days. He reached the NFC Championship three times in four 49ers seasons, making the Super Bowl once. He won a national championship at Michigan, one of many college football programs where it was thought to be impossible to win a national title in the current era.
Jim Harbaugh is also an unusual guy. Some of this is silly: There are the khakis. There’s the love/hate history with chickens. There were those recruiting sleepovers. Some of it is admirable: Harbaugh has a track record of thoughtful advocacy which spans both sides of the stereotyped culture divide and has never come across as self-serving or performative (though I know plenty who would debate his stances). Some of it, though, is uncomfortable. There’s the litany of odd scandals which orbited around this year’s Michigan team. There’s the old DUI from his time at San Diego. There’s his insistence that he wants to be at Michigan accompanied by what seems to be an aggressive pursuit of an NFL head coaching position.
Jim Harbaugh does his own thing, and he does it his own way, and in a lot of areas this manifests itself as integrity, while in overlapping areas it’s probably a great asset in building successful football teams, professional or collegiate. But there’s a third manifestation of this trend, and it’s disjointed from the rest:
Jim Harbaugh is a prolific liar.
“I’m here as long as Michigan wants me here.” – 2023 offseason, when he interviewed with the Broncos and the Panthers
“This will not be a reoccurring theme every year.” – 2022 offseason, when he interviewed with the Vikings
(Whatever he said to the NCAA which led them to say he lied to them, something Michigan and Harbaugh implicitly confirmed by way of his initial suspension this fall)
As far as lies go, these are innocuous lies, and none of them are unusual coming from a successful football coach, especially at the college level. Those about staying at Michigan are accompanied by the context that a man can change his mind, especially in the wake of topping a Sisyphean hill. Still, it’s puzzling, as reports hold that a deal between the reigning national champion and the Los Angeles Chargers is approaching the finish line. When it comes to what drives the guy, maybe idiosyncrasy is a better word than integrity.
Transfer of Power
Using 247’s confirmed transfers:
- Four Arizona Wildcats have transferred to Washington this offseason.
- Three Washington Huskies have transferred to Alabama.
- Three Alabama Crimson Tide have transferred to Ohio State.
It’s been an interesting flow, though it’s admittedly limited in its scope. Three or four players changing teams doesn’t mean a whole lot in a sport with 85 scholarships, or at least doesn’t quite live up to the attention the trend has gotten. A few thoughts, though, on the portal:
What matters most with these particular transfers is the continuity and the five-stars, but even the continuity angle is a little sparse with the Arizona and Washington transfers out. Demond Williams and Adam Mohammed were early enrollees at Arizona, but they’re still rising freshmen. Germie Bernard is only one wide receiver, and was not Washington’s best, while Austin Mack has yet to throw a college pass. More might be on the way, but looking at the list of uncommitted guys in the portal, it’s doubtful we get more than five or six making each of these specific transitions. If there was going to be a pair of waves from Arizona to Washington and from Washington to Alabama, we would have seen those waves. Instead, we’re seeing a few meaningful moves. That’s not earth-shaking.
Why haven’t we seen the waves we expected? Arizona’s boosters probably deserve a lot of credit. Managing to hold on to Noah Fifita and Tetairoa McMillan was a surprise. Arizona is an institutional mess right now. They’re dealing with a $240-million cash flow miscalculation in their university budget. They just fired their athletic director six days after letting him hire a new football coach. But a guess I have—and this is just a guess, based on the Fifita/McMillan announcement and a few other recent recruiting campaigns—is that Arizona has boosters who both have the money and care. The effort is not perfectly synced up yet. They lost Elijah Rushing, an historic 5-star commit, to Oregon. But don’t be surprised if Arizona bounces back. (It also probably doesn’t hurt to have the recruiting pitch of: Would you rather be a college star in Tucson or Seattle?)
As for Washington: It’s not that Washington necessarily retained a lot of guys. Washington lost a lot of players to the portal. It’s that Washington’s stars all aged out of college football or were good enough to go pro early, and the others probably aren’t the caliber of athletes Alabama wants. A lot of what makes Kalen DeBoer’s upside so high is that he won with talent like Washington’s. He doesn’t need to do that anymore.
Circling around to five-stars: These matter. They don’t always matter individually (it’s easy to name five-star recruits who didn’t, for various reasons, pan out), but collectively, they’re important. Ohio State is well-established these days as a top-three talent program alongside Alabama and Georgia. With Texas finding its groove again, that’s expanding to become a top four. But regardless of the size of the circle, Ohio State is in it, and now they’re drilling deeper into its center, pulling Alabama out of the most comfortable position. Expectations are going to be through the roof in Columbus this fall, and while the quarterback position isn’t ideal (Will Howard was a good–not–great quarterback in a good–not–great conference, and Julian Sayin is going to be a true freshman), they have a soft opening to the schedule and a nice-ish Purdue–Northwestern–Indiana pillow between Penn State and Michigan. Ryan Day doesn’t need to win a national championship to keep his job. I’m not sure what he needs, but I doubt it’s actually a title.* But Ohio State is not going to let talent be a question mark around him. They are making sure they have the athletes. Also, Sayin is probably aware of how well C.J. Stroud’s rookie season just went.
*My guess is that a 13–2 or 13–3 season with a win over Michigan would keep him employed.
Were Iowa and Iowa State Targeted?
The sports gambling investigation in the state of Iowa has rejoined the news this week, with two separate attorneys for suspended Iowa State athletes alleging this week that the investigation used illegal methods to obtain its evidence.
It’s important to stress here that it’s unlikely Iowa and Iowa State were specifically targeted in this. Even if the special agent and his team broke laws in the investigations, it wasn’t to specifically come down on these universities. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think that special agent Brian Sanger of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation is some huge UNI backer or anything like that. The allegations paint a picture of an overzealous investigator looking to crack down on sports gambling at universities, possibly to make a message-sending splash, and ending up with athletes in his net. One might theorize that such an investigator would hope that by nabbing a starting power conference quarterback, he could raise awareness of sports gambling laws and increase fear of being caught breaking them. It’s a deterrence theory. Were Iowa and Iowa State targeted? Yes. But not to take down the schools or the athletic departments. That’s not what it looks like, anyway.
It’s also important to stress that the athletes involved do appear to have broken the rules. They weren’t framed. The evidence might have been gathered illegally, but they still did something dumb.
That all said: It would be a good outcome here if these guys caught a break in some form (a lesson needed asserting nationally, but it stinks someone had to be the example). Also, if the allegations are true, that is awful on the part of the investigators. Especially in an investigation about the breaking of somewhat arbitrary rules! The hypocrisy.
Todd Bowles’s Timeout
Here’s something that’s been on my mind lately, with NFL game management—timeouts, challenges, etc.—in the public crosshairs:
Conventional wisdom holds that playing a lot of Madden can help train a football coach on when to use timeouts and when to go for two. There’s probably a lot of truth to this. Madden overemphasizes game management over other real-life coaching duties, and it affords a person a lot of reps. But there is one area where I think it really leads people astray:
Most people who play a lot of Madden become very good at Madden. They likely win more often than they lose. In some cases, they win far more often than they lose. People who are good enough at Madden to care a lot and know a lot about things like timeout usage and two-point conversions win, let’s say, 75% of their games.
Someone who wins 75% of their games in Madden is probably pretty good at converting two-point conversions. They’re also probably pretty likely to win games once they get to overtime. Neither of those probabilities are necessarily all the way at 75%, but they’re decidedly higher than 50%, which is roughly what NFL coaches deal with in the two-point conversion and timeout arenas.
Where am I going with this?
People push coaches to play for ties more than they should. They instinctively overweight the probability of winning a game once in overtime. They will crucify a guy for kicking a field goal down eight. Sometimes, the criticism is fair. Sometimes, it isn’t. Either way, they’re often relying on instincts that served their 13-year-old selves well.
Todd Bowles spoke yesterday about not using the Bucs’ final timeout—not forcing the Lions to try to kick a field goal or punt or run out the clock while going for it on fourth down—and it seemed like he both got it and didn’t get it. Missed kicks happen a lot! Blocked kicks happen a little! Those things might have spooked Dan Campbell enough to provoke him to go for it! Also, he made it sound like he made the decision at the beginning of the possession, when it appeared the Lions’ final kneeldown would come with 12 seconds left, rather than after the Lions kneeled the ball with 37 seconds on the clock. That’s a dumb thing to do. He mismanaged it. He gave up early.
Still, the Bucs’ win probability was very close to 0% at that point. Partly because they would have had to convert a two-point conversion.
How Much Is a Ref Worth?
Warren Sharp, a football stats man on the internet, reacted quickly today to the NFL assigning Shawn Smith to be the referee in the AFC Championship, sharing that in the last three years, home teams are 17–29–3 against the spread when Smith is the referee, that Smith called 30% more penalty yards on home teams than road teams this season, and that Smith ranks first out of 24 referees in raw road team win percentage since 2018.
I don’t know how meaningful or not meaningful this is. Sharp might have just been trying to get the post out quickly, but it seems like a small sample to provoke such a big reaction. The 30% number is the most interesting to me, because my initial guess—before noticing that sentence—involved wondering if Smith maybe was more unbiased, and if other refs were actually bowing more to the pressure of home crowds. If the penalty number is larger, that is not the case.
To take things a little further:
In a single game, a 30% discrepancy in penalty yards would come out to something like 15 yards. A little less than that, really, but we’ll call it 15 because it’s easy to conceptualize: One roughing the passer call when there shouldn’t be one (though that, again, is not necessarily how this is manifesting itself, if it’s even a real bias in the first place). The median team’s yards per point this NFL season was 15.2. In other words, if a referee is calling 30% more penalty yards on one team than another, he’s giving that team an advantage that should translate to roughly one point, on average, per game.
Going off of that, I’m not all that concerned about Smith, but at the same time, one point per game shouldn’t lead to an against-the-spread split as large as 17–29–3. Something to keep an eye on, I guess. I wouldn’t put it past Roger Goodell to do the NBA move here, but it’s really small-sample stuff, and the numbers aren’t huge. It’s possible that attention being drawn to it could even help the Ravens this weekend, by alerting Smith to some bias of his own.
(I heard once that you should write with regret and not with anger when you’re upset, and I think I would have found Sharp’s case more persuasive if he wrote with regret instead of going so heavy into the conspiracy theory angle. That’s entertainment, though, I guess. It’s what the market requests.)
(Credit to David Stern for giving us the blueprint on how the precise use of a known biased referee can shape outcomes.)
The Impending Joe Barry Decision
I have a perception of Matt LaFleur which says that he hears the critics. He seems aware of the discourse around the team more than other coaches are aware of it around their own, or more than other coaches might admit.
I have a perception of the Packers’ defense this year which says that the talent and effort were both consistently there, but that the scheme struggled against the run and that the playcalling struggled when leading late.
I don’t think LaFleur is a pushover—I see him more as someone who doesn’t always think he’s right, which should be an asset. In this case, I personally land with the crowd. I hope for the Packers’ sake that Joe Barry goes. I do think, though, that the effort piece and whatever role Barry played in shaping this roster shouldn’t be ignored. The Packers can hire a better defensive coordinator than Joe Barry. There are risks to trying to do that, though, and just because they can hire someone better doesn’t mean they necessarily will if they try.
More Street Courses, Please
Formula 1 is going to race on the streets of Madrid starting in 2026. This is good! It might mean moving the Spanish Grand Prix off the Barcelona road course, which could mean a decrease in racing excitement, but…
For one thing, I don’t think the Spanish Grand Prix has been all that exciting in recent years. I’m not an F1 diehard, but looking back through results to jog my memory, I’m seeing that two of the five were decently exciting. That’s not a terrible rate, speaking relatively, but it’s also only 40%.
For a second, this might be an investment in the quality of competition, at least in part. The race in Las Vegas was surprisingly compelling. F1 might be figuring out how to design good street courses. At the very least, they might think they’re figuring it out.
Third, and final, it’s what we always say about F1, in a variety of ways: If your level of competition isn’t great, lean into the strengths you do have. F1’s strengths are glitz and worldliness, in varied proportion. Street courses play into both of those. Transition the whole thing to street courses unless you’re getting compelling races at a road course 90% of the time (or it’s so historic that you’d be offending real fans). I doubt I’ll turn on the Spanish Grand Prix this year. But I’m excited to tune in for racecars in Madrid in 2026.
How Good Is Nick Dunlap?
Golf! We didn’t talk about Nick Dunlap yesterday, mostly because we didn’t realize his PGA Tour win over the weekend wasn’t anything more than a random act of sports. We were unaware of the Nick Dunlap hype. We were unaware he was getting mentioned as the next not–quite–Tiger–Woods.
I don’t know how real the hype is. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but hype sells, which is what makes overhype so much more common than underhype. If it’s real, though, great. Because whether the guy ends up playing for Saudi Arabia or having a more traditional professional career, it seems like we’re going to keep three good majors, and we could use some more intrigue in those three good majors a year.
Last Night, Tonight
Thoughts, starting with college basketball:
- Johnny Furphy being Australian makes the whole thing make a lot more sense. First of all, Furphy being an Australian name is more believable than Bill Self finding a man named Furphy in the United States, but secondly, I was kind of under the impression the state of Kansas had spawned another Gradey Dick, this time in Topeka or somewhere like that. Kansas is still probably more highly regarded than these Jayhawks deserve, but Furphy’s emergence has the potential to start changing that. They needed more, and he looks like he could be capable of providing them not another star, but a necessary additional option who can sometimes go off.
- Yes, UNC is good. We can quibble with the AP Poll, but right now, this team is very good. Fringe national title good. That was not a bad Wake Forest team that they pounded in last night’s second half. Also, the consistency’s been great. I have my own share of UNC scorn and skepticism, but they look like a real contender for a 1-seed and like the clear ACC favorite, and I didn’t expect either of those things. Credit to Hubert Davis for what so far seems to be a strange way to make it all work. (My impression is that this strange way is: Improved chemistry, some minor upgrades to the rotation, and letting RJ Davis take the lead he should take.)
- Houston and BYU play tonight, and sure, kenpom could be too high on these guys, but our best objective source of college basketball evaluation says it’s a top-ten matchup, and I won’t disagree. With Houston’s nonconference schedule what it was, I’m curious what they need to do to be a 1-seed, but getting a conference road win in a tough place would be a good place to start. As for BYU: If they don’t grab the upset tonight, it’ll set them up well for an under-the-radar surge. They’ve got a favorable stretch of schedule coming up.
- The Bulls blew a big lead against the Suns, and that’s fine, it’s all fine, you rarely feel anything in NBA no-man’s land. I will say: You can see pieces of a good team in there. There are pieces.
- The Blackhawks got shut out, Lukas Reichel got benched, and Nick Foligno’s back, so count it as one good thing last night and two bad things, though the two bads are part of the process. I’m not looking forward to the Corey Perry rumor mill buzzing up again when the road trip gets to Edmonton. I don’t know hockey well enough to know how odd it is or isn’t that Reichel is taking so much heat for his effort.
