Over nearly a decade at his alma mater, Jim Harbaugh built Michigan, his alma mater, his way, especially by the final three years in Ann Arbor. He did that with what he changed specifically in-house for the maize & blue.
Connor Stalions spoke in an interview with On3’s J.D. PicKell and, in that, discussed Harbaugh’s successes while he too was still on staff with the Wolverines. He began by explaining it was his empowerment of their entire staff, specifically one aspect of it.
“What, what made Michigan so good, first and foremost, is, like the marine in me? It starts with Ben Herbert. Alright, first of all, it starts with Jim Harbaugh, the head coach, hiring the right people, and that was his biggest strength is he was very decentralized command, as you would say in the military where he was not like this dictator of, ‘I need you do exactly this this exact way’ and ‘you to do this exactly this way,’” Stalions said. “His biggest strength was a combination of hiring the right people, getting, getting a good staff and then being relatively hands off, providing his commander’s intent, providing his guidance but not being, you know, over the shoulder, you know, and bugging you about exactly how you do everything.”
Again, Herbert was at the head of that as the former strength and conditioning who eventually earned the title of associate head coach. His role went beyond just the weight room, though, and extended to changing the approach of their entire team.
“Him empowering Ben Herbert as the strength coach was by far the x-factor of Michigan Football. I’m pretty sure anyone you talk to, player or coach, will tell you the same thing,” said Stalions. “I mean, I remember – I don’t remember what year this was – but there was a game. It was a bowl game. I was still in the marine corps and, the marine in me, getting off the bus, seeing, like wrappers and stuff kind of left around and, like, just not much attention to detail. And I just remember that, like, bugging me, being like, well, we wonder why we lose games when we can’t even pay attention to detail to throw away our trash, right. And then, fast forward to, it took a few years and rightfully so because, after a full cycle where, in 2021, the seniors had had Coach Herbert now for four years. There’s not a single player on the team who had not been essentially indoctrinated into this, this way of how we do things.”
“So, 2021 is – I think that was year three of Coach Herbert – where you go in the weight room and…it is, all of the block m’s are perfectly, on the plates, all perfectly aligned. If you ever happen to be there during a workout, the, you know – sometimes they’ll go from the field to the weight room so you have to have your cleats, your shoes, all that. Anytime you have your shoes off and your cleat one, or vice versa, whatever you have off, the left shoe is facing forward, the right shoe is facing back because it saves space and it’s perfectly, and it’s always got to be against a wall or on a line,” Stalions recalled. “Very attention to detail. And, obviously, as an actual strength staff and the actual strength program, that’s the whole other element. But it starts with the attention to detail and everything that, the way that Coach Herbert and his staff operates and continues to operate. I know he’s gone but it’s still in good hands, it’s still the same exact staff, same program, have the same tree. Justin Tress? He’s been being groomed for a while. He’s great.”
That sound very meticulous but was so to a point for the Wolverines. It was to change the very thinking of their team to give them more reliable habits to fall back on in every way, especially in games, with no better place to do it than in a room and with coaches that they were with more than anyone else on staff.
“Think about it too. You don’t practice every day, you don’t have meetings every day but you have a workout every day pretty much,” said Stalions. “When you talk about habits, right, because you’re a product of your habits – and I say this all the time, again, in marine corps-isms or whatever…When there’s bullets flying by you and you’re thinking, like, oh my gosh, the guy next to me is ten degrees off, I’m dead, right? Your minds fogs up and they call it the fog war. Your mind? There’s no way to get around it. Like, your mind will automatically fog up…When your mind fogs up, it’s impossible to rise to the occasion because you can’t think. You always fall back to your habits, right.”
Because of that, that didn’t just leave when Harbaugh, Herbert, and other coaches did too in the last year or so. That’s still there in Ann Arbor and is something Stalions thinks they can continue to rely on, regardless of how good their team is or isn’t in a given year.
“Why is Michigan Football so good? The improvement of the daily habits and attention to detail that starts in the weight room. You don’t really get that edge anywhere else unless you have something like that where it is that attention to detail,” said Stalions. “That’s why Michigan is so good and even why, on a relatively ‘down year’, they still had success because of those habits that are ingrained in the players and have been for years now.”
