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Jim Harbaugh is a great football coach, and there is nothing the NCAA can do to change that. As the governing body of college sports fades to black, it still defied its looming irrelevance by attacking Harbaugh with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.

The NCAA ruled the former Michigan coach ran a program “that was largely dismissive of rules compliance” and found “there was little, if any, emphasis on following the rules.”

Those words amounted to an in-his-prime Mike Tyson hook to the legacy of Jim Harbaugh, national champ and promoter of values over victories. As part of its findings from a sign-stealing scandal that seemed to get dumber by the hour, the NCAA added a 10-year show cause penalty to an existing four-year penalty and effectively banned the current coach of the Los Angeles Chargers from the college ranks until 2038, when the man will be 74 years old, or one year older than North Carolina’s Bill Belichick is right now.

Wow.

But really, you shouldn’t feel any differently about Harbaugh today than you did yesterday. While covering colleges and the pros for the better part of four decades, I’ve found that these mega-coaches are pretty much all the same.

They will do almost anything to win. And if an internal or external supporter wants to bend or break the rules in pursuit of that goal, the mega-coaches will do their damnedest to willfully ignore it.

Remember, there was a time in Ann Arbor when Harbaugh wasn’t the fearless leader who had won Michigan’s first national championship since 1997. He was merely the guy who couldn’t beat Ohio State and who lost 16 games over four years, punctuated by a 2-4 record in the pandemic-shortened season and the school’s insistence that he take a 50 percent cut in his base salary.

Harbaugh swore a move that cost him millions didn’t bother him, but a source with knowledge of Harbaugh’s situation insisted otherwise at the time, and said the coach had a strong desire to return to the NFL ASAP. Even though Harbaugh had led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and had won nearly 70 percent of his NFL games before Michigan brought him home, the school had sent its former star quarterback a message:

You stay on full scholarship only if you win, and win big.

Before he ran a go route back to the NFL, Harbaugh served two three-game suspensions for separate infractions during the 2023 season and then mocked the whole process by winning the whole thing. He probably figured he was safe in Los Angeles, living the life with Justin Herbert, but the NCAA sent what could be its final all-out blitz Friday and seemed to take a measure of delight in it.

Michigan is facing tens of millions in fines for an improper scouting scheme run by former aide Connor Stalions and his amateur-hour operatives known as “the KGB,” who attended games and broke rules by filming the coaches of future opponents who were signaling plays. Harbaugh’s successor and former assistant, Sherrone Moore, saw his existing two-game suspension increased by a game (in 2026), a development that commanded much of the attention that wasn’t already devoted to the fact that Michigan kept its national crown and dodged a postseason ban.

But this was a Harbaugh story from start to finish, and it will remain a Harbaugh story until the end of time.

Addressing the allegations last year as the rookie coach of the Chargers, Harbaugh said the following:

“Never lie. Never cheat. Never steal. I was raised with that lesson. I’ve raised my family on that lesson. I have preached that lesson to the teams that I’ve coached. No one’s perfect. If you stumble, you apologize and you make it right. Today, I do not apologize. I did not participate, was not aware nor complicit in those said allegations.”

Harbaugh delivered Michigan a national title before returning to the NFL. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

Though I’ve recognized Harbaugh’s brilliance as a motivator and strategist from a distance, his brother John — the Baltimore Ravens coach and the victor in their bygone Super Bowl duel — was always more my cup of tea. I once spent three or four hours at John’s house to get to know him, and I reminded him that day that he owned a 2-0 career record against his brother.

“I’m 3-0,” John shot back, counting a preseason victory.

The Harbaughs try to finish in first place at everything.

In talking to people in and around their family, it’s clear that the sons of Jack and Jackie Harbaugh mean it when they say that their faith and their loved ones take priority over their profession. But while at the office, trying to build and maintain a championship team, Jim Harbaugh cares only about beating his opponents — by any means necessary.

Back in his playing days, when former Buffalo Bills star Jim Kelly questioned his toughness, Harbaugh responded by punching Kelly in the face, breaking his hand on contact.

Nothing is worse than questioning his will to win. Not even assailing his integrity as Michigan’s coach.

I do not doubt that Jim Harbaugh is a good son, husband and father. But as Michigan showed him with that cut in salary, he was not hired to be a role model for young men at the facility. He was hired to do everything in his power to make the Wolverines the finest team in America, and if that meant treating NCAA compliance and its advocates with utter disdain, then so be it.

In a different time and place in college sports, the coach held up as the enduring paragon of virtue, John Wooden, displayed impressive willful ignorance while booster Sam Gilbert supplied his players with improper extra benefits. “My dad once said that amateur athletics is administered by amateurs,” Gilbert’s son, Michael, told Seth Davis in his authoritative biography of Wooden.

That same feeling has been shared by generations of coaches who thought the NCAA was an outdated organization with silly rules and selective methods of prosecution, an organization that now looks like a rotary phone in the era of multimillion-dollar “student-athletes.” And why can’t football coaches scout future opponents in person and film signal callers when tens of thousands of fans in the crowd can study those same signal callers all day?

Belichick’s supporters made that case back in the Spygate days. Though coaches who get their signs stolen need to do a better job of protecting and changing their plays, rules are rules, and there’s a price to be paid when caught breaking them.

Harbaugh just paid that price at the hands of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions, even though, with a straight face, he says he knew of no wrongdoing in his program. The committee could not take away his championship or his forever standing in Ann Arbor as a homegrown hero.

It could only validate the notion that Jim Harbaugh is just another coach who shouldn’t be teaching any courses on sportsmanship or ethics.

(Top photo: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)