How Jim Harbaugh, Mike Hart teamed up to revive Michigan football years after public spat
When Jim Harbaugh hired Mike Hart as Michigan football’s running backs coach in January, Jamie Morris was the first to reveal the contract had been finalized.
Until that moment, the WTKA-AM (1050) sports talk host hadn’t been a source for big scoops. But the Ann Arbor radio personality was the perfect person to deliver this piece of breaking news that reverberated in the following days.
Morris, after all, shared a personal connection with the two main subjects. Like Hart, he once lined up in the Wolverines’ backfield. And when he did, it was Harbaugh who shoved the ball in his midsection as Morris zipped toward the line of scrimmage.
The bonds within the Michigan football fraternity spanned generations, forged by the same rare experience of playing fall Saturdays at the Big House. But those links were frayed 14 years ago, when Harbaugh, Hart and Morris became involved in a public squabble about the program’s legacy of balancing athletics with academics.
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The comments were fierce. The reaction was intense. The drama was captivating. The emotions were visceral. Pride. Betrayal. Anger.
It all started in May 2007 when Harbaugh gave a candid interview to the San Francisco Examiner soon after he was hired at Stanford. Boasting about the Cardinal’s pursuit of athletes who excel in their studies, he noted that Michigan lowers its admission standards for players and encourages them to take easier classes.
“Michigan is a good school, and I got a good education there, but the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in, and when they're in, they steer them to courses in sports communications," Harbaugh said.
He then amplified his criticism in the Ann Arbor News, telling the newspaper he had been talked out of majoring in history because “it takes too much time.”
Morris, who had been working for the athletic department, was furious.
Harbaugh’s remarks stung him. To Morris, they were particularly inappropriate, given the timing. Bo Schembechler, the iconic Michigan coach, had only died six months before. So, Morris fired back, stating that he had dissolved his friendship with his former teammate after telling him to lose his number.
“At the time, I was hurt,” Morris recalled during an interview with the Free Press in March. “I guess I reacted badly. And maybe I should have kept my damn mouth shut.”
But others echoed his sentiment as the animosity billowed through the spring and summer. Even mild-mannered Lloyd Carr found himself in the middle of the controversy at the dawn of his final season as he delivered his own rebuke of Harbaugh by saying his comments were “elitist” and “self-serving.”
Yet no one was more vocal than Hart.
At the Big Ten kickoff, he bashed the former Michigan quarterback, hurling invective at him as if he were a sworn enemy.
"That's a guy I have no respect for," Hart said. "You graduate from the University of Michigan, and you're going to talk about your school like that, a great university like we have? To say that we're not true student-athletes? I don't know if maybe he wants to coach here and he's mad because he didn't get a job. He's not a Michigan man. I wish he'd never played here."
Harbaugh seemed wounded by the backlash, ratcheting up the heated dialogue with his own riposte.
"I'm not going to allow those comments to define who I am,” he told ESPN. “Mike Hart and Jamie Morris are not the makers of the Michigan man list. I put in the blood, sweat and tears to prove I belong on that list.
"Mike Hart is just repeating their messages. When I was a player, there would have been nobody saying anything like what Mike Hart said about me. We would have been too afraid of the consequences.”
Flash forward to present day and Hart wears a big smile along with a blue visor that has the 'Block M' affixed to it. A goatee lines the edges of his mouth and he no longer looks like the baby-faced ball carrier who tore through defenses in the aughts.
“How old was I in 2007? 21?,” Hart said last Thursday.
He was just asked about the drama that unfolded in 2007, when a star running back had the gall to challenge one of Michigan’s most celebrated alumni.
“I’ve said a lot of things in my life,” Hart continued. “Youth. Inexperience. I think people say things when they’re angry. I learned not to say things when I’m angry, I’ll say that. Me and Jim are great. It didn’t just start with the hiring.”
As the old adage goes, time heals all wounds. It also brings new perspective. After a brief career in the NFL, Hart climbed the ranks as a college coach by teaching the position he once played. Small jobs in the MAC were followed by bigger ones at the Power Five level. By the time he arrived at Indiana in 2017, Hart was considered a rising star in his profession and U-M was ascending under Harbaugh’s leadership.
Morris kept his eyes on both men.
In the years before Harbaugh’s returned to Ann Arbor with great fanfare in December 2014, Morris patched things up with his former teammate. They had seen each other at a speaking engagement and stayed in contact thereafter.
“These emotional things are going to happen because we were young and dumb and just acting crazy,” Morris said. “Once cooler heads prevailed, we were fine.”
The bitter animosity faded just as it did with Hart and Harbaugh, who talked over the years at recruiting camps and exchanged text messages during the week of the Ohio State game. A common foe can be a unifying force, as Hart insinuated.
So too can a shared mission.
Harbaugh was in the market for a qualified running backs coach after the Wolverines’ ground attack struggled to gain traction during a calamitous 2-4 season last fall. Within the Big Ten, Michigan ranked 11th in rushing, and an extensive rotation of ball carriers led to the underwhelming results.
After Harbaugh signed a contract extension, Harbaugh zeroed in on Hart and made him the first addition to a revamped staff. In the press release announcing the move, Harbaugh even called Hart a "Michigan Man," which made it clear that whatever grudge he may have held had been erased.
“He and a few former Michigan players have come in and have helped send a message of what it’s like, what the expectations are,” Harbaugh said last month. “A good teacher, a good dad, a good coach, it's all pretty darn synonymous.”
On paper, it seemed a perfect match. In a conversation with Morris, a former Indiana player raved about Hart. He told Morris that U-M had pried away a jewel from Bloomington.
“We are bringing this gem home,” Morris replied. “That’s what we were doing.”
“Honestly, I think it was the best move Jim Harbaugh made in a while,” Morris continued. “Bringing Mike Hart back, a Michigan great, you’re bringing in someone who understands how to beat certain teams, how to play the game as a Michigan player and a guy whose last stop he was well-respected.”
Much of the same could be said about Hart’s new boss when he returned to Michigan almost seven years ago, which invites this question: Were Harbaugh and Hart always destined to be together?
“We have had a great relationship,” Hart said. “Stuff happens. It is what it is. You move on. …There is no animosity.”
After all, they’re all on the same side. Then again, they always were.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin.