The Quick Resurgence of Michigan Football Under Jim Harbaugh

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — There is a logic of self-fulfillment big college football programs have to use when trying to rebuild. The starting point is you have to believe in your greatness just as a matter of faith. Then you force yourself to see proof when it isn't there. Finally, eventually, you need hard evidence, or the whole thing falls apart.

It is the backward cycle of football fandom. And the truth is, the players go through it, too, with the fans.

Believe first and use that belief to prove it later.

At Michigan, the entire belief has been in Jim Harbaugh. No proof, just Harbaugh. And while the Wolverines were pounding on 22nd-ranked BYU on Saturday, winning 31-0, it became clear Harbaugh has been racing through the cycle. The team is getting better every week.

People don't have to see things that aren't there anymore.

"It is coming," Harbaugh said after the game. "It's coming together. I'm starting to know our team, and I'm liking what I'm knowing."

Year	Team	W-L
2004	University of San Diego	7-4
2005	University of San Diego	11-1
2006	University of San Diego	11-1
2007	Stanford	4-8
2008	Stanford	5-7
2009	Stanford	8-5
2010	Stanford	12-1
2011	San Francisco 49ers	13-3
2012	San Francisco 49ers	11-4-1
2013	San Francisco 49ers	12-4
2014	San Francisco 49ers	8-8
2015	Michigan	3-1

He's right. That's not a surprise, really other than how fast it is happening. On the other hand, Harbaugh has done it in a hurry everywhere he has been, selling the ideal as fact and then proving it—before, inevitably, his intensity gets on the wrong people's nerves.

But this isn't the time to talk about that. So far, there is no grumbling from any level, from fans or administrators, on the record or off. Whereas the 49ers couldn't wait to be rid of him, the only one little thing he has done at Michigan was this: The Big Ten Network made its preseason tour of the campuses, and when it got to Michigan to talk with Harbaugh, he blew it off. He blew off his own conference.

By year four, that sort of thing might not seem so trivial.

It's a little different for Harbaugh at Michigan than it was in San Francisco, though. This is home, so his shelf life will be longer. For sure, Michigan fans wanted one of their own.

So things have changed already in Ann Arbor. The private parking lots near Michigan Stadium are jacking up rates. That's $50 to get within a 10-minute walk. You see big tents near the stadium selling shirts and things welcoming Harbaugh: "Keep Calm and Wear Khakis."

It was two hours after the game when Stephen Masko, a Michigan Man, football fanatic and grad from 1987—"the same year as Harbaugh"—packed up his Ford Explorer to leave the golf course fans had turned into a parking lot ($50)/garbage dump. Police were driving on the course telling people it was time to go home. But they were enjoying this too much.

Masko said it felt like the days of Bo Schembechler again, back when Harbaugh was the quarterback. And while he still came to the games through the Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke eras and still wore his Michigan hat and shirt, "I don't want to say I was embarrassed to be putting it on, but..."

A couple of blocks away in the field at Pioneer High, Kipp Randall and Shane Coleman were packing up their satellite dish. They have been coming to the games for years. But they just stay out in the parking lots tailgating the whole time, watching on TV.

By then, there were just a few dozen people left in the lot, some throwing a football around.

"Last year," Randall said, "this is how it looked throughout the third quarter."

"We'd be talking about the next game," Coleman said. "Now we're listening to the crowd."

See, the place sounds different now. Looks different. Feels different.

But look, these aren't exactly long-abused hard-luck fans finally finding joy. These aren't Cubs fans. When Michigan needed to push a reset button on itself, it smartly hired Rodriguez to modernize things. But the place simply wasn't used to losing big and wasn't prepared to let RichRod have time to change the face of the place.

So it treated Rodriguez poorly out of arrogance and dumped him. Then it brought in Brady Hoke, Michigan Man, who knew how Michigan wanted to look. A few years later, he had to go, too.

Carlos Osorio/Associated Press

Now it's Harbaugh's turn. And maybe a few bad years brought a little—gulp—humility to the place. At the very least, it brought an understanding that losing is a possibility.

Whatever the case, until Saturday, Michigan was living only on Harbaugh's promise.

That goes for the players, too. In Harbaugh's first game at Michigan, the Wolverines couldn't get to Utah's quarterback. They couldn't quite push Utah around. On Saturday, they had BYU quarterback Tanner Mangum, a social media favorite after winning two games on Hail Marys, getting his first dose of reality. Michigan manhandled BYU with muscle and not much flash, the way they like it in the Midwest.

BYU coach Bronco Mendenhall talked afterward about the devastation the game might have caused his team. He said you find out who you are after a game like that, not after winning on a Hail Mary.

I asked Mendenhall, who had studied game tape of Michigan before seeing the Wolverines firsthand, if they were improving.

"They're asking their quarterback just to do enough in the right settings, and they can rely on their defense while that happens," Mendenhall said. "By far, they're the best team we've played in four games."

By far? Think about that. A week earlier, BYU lost 24-23 to UCLA, which is ranked No. 7. Michigan, at 3-1, is now No. 22.

So far, Harbaugh hasn't been as, shall we say, quirky (weird?) as we've come to expect. He has been mellow. No fights with opposing coaches during the postgame handshake. He hasn't started a rivalry with Ohio State's Urban Meyer the way he did in the past with Pete Carroll.

He seems to be absorbing everything going on around him, everything he already is creating.

"I had a couple opportunities to just see how inspired our crowd is, our student section is, a full stadium," he said. "Just so enthusiastic about our university and our team. It was good. Had a nice couple of occasions to look up and go, 'This is good for us and for football.' It looked good. ...

"Whatever level you're at, the thrill of winning a football game is a great thrill. A team victory all the way. Feel happy when we win a game."

Tony Ding/Associated Press

He said he still watches NFL games and even stole a play he had seen his brother, John, put in as the coach for the Baltimore Ravens.

The thing is, Harbaugh doesn't seem to be in a fight with the world. Maybe it's just early. But someone asked him about the flak quarterback Jake Rudock had taken. The narrative after the first game was that no matter what Harbaugh does, you have to have a quarterback. Now, Rudock looks solid, if not spectacular.

It was an opportunity for Harbaugh to gloat. And this is what he said:

"He wasn't taking any flak from me. I've been telling him he's doing a good job."

Meanwhile, a few players told me the team seems more fired up this year than in the past. Granted, two of them said Harbaugh gave a motivational talk last week about some proverb or saying, and players had no idea what he was talking about or even how he was interpreting it. But even so, players believe more.

So Michigan is back? Well, careful with that. Remember that in 2011, Brady Hoke's first year, the Wolverines beat Notre Dame and Ohio State and won the Sugar Bowl. Hoke was fired three years later.

But Saturday was a breakthrough win for Michigan—and maybe Harbaugh, too. He'll need a breakthrough win against Ohio State at some point soon. But shutting out BYU broke the program through to the next step of the cycle, from pretending to proving.

"I don't know, maybe the sky's the limit," Harbaugh said. "Who knows?"

Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report.