Opinion: Michigan football's Jim Harbaugh shows what he learned from Bo by blaming the refs again
Jim Harbaugh may have been seething inside. But it was hard to tell. The Michigan football coach wore a blank expression and kept a measured tone as he zipped through a four-minute postgame news conference following one of the most excruciating defeats of his tenure in Ann Arbor. It wasn’t until approximately 48 hours later, when Harbaugh resurfaced in front of the microphone, that he began to grumble about Saturday's 37-33 loss to Michigan State.
He moaned to reporters Monday that defensive pass interference should have been called on a fourth-down play during the Wolverines’ penultimate drive. Later that evening, he continued to question the officiating on the school’s in-house radio show, objecting to an overturned call of a sack-fumble that would have resulted in a Michigan touchdown in the second quarter. The next morning, while making an appearance on WXYT-FM (97.1), he groused further about other replay reviews that didn’t go in his team’s favor.
BIG-TIME IMPLICATIONS: Big Ten, SEC lead a slate of college football games that will define November
COLLEGE FOOTBALL SETUP: Picks, bold predictions led by major showdown in the SEC West
“You don’t make excuses,” Harbaugh said, “but the guys deserved better.”
This wasn’t the first time he assigned blame to the refs for a close loss: He pointed the finger at them after a defeat at Penn State in 2019 and three years before that immediately following a double-overtime setback against Ohio State. That day in November 2016, a controversial spot on J.T. Barrett’s fourth-down conversion drew Harbaugh’s ire, as he ranted about how “bitterly disappointed” he was with the officiating. The primary target of Harbaugh’s fury was Dan Capron, a Big Ten referee who called games from 2000-2019. That afternoon, Capron flagged him for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty when Harbaugh launched into a tirade and tossed his play-sheet to protest an offside call.
The incident stands out in Capron’s mind. But it was far from the first time Capron was badgered along the Wolverines’ sideline, where he used to hear Lloyd Carr constantly bellyache.
“Is it possible Jim Harbaugh, quote, unquote, learned this, or that’s in his Michigan DNA?” said Capron, who is a Chicago-based lawyer. “I’m agnostic about that. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. But it’s an interesting argument that he inherited this, in some sense, from Bo Schembechler.”
The theory became more convincing as he reflected on his encounters with Brady Hoke and Rich Rodriguez, the two Michigan coaches not directly linked to the tempestuous Schembechler.
Neither, Capron said, was "a problem to deal with."
But Capron heard stories about Schembechler,
The iconic coach, after all, was an intimidating figure, with his domineering sideline presence and volatile behavior. He became known for relentlessly carping about the so-called "zebras" when his teams were beaten. In 1988, Schembechler blew a gasket after a 31-30 loss to Miami, accusing Hurricanes coach Jimmy Johnson of “officiating the game over there on the sidelines for those dumb guys.”
“I expect to get fair treatment in our state,” Schembechler added.
The gripes didn’t stop as he veered toward coaching retirement. In his final game on the sideline — a Rose Bowl loss to USC on Jan. 1, 1990 — a holding penalty against the Wolverines enraged Schembechler, and he later attributed the call to “incompetent officiating.” The public criticism lobbed by Schembechler prompted conference commissioner Jim Delany to issue a stern rebuke.
Whether Schembechler was chastened by the reprimand is uncertain. But not long thereafter, former official Otto Puls, who had worked 20 years in the Big Ten, received an apologetic letter from the iconic Michigan coach. “It said, ‘I’m a different person on the football field,' ” Puls, 89, recalled to the Free Press this week. “'But I’m pretty down to earth the rest of the time.' And he said that 'I’m sorry I was bad at the time.’ ”
Schembechler’s legacy of excoriating the referees lived on in his beloved program, however. Those who worked under him or played for him mimicked his behavior when they were tasked with leading the Wolverines. Some of their most vocal grievances were aired after controversial losses to Michigan State. In 1990, No. 1 Michigan fell, 28-27, to the unranked Spartans after a two-point conversion attempt in the final seconds failed. The play became the subject of scrutiny when defensive back Eddie Brown appeared to trip Desmond Howard as he tried to catch a slant pass in the end zone. Schembechler’s hand-picked successor, Gary Moeller, smoldered in the moment.
“You can’t choke like that!” he yelled at the side judge. “You didn’t see him grab him? What were you looking at? You just lost us the game. I want you to know that. I want you to know it, and I hope you bear that the rest of your life, son, because you screwed us big time.”
The Big Ten agreed, later admitting fault. But lost amid the fury was the Wolverines' status as an 11 ½-point favorite; they might not have been in position to win the game in that crucial moment had Derrick Alexander not been awarded a questionable first-quarter touchdown catch that one reporter noted was made when the receiver appeared “three feet out of bounds.”
Ken Baker, a back judge who signaled incomplete on the decisive conversion, was not within earshot of Moeller when the coach vociferously argued the call.
“If I have a close play, if I was a coach, I’d be yelling,” he told the Free Press. “But you know, I was raised by a coach, so I guess I am more used to their mentality.”
Capron had little tolerance for it though.
As a head linesman in the early 2000s, Capron was on the receiving end of some Maize and Blue-colored invective. The primary source was Carr, who replaced Moeller in 1995. According to Capron, the former Schembechler assistant and Penn State’s Joe Paterno were among the most vocal Big Ten coaches when it came to officiating. On game day, Carr was constantly in Capron’s ear, moaning about one thing or another.
“Lloyd Carr was a whiner,” Capron said. “And there's a difference between complaining and whining. And that's what he used to do…. Jim Harbaugh, for all of the bad press he gets about his behavior, does not misbehave nearly as much as Lloyd Carr and his predecessors did.”
Capron remembers hearing about the aftermath of Michigan State’s 26-24 victory over Michigan in 2001, when a clock operator found himself in the center of a disputed ending of a game the No. 6 Wolverines were favored to win by 6 ½ points. One of his Big Ten officiating colleagues on the field that night told Capron his crew was chased into the Spartan Stadium tunnel by Carr’s angry assistant coaches after T.J. Duckett caught the winning touchdown pass. The recollection was confirmed by an Chicago Tribune article the next day, as Carr bristled about the outcome on his weekly television show and argued time should have expired when MSU quarterback Jeff Smoker spiked the ball before the final play.
"There's a major error there and something needs to be done about it,” he said.
In another setting, Carr asserted, “I’m very proud of our football team. I’m very proud of the effort they gave. They deserve better.”
The last remark, which appeared directed to the officials, was repeated almost verbatim 20 years later by Harbaugh following Michigan's latest loss to the Spartans. The comment, in many ways, captures the zeitgeist of a program that won’t go quietly after a tough defeat like the one suffered last Saturday.
“Going into that game,” Wolverines edge defender Mike Morris said, “I didn’t think the refs were going to have our backs.”
But they also weren’t against them, Capron noted.
“I am not your enemy,” he once told Carr in a tense exchange. “And I don’t care who wins this game.”
Impartiality, after all, was the baseline of his weekend job, where he would adjudicate hundreds of plays and try his best to get them right.
“We're all human,” Capron said. “But when they start to inject into that criticism, a (suggestion of) a sinister attempt at favoritism, or frankly, just blatant cheating, that crosses a line. That crosses the line. I may be incompetent on any given play, but I'm not dishonest.”
Inside Schembechler Hall, the wailing about the officiating is not as pronounced as it would appear. Harbaugh’s son Jay, the coach’s longest-tenured assistant, said he hasn’t heard much about it this week as he’s gone about his business — adding that it’s not typically a topic addressed in staff meetings or film-review sessions.
Instead, the grievances are projected outward, where they have been heard loud and clear since Schembechler ruled Michigan's fiefdom along State Street.
“Michigan doesn’t have a monopoly on complaining about officiating or bad calls,” Capron said.
But sometimes it seems that way, as Harbaugh reminded everyone in the aftermath of another bitter loss.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin. Read more on the Michigan Wolverines, Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Big Ten newsletter.