University of Michigan Welcomes Jim Harbaugh At Press Conference

After plenty of speculation and reports, Jim Harbaugh is officially the next head coach at the University of Michigan. He replaces Brady Hoke, who leaves Michigan after four years at 31-20, a bowl record of 1-2 and back-to-back losing Big Ten Conference records.

The short press conference began with a standing ovation by the crowd. After, Harbaugh joked about tripping while walking in: he proclaimed “a lesser athlete would have gone down.”

The full speech contained a lot of what you might expect, but Jim Harbaugh’s “kid at Christmas happiness” showed genuine meaning behind his words: “To come back as a football coach at the University of Michigan, I have to tell you that I thought about that, dreamed about that, since the time I was a young lad: nine, ten-years-old. And throughout adult life, I dreamed about coaching at Michigan and now it is time to live that,” he stated.

Now, though Jim Harbaugh refuses to call the Michigan position a turnaround job, he is attempting to bring the storied school back to glory: that is why they are paying him the astronomical $8 million a year. He revitalized the Stanford Cardinals, who the three years before him had a winning percentage of .294, and then did the same thing with the 49ers: again, the three years prior to his entrance they had a winning percentage of .438 and he left his tenure in San Francisco with .625, one Super Bowl appearance and five playoff wins.

Article by Anthony Falco