Harbaugh and the Chargers: Something's gotta give

A perpetual winner comes to L.A. to coach a habitual loser.

Harbaugh as Chargers’ QB

Jim Harbaugh left Stanford to coach the 49ers in early 2011. The 49ers were 6-10 in 2010 and fired Mike Singletary during the season. Harbaugh’s 2011 team was 13-3 and played in the NFC Championship Game, where it lost on a field goal. The 2010 Niners ran the ball 401 times. The 2011 team ran it 498 times.

Harbaugh became Michigan’s coach in 2014. The 2013 team was 5-7. The 2014 team was 10-3, and won the Citrus Bowl.

Harbaugh left the U. of San Diego to take the Stanford job in 2017. The previous Cardinal team was 1-11 and Harbaugh was Stanford’s third coach in six years. The 2017 team went 4-8 but is known, and will always be known, for winning at USC, 24-23, as 41-point underdogs, when backup quarterback Tavita Pritchard completed 11 of 30 passes but still catalyzed the winning drive, when Stanford blocked an extra point and accepted five takeaways. The next year Stanford won five games, then eight, then 12, including a 40-12 Orange Bowl win over Virginia Tech. Harbaugh left the next season but his project, coached by David Shaw, won 34 games the next three seasons, including a Rose Bowl.

And even though USD was 8-3 the year before Harbaugh got there, he found another level. The Toreros were 29-6 in his three seasons.

So when Harbaugh took the L.A. Chargers job on Wednesday, and returned to the team he quarterbacked in 1999 and 2000, he set up one of the classic matchups in football history. He has been the irresistible force. The Chargers have been the immovable object.

Whose history will prevail, or buckle, in the face of the other’s? That question suddenly becomes essential to the L.A. sports scene, and Chargers fans — both of them — can’t wait for training camp.

The Chargers are coming off a travesty of a 5-12 season. They are $35 million over the salary cap. Under coach Brandon Staley they were known for gimmicky fourth-down go-for-its but their structure and their explosiveness disappeared, along with their health. The memory of blowing a 27-0 lead to Jacksonville in a playoff game in 2022 never dissipated. The Chargers were 30th in yards per carry, with Austin Ekeler leading the way with only 628 yards. Their defense was an eclair, and Justin Herbert found himself at The Alamo nearly every game, dodging invaders and throwing to strangers.

What immediate help can Harbaugh bring, considering that the Chargers might have to part with Keenan Allen, who was targeted 150 times in his 13 games, or Mike Williams or both? Specifics are hard to come by. The Chargers don’t have a general manager yet, but they’ve already blocked offensive coordinator Kellen Moore from interviewing elsewhere, which is something Harbaugh knew before he signed up. But he’s won with all kinds of coaches, with offensive coordinator Shaw (Stanford), offensive coordinator Greg Roman (San Francisco), defensive coordinator Michael Macdonald (Michigan) and associate coach/interluctor Biff Poggi (Michigan). The Chargers have lost with all kinds of coaches, too many of them. Giving Herbert the same offensive boss for three consecutive years would be like Christmas.

But the Chargers are no more dysfunctional than the 49ers that Harbaugh inherited. Beyond that, there was no training camp to speak of in 2011, because of a lockout. It didn’t matter. The Niners won 10 of their first 11 games and only lost the NFC Championship to the Giants because Kyle Williams fumbled a punt in overtime. They sacked Eli Manning six times and hit him 20 times.

By then Harbaugh had erased the 49ers’ memory banks. There was nothing West Coastie about them. They were equal-opportunity maulers, on both sides of the ball, and Harbaugh even ordered work shirts for all of them, with their names on the shirt pocket, like tire recappers.

Harbaugh, who turned 60 last month, is by all accounts better at player relations than he once was, but he doesn’t mind a little creative tension. In San Francisco he had a perfectly good quarterback in Alex Smith and demoted him in favor of Colin Kaepernick, who got the 49ers within one play of winning a Super Bowl. All the teams visited Nevada to check out Kaepernick, including the 49ers, but Harbaugh left the scene without a word and never communicated with the Nevada folk until Draft Day, when, of course, he took Kaepernick.

At Penn State in November, when Harbaugh was serving a suspension, offensive coordinator (and presumptive Michigan head coach) Sherrone Moore surveyed the weather and the Nittany Lions defense and ordered 32 consecutive runs in the second half. Michigan won, 24-15, and Moore couldn’t have channeled his boss any better.

Harbaugh is the guy who arranged, or at least didn’t stop, the illegal scouting operation that made Michigan’s season more stressful than it should have been, but maybe that was the point. It gave the Wolverines yet another cause in their pursuit of a national championship, in their third consecutive College Football Playoff appearance. He also took Michigan on overseas trips, on a rich donor’s checkbook, and had a week of spring practice at the IMG Academy on Florida’s Gulf Coast. That rankled his rivals, too. 

He talked of a three-hour team dinner in Rome that brought the team together and marveled at the fact that none of the players had their cellphones out. They informed him they couldn’t get reception but, hey, whatever works.

The definition of “works,” as in whether Michigan football does, can be found on the scoreboard on the final Saturday in November. Harbaugh lost his first five games against Ohio State. The social networks doubted if he would get a chance to lose a sixth. Instead Michigan kept building, kept improving, added a special “Beat Ohio” period to its practices, and toppled the Buckeyes in each of the past three seasons. The Kansas City Chiefs might want to pay attention to that.

And on another Suspension Saturday, while Michigan was beating UNLV, you could find the head coach literally moving the sticks at a youth football game near the Michigan campus, featuring his 10-year-old son Jack.

Goofy and quirky and petty and corny enough to lead the team in “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” after each win, Harbaugh is an original. Originals resonate. And in every case Harbaugh has left his teams in better shape than they were when he found them.

The Chargers expect much more than that. They hired Harbaugh to reverse their history, steal their identity, make them into something they haven’t been. He joined them, and now he has to beat them.