Never mind that Michigan is the biggest favorite in the country this weekend.
If you ask Jim Harbaugh’s assistant head coach, the boys in blue have their work cut out.
“My dad has been right there now for a couple weeks telling us, ‘Bowling Green is going to come up here and kick your ass,’” Jim said during his Monday press conference.
Jack Harbaugh laughed.
Roll along, nothing to see here.
“No, I did not use that word!” he said. “I think Jim was using that for some motivation with the team. ... I just kind of poked at him and said, ‘Bowling Green is coming to beat you.’”
What can Jack say? He’s a proud alum.
I caught up with the irrepressible 84-year-old patriarch of the Harbaugh clan this week as his football worlds prepared to collide, with the two schools nearest his heart set to meet Saturday night at Michigan Stadium.
Jack played and coached for seven seasons at Bowling Green, coached for seven seasons at Michigan, and, as fate had it, spent another 14 years as the head coach of Western Kentucky in none other than ... Bowling Green, Ky.
“I tell the story that when I set out coaching my goal was, ‘Dear Lord, allow me to coach in Bowling Green,’” Jack told me Tuesday night at The Beirut, where he was the guest at a dinner to benefit the Historic South Initiative. “Obviously, He got a little confused and sent us to Kentucky, but we had a great experience there, too.”
Today, he and his wife, Jackie, live in Ann Arbor, next door to Jim.
Though Jack retired from coaching in 2009, he remains a welcome regular around the Wolverines program. He is his son’s biggest supporter, not to mention top confidant, and, yes, as of last month, deputy.
With Jim currently serving a three-game, school-imposed suspension for violating NCAA recruiting rules, he appointed his dad assistant head coach.
“He watches every play, every practice. He’s one of the coaches in the building, probably the most, that I go to,” Jim said. “My dad, that’s my best friend. I do what he tells me to do, when he tells me to do it, how he tells me to do it, and things just keep working out well for me, so I’m just going to keep rolling with that.”
With that in mind, I asked Jack what he sees on tape from Bowling Green, a cool 41-point underdog.
He wouldn’t give up any trade secrets, but like Jim, count him impressed.
“I really like what Scot Loeffler is doing,” he said of the former Michigan quarterback and current BG coach. “He’s got them moving in the right direction.”
Either way, Jack will keep cheering on the Falcons, loudly and proudly. (He is known to break into spontaneous renditions of “Ay Ziggy Zoomba,” as are his sons, Jim and John, the coach of the Baltimore Ravens. “They sing it every once in a while, just to get Jackie and I fired up,” Jack said.)
Even driving down 23 into Ohio this week got him going.
“When you get close to Bowling Green,” Jack said, “your heart starts to pound, the memories start to come, I can hear [Doyt Perry’s] voice, I can hear his advice, I can hear his coaching points, and you just say, ‘I’m home. I’m coming home.’”
He still calls his time at BG the best years of his life, beginning with his first day of classes as a freshman.
It was in the biology lecture of professor Ernest Hamilton — father of Scott, the future figure skating champion — that he first laid eyes on Jackie Cipiti, a cheerleader from Cleveland.
“Most beautiful young lady I’d ever seen in my life,” he said. “Four years later, we were married.”
As for his relationship with BG football, it was not love at first sight, the schoolboy star from Crestline struggling to keep up at the next level.
But Jack recalls the exact moment everything changed.
“I came back as a sophomore after a terrible freshman year and I ran into Doyt on campus,” Jack said. “He just stopped, looked around, and said, ‘Harbaugh, you may be the worst player I’ve ever recruited at Bowling Green. ... The absolute worst. Or you might be one of the best that I’ve recruited.’ And he walked away.
“I’m standing there thinking, ‘What was he trying to tell me?’ I went back to the dorm and realized he was saying he’s done about all he can do, and it was in my hands. If I chose to get serious about the game and give it my very, very best effort, and concentrate, then ... ”
Well, he could achieve exactly what he did.
Jack became a starter as a junior and was a standout defensive back on two of Perry’s best teams, in 1959 and 1960, an indomitable stretch in which the Falcons went 17-1.
After graduating in 1961, Jack got a teaching job at Perrysburg High, where he spent two seasons assisting the late Jerry Nowak with the Yellow Jackets gridders, and, together with Jackie, began building the first family of football.
John was born midway through that first season and James Joseph Harbaugh came along after the next one, both at the old Mercy Hospital on Madison Avenue in Toledo.
But Jack returned to BG in 1968 and spent three seasons as an assistant under Don Nehlen.
And even as he then left northwest Ohio for good to join the Iowa staff of former Toledo coach Frank Lauterbur, a big piece of his heart stayed behind, where it remains today.
Jack is proud of his alma mater as ever.
“I wouldn't have wanted to go to any other school in the country than Bowling Green,” he said.
You might call Saturday’s game a homecoming.
As Jack warned his son, just don’t suggest BG will feel like a homecoming opponent.
First Published September 13, 2023, 3:37 p.m.
