Jim Harbaugh NFL rumors are ‘lies made up by our enemies,’ he reportedly told players

Rumors have swirled this week about the prospective return of Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh to the NFL, where he previously had a mostly successful four years running the San Francisco 49ers. Harbaugh’s got a pretty strong rebuttal to those rumors, as relayed Tuesday by a couple of seniors on Michigan’s defense. Via 247Sports:

“He addressed it to us yesterday,” senior defensive end Chris Wormley told Wolverine247. “I couldn’t see any reason why he would want to leave here anyways. He loves it here. I can’t see him leaving anytime soon.”

Senior defensive tackle Ryan Glasgow, who announced he will play in the Senior Bowl next month on Tuesday, said Harbaugh addressed the rumors vigorously and directly with the team.

“He said ‘Look guys, short, sweet, to the point, I’m not leaving, don’t worry about it’. These are lies made up by our enemies’,” Glasgow said during the team’s bust on Tuesday night. “It got the team riled up. We don’t want any enemies infiltrating our fortress.”

The Harbaugh-to-NFL rumor du jour is that he’d leave Michigan to coach the Los Angeles Rams. The Rams just fired Jeff Fisher, and they play in the same division as the 49ers, with whom Harbaugh had an acrimonious split in 2014. Maybe he’d want revenge a couple of times per season, after all. There’d surely be huge money involved, and it all makes sense, at least conceptually.

The problem is that there’s not much more to the idea, at least not right now. This week’s Harbaugh-Rams mania can be traced easily enough to a later-clarified secondhand quote.

Harbaugh is comfortably the highest-paid coach in college football, at $9 million this year, and he has great job security at Michigan, his alma mater. He wasn’t leaving the NFL two years ago just for the sake of it, based on everything we know at this point.

Several pundits insisted that he would never leave NFL coaching. They did not understand the lingering pull of Bo [Schembechler, Harbaugh’s former coach and mentor] or Harbaugh’s love and loyalty to Michigan. His need to feel wanted. Appreciated. Comfortable. The need for his ego to be stroked and his heart to be touched.

He used to share stories with me at Michigan about how as a youth he kept individual statistics on his batting average in baseball, scoring average in basketball and touchdowns in football. He memorized them. Few peers wanted to play with the pre-teen Harbaugh because of his overwhelming competitiveness and ego. It was at Michigan that Harbaugh learned the soul of Schembechler’s chief mantra: THE TEAM, THE TEAM, THE TEAM.

Calling the rumors “lies made up by our enemies” might (or might not!) be a stretch. There’s no public evidence that rival college staffs made them up to gain a recruiting edge, though that kind of thing is common practice in the college ranks. Harbaugh’s checkbook could actually benefit from a churn of NFL interest, because it could provide leverage in future negotiations with Michigan.

Coaches, as a profession, have a long history of denying interest in jobs and then taking those jobs. It’s the becoming thing to do, rather than talking openly about a future destination while still in a different job. But there’s nothing to suggest right now that Harbaugh’s anywhere near the exit door in Ann Arbor.