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Kris Rhim, ESPN
JIM HARBAUGH WAS underqualified when he applied for the University of San Diego’s head coaching job in late 2003 — and the panel interviewing him knew it.
“For the majority of the group, he was not the leading candidate,” Dan Yourg, USD’s senior associate director of athletics for administration, said of the committee composed of Toreros administrators and players.
Harbaugh, then 39, had recently retired after playing 15 seasons in the NFL and was in his second season as an assistant quarterbacks coach with the Oakland Raiders. He had never been a head coach. Concern about his lack of experience prevailed.
But Harbaugh impressed the group with his enthusiasm and an unusual level of preparation. He knew everything about USD wide receiver Michael Gasperson — a member of the interview panel — from Gasperson’s high school stats to how he planned to use him on offense.
“For someone that had played at the highest level … he had a humbleness about him, but also a great passion and plan,” Yourg said. “And again, had done his homework.”
But one moment from that interview still stands out to Yourg 20-plus years later. When asked about his objectives, Harbaugh told them his ultimate goal was to win a Super Bowl.
It was a surprising admission, considering Harbaugh was interviewing for a college job where he couldn’t win a Super Bowl, but Yourg said it shed light on his commitment to winning. Harbaugh knew the first step toward his goal was becoming a head coach.
“He said that when he was coming down to interview, [Raiders owner] Al Davis said to him, ‘You’re interviewing at USD, not USC,’ meaning ‘What are you doing?'” Yourg said. “And Jim said, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.'”
Harbaugh’s personality and vision convinced the committee to hire him at USD. His three seasons with the Toreros included two of the most successful seasons in program history.
“Phenomenal experience. One of the best times of my life,” Harbaugh said this week of his tenure there.
More than 20 years since his hire, the 60-year-old Harbaugh still hasn’t fulfilled his ultimate goal of winning a Super Bowl, but he could have a chance this season. Harbaugh has the Los Angeles Chargers (8-6) in playoff contention ahead of their matchup with the Denver Broncos on “Thursday Night Football” (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video).
In many ways, Harbaugh is the same coach he was two-plus decades ago. But back then, he didn’t have a track record of turning around programs, and his demanding coaching style drove away many players. Those who stayed, however, had a front-row seat to Harbaugh’s first step in becoming one of the most successful football coaches of his era, a coach the Chargers hope has one more organizational turnaround in his career.
“Super polarizing. Some people loved him, some people didn’t,” said Phil Bretsch, who played strong safety at USD. “But he had this thing he said to us the first week he was there [derived from a famous saying by his college coach at Michigan, Bo Schembechler]: ‘If you stay, you’ll be champions.’ And then that’s what happened.”
ALTHOUGH HE HAD WON the job, Harbaugh’s hire wasn’t met with resounding support from Toreros players.
In 2003, under coach Kevin McGarry, USD began the season 5-1 and was on a five-game winning streak when the university fired McGarry hours before the team boarded a plane to Indiana to face Valparaiso. USD lost that game, but finished the season 8-2. McGarry’s firing (shrouded in mystery at the time but later revealed in court filings to be tied to a series of alleged interactions on campus that showcased McGarry’s anger) never made sense to many players.
When USD hired Harbaugh on Dec. 20, 2003, some players were excited about a coach with NFL experience, but others felt loyalty to McGarry and wondered if Harbaugh would be a good fit.
“I was honestly a little skeptical,” said Ronnie Pentz, who played linebacker.
Harbaugh’s offseason training program in the spring of 2004 quickly turned away some players. Harbaugh demanded a lot of the team, including 5 a.m. workouts during the offseason when players were accustomed to downtime. USD is a non-scholarship program, so players weren’t tied to the team by a financial commitment. Multiple players from the 2004 team said around 50 people quit that spring.
“It wasn’t always easygoing,” said Nick Garton, a wide receiver at USD. “A lot of guys ultimately ended up tapping out … and it left us with a nucleus core of players that were the foundation for the teams he had so much success with.”
For some players, it was not Harbaugh himself but the coaching staff who won them over. Harbaugh built a staff that included ex-Chargers Dave Adolph, Charles Dimry and Reggie Davis, which excited players about the team’s potential. Harbaugh’s father, Jack, who was hired as USD’s assistant head coach after a successful stretch as head coach at Western Kentucky, connected with the team as well. Jack’s presence helped shed light on why Jim operated as he did.
“His dad would be backpedaling like right behind me. The ball would be thrown. He’d be screaming down my ear, chasing after me,” Pentz remembered with a smile. “I couldn’t slow down for one second, or this old man would smash into me. That’s where Jim’s enthusiasm comes from.”
The moment of acceptance for some players over Jim Harbaugh’s methods came during a team workout. He joined players in running a steep hill that took around 60 seconds for most to reach the top. They ran it multiple times, enough that Harbaugh vomited mid-stride while running — without stopping. It’s a moment many players still talk about.
“We didn’t know whether to be pumped on that, ‘Like this guy’s awesome,” Garton said, “or like, ‘What is wrong with this guy? He’s got a screw loose.’
“But that’s part of his charm, part of his appeal. He’s a little crazy, so guys are like, ‘Dude, I kind of like this, but I am also not sure what to make of this.'”
HARBAUGH, WHO RAN the team’s offense, created an offseason environment that cast the two sides of the ball as enemies. The former NFL quarterback had the final say at practice and this led to lopsided officiating in favor of the offense, which fostered more tension between the offense and defense. Harbaugh also rarely let practice end on a defensive stop.
“If the last play the defense won, then we’d have to run it again,” said Mike Rish, who was then an assistant wide receivers coach at USD.
Wes Doyle, who played wide receiver, remembers Harbaugh chastising him for sitting with defensive players in the cafeteria. “He’d say, ‘What could you guys possibly have to talk about?'” Doyle said with a smile. “‘You don’t need to be all buddy-buddy with him in the cafeteria, he’s not your friend right now.'”
“It was kind of like us versus them in practice and spring ball,” Bretsch said. “And it was more intense than a lot of games we played.”
The defense was dominating one practice when Harbaugh grew irritated — and took over as quarterback of the first-team offense. Harbaugh threw a few passes, but the defense knocked them down. Eventually, Harbaugh, wearing no pads, sprinted out of the pocket and began running downfield. Now Harbaugh was headed toward Bretsch, who was running to make a tackle.
“I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to light him up if he’s going to do this,'” Bretsch said. “And it was like playing a game of chicken. He put his head down to run me over, and I had to move out of the way. At the last minute, he got up and threw the ball at me. He was like, ‘You p—y. Hit me. Come on, let’s go.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, this guy is insane.'”
Bretsch continued: “Our relationship was, he talked crap to me, and that’s the way he got the most out of me. He knew how to get the most out of each person.”
THE FIRST GAME of that season was against Azusa Pacific University, then an NAIA school outside of Los Angeles. The team took a two-hour bus ride there, anticipating a win to begin the Harbaugh era at USD.
Instead, the Toreros lost 24-17. Azusa Pacific outscored USD 10-0 in the fourth quarter to spoil Harbaugh’s coaching debut.
After the game, Harbaugh took the team to Hooters for a planned dinner that included a private room. When the players and coaches entered the room, a large banner read, “Congratulations, Coach Harbaugh.”
“It was the saddest Hooters experience in all of our lives,” said Eric Bakhtiari, who played defensive end. “Once it didn’t work out, he took that feeling and everything after that was making sure that it would never turn out like the Hooters day.”
But the struggles didn’t end at Hooters. The Toreros began the season 2-4, including a 61-14 drubbing by Penn in Harbaugh’s home debut, where USD allowed eight touchdowns.
Amid the skid, some began to wonder whether Harbaugh was the right coach for the job.
“It took a little bit of some of the excitement away,” former USD cornerback Josh Brisco said. “We’re working so hard, so much has changed from an attitude level to an investment perspective. Like is it worth it? We were doing fine before, did we need to change that much?”
Still, Bakhtiari remembered how the losing streak and specifically the Penn loss “fundamentally switched” the team. “It was a call to action to himself, to his staff, to us as players,” he said.
Harbaugh encouraged players to continue to believe in his coaching philosophy. Despite the losses, he promised USD was close to being the team he had hoped it would be after the most challenging offseason of all his players’ college careers.
“It wasn’t like everyone felt dejected and gave up,” Doyle said. “Or like, ‘This guy’s crazy, none of his s— worked.’ It was like ‘buy in more, buy into the program.'”
PLAYERS CITE HARBAUGH’S dedication and personality as a reason they continued believing. He walked the walk. Harbaugh did pushups during the team’s daily warmups, trying to add to how many he could do without stopping. Players remember his face going red and the veins in his face and neck bulging as he struggled through each rep.
“He got to a point where he was at a hundred pushups that he could do without stopping,” former USD running back Evan Harney said, “and it started like 50, and then the next week was at 55.”
Garton remembers Harbaugh becoming a mainstay at the team’s lifts, often wearing a sweater tucked into khaki pants. One day, Harbaugh joined the team in doing power cleans — an exercise where the athlete pulls a barbell from the ground up to their shoulders, catching it in a squat position. Harbaugh had not warmed up, but grabbed the weight anyway and attempted the power clean.
“He ended up on his ass, but he tried it, and we’re all looking at him … and he doesn’t get embarrassed, dude,” Garton said with a laugh. “He’s just kind of like, ‘Huh. It’s heavier than I thought.’ Gets up, walks out. We’re just like, ‘What the f—?’ I mean, we’re looking at each other like, ‘Dude, this guy’s different.'”
Beyond the workouts, Harbaugh elevated the legitimacy of the program. Before Harbaugh, Brisco remembers paying $200 for his team travel gear and equipment. Harbaugh ended that immediately, though, to this day, the players aren’t sure what strings he pulled. “Now, when I needed gloves, I could just go to the equipment room,” he said. “It was small, but it started to feel like this was a real program.”
Harbaugh did many things that first year that kept practice or meetings interesting, measures the players now realize had a deeper meaning related to football.
Once, during a meeting, he told players to walk outside, where they watched a traffic controller direct traffic for 10 minutes. While they watched, Harbaugh preached “mind-numbing repetition” — doing something enough to make it become second nature. He wanted his players to focus on the most mundane details even if no one was watching — the same as this man directing traffic.
“I get sensitive about these stories sometimes because if you oversimplify him down to a quote, you miss Harbaugh,” Doyle said. “If you lift the covers on most of the one-off quotes and stories, there’s a lot more there for those of us who know him.”
USD PUMMELED ITS opponents in a five-game winning streak to end the 2004 season, winning by at least 21 points in each game but one.
Harbaugh often told the players in meetings ahead of games that season that they could beat teams and “it didn’t need to be close.” In USD’s wins, Harbaugh encouraged the team to keep scoring. “He always told us it wasn’t his job to stop his team from scoring,” Doyle said. “That was the other team’s job.”
Perhaps the biggest win of that campaign came in the only non-blowout during the streak. USD played Dayton in the season’s penultimate game, a measuring stick for Harbaugh and a Toreros program that had beaten the Flyers only once in team history before that season. Dayton was the Pioneer Football League’s most dominant team with a conference-best eight titles.
With 9:18 left in the fourth quarter and USD leading 31-28, running back Evan Harney fumbled. Dayton defensive back Casey Klaus returned the miscue 79 yards for a touchdown that gave Dayton a 35-31 lead.
“I’m thinking I just lost the game,” Harney said. “I never had a moment like that where I was so helpless on the field.”
On the following drive, Toreros quarterback Todd Mortensen remembers a run-pass-option play call on third down, and his choice was to throw the ball when he should have handed it off based on Dayton’s defense. USD was forced to punt. It was two mistakes from two of the team’s best players, but Harbaugh assured Mortensen when he came to the sideline that they’d have a shot to win the game.
Pentz stopped a Dayton fourth-down attempt on the next drive to give the offense the ball with 2:40 left in the game. The Toreros drove down the field and Harney scored a touchdown to put them up 38-35. They sealed the win with Bakhtiari’s interception on Dayton’s final drive.
“The fact that he would have that trust in me to put the ball in my hands was huge,” Harney said. “That was a huge win for us. And I think it was a big deal for him, too, but we’ll still talk about that play together when I see him.”
“If I made a mistake, he would coach me instead of chewing me out and then express his confidence in me,” Mortensen said. “Those kinds of experiences really made a huge difference in my career.”
USD ended the season with a 35-14 win over Wagner to finish 7-4. According to their record, the Toreros had taken a step back from 2003. And yet, the players largely felt that they had found a winning formula, that they were on the doorstep of something bigger.
USD went 22-2 over Harbaugh’s next two seasons, winning the first two PFL championships in school history. Harbaugh left USD after 2006 for Stanford, where he spent four seasons and led the Cardinal to a 12-1 record and Rose Bowl win in his final year.
He moved to the NFL in 2011, leading the San Francisco 49ers to three straight NFC championships and a Super Bowl appearance in four seasons before going back to college. Harbaugh returned to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, in 2015, coaching the Wolverines for nine years, culminating in an undefeated national championship season in 2023.
At each stop, Harbaugh significantly elevated programs from where they were when he arrived. Over 20 years and five teams, his players are unified by that pattern of growth, traditions that started for Harbaugh during that first season in San Diego.
“There was just kind of a collective swagger,” Doyle said. “There was definitely a feeling that kind of, no looking back from here. We had bought in and this was our thing.”