Report: Jim Harbaugh Recruiting HS Football Player He Once Babysat

If there's one thing professional Harbaughlogists can all agree on, it's that Jim Harbaugh's return to college football is the gift that continues to give.

In the last six months, he's helped the victims of a car wreck, basked in Judge Judy's success and made this face while playing shirtless Peruball with high schoolers in Alabama.

Harbaugh's work also includes piecing together a strong, 20-man recruiting class for the 2016 season, and judging by recent reports, recruiting investments the Michigan Wolverines head coach made decades ago are beginning to pay dividends.

Sports360AZ.com's Jared Cohen (h/t Detroit Free Press' Mark Snyder) published a piece about Harbaugh's peculiar recruitment of Connor Murphy—a 4-star defensive end, per 247Sports, at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix.

In a recent interview, Connor and his father, Jerry, told Cohen about Harbaugh's recruitment—specifically, how the process unwittingly began years ago when the coach assumed the role of pinch babysitter during a Murphy family crisis.

As the story goes, Harbaugh and D.J. Durkin—then staff members with Stanford football—stopped by the Murphy household for a recruitment visit with Connor's older brother, Trent. Instead of the full family, however, Harbaugh stumbled upon a Lord of the Flies-ish scenario where Connor and his siblings were left to their own devices while Jerry and Mrs. Murphy were at the hospital dealing with pregnancy complications.

Instead of offering a "welp, see ya later" and leaving, Harbaugh and Durkin decided to stick around until Mr. and Mrs. Murphy returned. It was a solid block of babysitting time, according to Jerry:

"

A few hours before we were gonna go home, my wife went into labor pains...it was either go home and get ready for Jim Harbaugh or take my wife to the hospital. Well, my wife's gonna win, so we went to the hospital. We thought it would just be a routine visit, just go there and leave. But by the time we left the hospital, we were there for a good five hours.

"

Back at the Murphy house, Harbaugh was entertaining the kids by playing chess and drinking milk on the living room floor. Seriously.

"[Harbaugh and Durkin] kind of babysat us kids," Connor said. "Not many people can say that they sat down on the living room floor with Jim Harbaugh and D.J. Durkin and just played chess and drank milk with them."

This is true. Not many people can say they've drank milk with Jim Harbaugh, noted dairy enthusiast.

"Jim Harbaugh's a big milk man," Jerry said. "So the fact that us Murphys had a lot of milk—we actually had cows in our backyard—he was pretty impressed with our house."

I believe we can all agree that if the phrase "big milk man" isn't seared into Harbaugh's headstone when all of this is done, we're just wasting our time.

So there you have it— Jim Harbaugh: good babysitter, big milk man and an innovative recruiter years ahead of the game.

Harbaugh's making moves with his eyes set decades down the road, and all the rest of college football can only hope to keep up.

Dan is on Twitter. He's been described as a "big orange juice guy."