Well: Jim Harbaugh decided to go out on top, at least as far as college goes. As you have no doubt already heard, he's taken the Chargers job. Michigan is already in the process of hiring Sherrone Moore and will have a press conference announcing it as soon as they can. Technically they're supposed to post the job for a week before they can hire anyone, but IIRC that's some sort of Department of Education diversity initiative and Sherrone Moore is about to be the first black head coach in program history, so they're applying for a waiver.

Let's get some h2 tags up in here.

This was probably inevitable

Harbaugh had flirted with the NFL the past two offseason and just culminated a nine-year career with three Big Ten titles and Michigan's first national title since 1997. He checked one of the items on his bucket list (a term popularized by the 2007 film Bucket List) and there are only two left: win a Super Bowl and beat Kathy Lee Gifford in an arm-wrestling contest. He cannot do the former at Michigan.

I don't think money really matters to Harbaugh, nor do I think he "needed to feel loved." He has more money than he knows what to do with. He mows his own lawn and one day I went into Home Depot and literally the first person I saw was Harbaugh, no doubt there to do some errand 99.999% of multi-millionaires delegate. And if the man wanted to feel loved and appreciated he would not be leaving a Michigan fanbase still in the outer stratosphere for an NFL team that almost literally has no fans.

I think the thought process went like this: can I win the Super Bowl here? Will they hire the GM I want? Will I have full control otherwise? The answer to the first is "yes, I am Jim Harbaugh." Once the answers to the latter two were also yes, Michigan could have given Harbaugh a fully guaranteed 16 million dollars a year and a rider that he gets to pull out every hair in Tony Petitti's eyebrows and it wouldn't have mattered.

This does not happen to other college coaches who win titles because the transition from one to the other almost never works. In the past 20 years there has been one coach who had an extended, successful college tenure after a successful NFL one. His name is Jim Harbaugh. Pete Carroll is the only other guy in the picture, and Carroll had a 33-31 NFL record before taking the Seahawks job. Is the NFL going to hire Dabo? In a word, lol. I remember what being an NFL coach did to Nick friggin' Saban. I would pay money to see Dabo coach an NFL team.

[AFTER THE JUMP: keep Herbert, keep Herbert, keep Herbert]

…but what are we doing here?

If you are trying to retain Jim Harbaugh and he is asking for something in his contract and you do not want to give it to him and then you end up giving it to him at the last second, what was the point of denying him the thing in the first place?

pic.twitter.com/ff4Ys8sZcr

— John U. Bacon (@Johnubacon) January 25, 2024

It is true that Harbaugh was probably gone no matter what Michigan did; it's also true that Warde Manuel doesn't come out of this looking particularly good.

Meanwhile, the impending hire of Moore is another on-rails decision for a guy who's barely had to make a decision in his tenure. The timing of John Beilein's departure meant that the college coaching carousel was already done and Juwan Howard was more or less the only reasonably appealing option available. Brandon Naurato was hired as an interim largely because Manuel dithered for months about whether he should fire Mel Pearson. It's a very strange situation in that the athletic director receives neither merits nor demerits for the performance of Michigan's three most important sports.

The one actual decision Manuel can be credited with is not firing Harbaugh after the COVID year, but isn't that just more of the same inaction? Anyway.

Sherrone Moore is the right decision-type substance

[Barron]

It's the end of January and Kalen DeBoer got sniped by Alabama mere moments before all this started going down. Assuming that Dan Lanning is untouchable (and he turned down Bama, so… yeah), who's out there that has a compelling case? It says something that Feldman's list of non-Moore candidates is three guys long: Lance Leipold, Chris Kleiman, and Brian Kelly. You've got two guys around 60 piloting B12 programs to good but not unassailable heights and an obvious nonstarter.

If Michigan could have gotten DeBoer, I'm listening. In lieu of a stone-cold lock sort, continuing the program momentum with Moore makes the most sense. The culture around the program is better than it ever has been and I don't think it's a coincidence that the arrows started pointing all the way up when Moore started become a larger and larger factor.

Promoting Moore should help Michigan fend off the portal pirates that decimated Alabama's roster, and the fact that he's 37 instead of 62 (Leipold) or 56 (Kleiman) gives Moore huge long-term upside. Also, the last guy who was an internal hire in the aftermath of Harbaugh started off with four 11+ win seasons in his first five years. David Shaw tailed off badly at the end of his tenure but kept the Harbaugh train rolling for a long time. One of Harbaugh's biggest assets was hiring coaches. (Note: not "recruiting" analysts.) Let the man cook.

Oooh: minor searchbits time

Michigan isn't going to undergo a month-long will-he-or-won't he Harbaugh chase this time around (RIP our coaching search traffic) but his exit is going to cause some additional departures amongst the staff. Josh Henschke of Rivals asserts that Harbaugh is going to take Jesse Minter and Jay Harbaugh with him, which would create a total of four openings since Chris Partridge was not permanently replaced after his firing.

If nothing else changes, that means Michigan needs an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, an OL coach, a LB coach, and fill-in-the-blank.

OL is pretty easy: Grant Newsome is already the TE coach and will probably slide over.

DC is conceptually easy: find the most Ravens guy around. John Harbaugh tossed a couple of up-and-comers Michigan's way, which worked out great for everyone involved. Let's keep doing that. Zach Orr looks like a potential candidate. Orr played for the Ravens as a UDFA out of North Texas was second team All-Pro in his third year, then had to retire due to a congenital spine injury. He immediately became a Ravens defensive analyst, then popped over to the Jaguars for a year as their OLB coach before returning to coach LBs at Baltimore. He has the same profile as Macdonald, except he was also an All-Pro LB. The other Ravens-adjacent guy is D'Anton Lynn, who USC just poached from UCLA. Normally you don't get guys jumping before they even play a game, but maybe you could poke Lynn with a stick, show him the defensive rosters of USC and Michigan, and induce a move.

Lots of people are mentioning Jim Leonhard, who was a very successful DC at Wisconsin until Paul Chryst got fired and Wisconsin install him as a mid-season interim, clearly with an eye towards giving him the full-time gig. Instead they pivoted amongst lots of rumors that Leonhard had stabbed Chryst in the back, and when that didn't work he got a job at Illinois. As an analyst. After their DC left to be Purdue's head coach. I have is-this-dude-a-good-dude questions. Maybe this is spurious, sure.

OC is one of those things where Michigan might internally promote Campbell and lean on Moore.  In that case you'd need a QB coach. LB/QB/whatever position coaches could be anyone. I would like to offer Courtney Morgan whatever he wants to come back.

Herbert?

Once the Harbaugh-to-the-NFL train started rolling in earnest the biggest question on most people's minds was Wither Ben Herbert? Herbert is the highest-paid S&C coach in America and the NFL does not really have equivalent jobs, as most players have their own personal trainer. There are conflicting reports here, with Henschke asserting he expects Herbert back and Feldman tweeting that "the expectation is that Harbaugh brings Herbert with him." Nick Baumgardner knows the ins and outs of all of this and seemed skeptical of that one:

Ben Herbert makes seven figures at Michigan as S&C coach.

That is not, to my knowledge, what NFL S&C coaches make. In fact, just about every player on your team has his own trainer. So. That's ... we'll see about that one.

— Nick Baumgardner (@nickbaumgardner) January 25, 2024

If Michigan can't keep Herbert when NFL S&C jobs are basically nonexistent—quick, name the most famous NFL S&C coach—then it is time to put Manuel in the rocket and fire him into the sun.