Today, Jim Harbaugh will interview to become the next Minnesota Vikings head coach. He would certainly be an eccentric choice. In that linked piece, I detailed Harbaugh’s off-color personality and laid out an interesting conundrum. Whether he can play nice with others remains to be seen, but his track record is unquestionable. Between college and pro, Harbaugh is 156-65 (.700) all-time as a head coach. Over 18 years*, that is almost beyond comprehension. We just have to decide if it is worth the headache.
To make that choice, let’s dive deeper into why Harbaugh won so many games. It’s unlikely that it’s a fluke over 18 sustained years, but that’s no guarantee it will work in Minnesota. We can go deeper than simply assuming that what happened in San Francisco will happen again. Everything changes all the time in the NFL. But if we look deeply into the sorts of strategies Harbaugh prefers, we can get a sense of the Vikings team he would build. After that, I leave it to you to decide if that’s exciting for you.
Stanford
In Harbaugh’s first head coaching gig, he inherited a mess of a program and turned it around to give them their first bowl appearance (and win) in over a decade. Part of that was his courting of Andrew Luck, but even beyond that, he took a different approach to the rest of what was going on in the Pac-10. Around the late 2000s and early 2010s, the spread offense was first taking over college football. That means heavy shotgun usage, quick passing, and smaller, faster players.
Harbaugh met that with a right hook to the jaw. He embraced “Power O” as a staple. Power O is drawn around downhill blocking and physicality. While every defense was trying to recruit the fastest tweeners they could to keep up with the spread revolution, Harbaugh’s Cardinal got big and brutish. Imagine an offensive scheme designed around the talents of Toby Gerhart. That’s the Power O, and it dates back to some of the earliest days of organized football.
This diagram might be confusing to the untrained eye, so let’s walk through it one assignment at a time.
- The backside (left in this case) tackle performs a “hinge” block, where he is responsible for sealing off the defensive end to the inside. He can let the DE go upfield and out of the play, as long as that DE doesn’t get into pursuit near the line of scrimmage.
- The center, tight end, playside guard, and playside tackle all block “down.” That just means hitting a guy in the mouth to the back side of you (to your left, in this case). Seal them off and push them away from the running lane.
- Since the playside DE isn’t “down” of anybody, the fullback has to kick out and seal him off from the inside.
- This leaves the backside guard as the lead blocker. Like a fullback, but gigantic.
- The playside “Z” receiver also performs an angle block, climbing all the way to the safety in case the run bursts into the second level.
Power O is designed to punch the defense in the mouth. The more a defense is built to combat finesse, the more appropriate power becomes to destroy it. That was the PAC 10 around 2010 when Harbaugh first dragged them back to respectability. It was the meat-and-potatoes of the Stanford rushing attack. Defenders would line up, get hit, line up, and anticipate getting hit again.
That meant that Harbaugh could work in other concepts. If a defender anticipates an aggressive down block, they’ll position themselves in a way that tries to exploit that. That different positioning is vulnerable to different blocking techniques, so Harbaugh ran those. Stanford still ran inside zone, counter concepts, iso concepts, and more. Those all prey on a defense’s pre-snap anticipation that a lineman is going to try to exploit that. The technique a defender would use may put them in a position that is vulnerable to a reach block or combination block.
All that said, Power O was the foundation from which everything else was built. That was the run play their play-action passes with Andrew Luck would subvert. Because it used under center quarterbacking, Luck could enter the NFL with “pro-style experience.” It would cause safeties to trigger downward immediately at the snap, which opened up deeper shots. He also ran some classic West Coast passing concepts with Luck, which helped them both ascend to the NFL.
San Francisco
Harbaugh brought a lot of the same concepts to the pros with him, where he inherited Alex Smith. Harbaugh’s cultivation of Smith is one of the league’s great developmental accomplishments. With no offseason (thanks to the 2011 CBA lockout), Smith led the San Francisco 49ers to the NFC Championship game despite never making the playoffs before that. Perhaps the most exciting chapter of Harbaugh’s curriculum vitae to Vikings fans is the one where he turned a jittery game manager into a Super Bowl contender.
Partially, he did this by leaning on his own experience as a quarterback to make Smith more comfortable. But the schematic story is perhaps more intriguing. Smith came up in Urban Meyer’s spread offense in the early 2000s at Utah. So here was Harbaugh, a coach who made his living subverting the spread, inheriting a spread quarterback. Harbaugh and Greg Roman got Smith moving more on the ground than he ever had before. Smith was never going to be the dynamic pocket passer that Matt Ryan or Drew Brees was, but the option unlocked more of his power.
In 2012, the 49ers leaned fully into the read-option revolution and transitioned to Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick was built for the read-option while Smith was built for college spread offenses and just happened to also fit. The read-option can employ any blocking scheme you want, but with the quarterback threatening to keep the ball. That keeps one extra defender occupied, generating a numbers advantage.
If you have a quarterback with sufficient mobility, like Smith or Kaepernick, the option can be much more difficult to defend. The option has evolved over the last decade. If Harbaugh runs it in Minnesota, it could look like the zone option the Arizona Cardinals run with Kyler Murray or the power option the Baltimore Ravens run with Lamar Jackson (and Greg Roman). Or he could install a more spread-focused system that works with a pocket passer like Kirk Cousins. I wouldn’t put it past him to stick with the wide zone in an effort to keep Cousins comfortable.
On the other side of the ball, Harbaugh embraced the attacking nature of Vic Fangio’s defenses. Those stout units helped support an up-and-down offense and allowed him to lean on the run game to close out. It’s been rumored that Fangio might follow Harbaugh to whatever his NFL destination is, so perhaps the Vikings can also adopt the terrorizing defense that dragged Mitch Trubisky to a division win.
The Kaepernick option wore off after a couple of years of defenses learning how to defend it. That, plus all of the interpersonal drama between Harbaugh and Trent Baalke, led to Harbaugh’s exile back to the college ranks. There he inherited a whole new problem: How to beat Ohio State.
Michigan
Harbaugh had to adapt himself even more with the Wolverines. The old-school ground-and-pound hardball he played at Stanford wasn’t going anywhere in the modern Big Ten. Harbaugh had to adapt again. He brought in Shea Patterson, a mobile quarterback. He brought in Ed Warinner, an expert in the very thing he once sought to destroy. Jim Harbaugh became a spread coach.
The quarterback options definitely helped, especially with Shea Patterson. Harbaugh has always been good at subverting his tendencies to catch a defense off guard, and it’s particularly easy to see with Michigan. This article details a great example.
A common option counter is called a “scrape exchange.” That means a linebacker and a defensive end swap jobs. The defensive end, whom the quarterback is reading, crashes hard inside. The quarterback’s directive when that happens is to keep the ball and run outside (if it’s inverted, the running back takes it outside). Because the end is crashing inside, the linebacker can “scrape” toward the outside and take that gap. Now a faster linebacker is chasing the quarterback with the correct momentum.
To exploit this, Harbaugh sends a fullback from the other side of the formation to block the scraping linebacker. There were no defenders left to take the quarterback. Touchdown Wolverines. These “bluffed” runs became as much a staple for Michigan as the classic zone reads.
Still, Michigan couldn’t get over that hump. Crucially, they couldn’t top Ohio State. At least, not until 2021, when Michigan finally stomped the Buckeyes with a 300-yard, physically dominant rushing performance. It is here that we learn that Harbaugh can still draw from his old bag of tricks if the occasion arises. The Wolverines won the Big Ten, and now Harbaugh sets his sights on the ultimate trophy in American Football.
What we can learn
There’s no guarantee that Harbaugh will make the Vikings into a Power O or Read-Option offense. He has a long history of hiring assistants who fit the personnel and vision he has for the team. Whether it’s Pep Hamilton coaching up Andrew Luck, Greg Roman finding a way to make Alex Smith a contender, or Ed Warinner installing the spread, Harbaugh has shown not only a willingness to adapt schematically but a talent for it.
Perhaps most exciting is that Harbaugh can hire. If he finds success in the NFL, he will lose assistants to other teams. It’s the nature of the business. But Harbaugh has a long, impressive track record of bringing in assistants who perfectly match what the roster needs.
Harbaugh has a long history of evolving his scheme over the course of a season, too. The best coaches will use their opponents’ tape study against them. Harbaugh will run a zone option, then bluff the option, then use the hesitation that causes to run lead right into the defense’s face. And when that’s got the defense triggering downhill, he’ll hit you over the top with a bomb.
Yes, Harbaugh’s schemes are based on how they run the ball. But before you seize up over run-pass ratio trauma, understand that this is how most professional offenses work. The amount that you run is not at issue, but rather, the way that you run. The techniques and responses that the run game will trigger in defenders dictate the shape of the passing game. If you run outside a lot, triggering a safety to fill from the roof, the play-action bomb attacks the deep middle. Run a lot of power that causes linebackers to trigger hard outside when they see a pulling lineman? Pop pass over the middle.
Harbaugh’s eye-popping winning percentage is not a coincidence. If the Vikings can get past his interpersonal issues, they could land the biggest fish since Bud Grant. At the outset of this piece, I said we should not assume that Harbaugh’s success in San Francisco would repeat itself. After deeper investigation, we can make an informed prediction that it would (or at least as confident a prediction as you can ever make in the NFL). There’s a hell of a prize at the end of this wacky rainbow.
*An earlier version of this post said Harbaugh had been a head coach for 13 years. We regret the error.
