There’s a symmetry in the story arcs of Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw

On the day that Jim Harbaugh got the biggest win of his college coaching career, David Shaw resigned in defeat. Causality? No. Coincidence? Sure. But there’s a symmetry in their story arcs.

Harbaugh and Shaw became FBS coaches on the same day in December 2006, Harbaugh as head coach at Stanford, Shaw as his offensive coordinator. They came from FCS member San Diego, where they had transformed the Toreros into a winner. Together, they brought the Cardinal program back from the dead. In four seasons, Stanford climbed from 1-11 to 12-1.

Harbaugh left for the NFL and Shaw replaced him. After four seasons in the NFL, Harbaugh went to his alma mater, Michigan.

Each man has coached an FBS team for 12 seasons.

Harbaugh has won 102 games, Shaw 96.

Shaw won three conference championships. Harbaugh is one victory away from his second.

As Harbaugh prepares for the Big Ten Conference Championship Game on Saturday night, Shaw is preparing for life after football. After consecutive 3-9 seasons, Stanford is hovering close to where Harbaugh and Shaw found it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

“I have an appreciation of Jim Harbaugh and the original staff,” Shaw said at a news conference Monday morning. “We started something that really, really lasted.”

Harbaugh made Stanford a power. Shaw made them The Power in the Pac-12. He won those conference championships (2011-12, 2015) with Harbaugh’s recruits and with his own. The Cardinal won the Pac-12 North again in 2017 and might have won it in the truncated season of 2020 had a false positive COVID test not knocked quarterback Davis Mills out of the Oregon game.

In his first five seasons at Michigan, Harbaugh won a lot of games (47) and no championships. He went 0-5 against Ohio State. In 2020, Michigan went 2-4 and an ugly 2-4 at that. Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel had to make a hard decision.

In the two seasons since, Harbaugh is 24-2 and counting. Shaw went 6-18 and resigned with his characteristic grace.

For all the commonalities in their coaching careers, when they reached a critical crossroads, character became fate. As Harbaugh’s program began sliding toward the abyss in 2020, he gambled on change. When Shaw’s program began sliding, he doubled down on his staff and his philosophy.

Staying put always is a gamble in a sport that continually evolves, where last year’s innovation is next year’s orthodoxy. As Stanford began to fall short of its standard of “intellectual brutality,” the physical domination at both sides of the line of scrimmage that created unprecedented success in a storied program, the Cardinal got blindsided by the biggest transformation that college football has undergone in decades.

No FBS program has been slower to adjust to the seismic changes in college athletics than Stanford. While the rest of college football is feeling its way through the transfer portal and NIL, Stanford just got around to allowing freshmen to enroll in January.

The university, Shaw said politely this week, is “methodical.” In the wake of his resignation, Shaw and athletic director Bernard Muir discussed the school coming to terms with the transfer portal. In general, Stanford throws around transfer admissions like manhole covers. The university’s idea of opening itself to the portal will mean you can count the number of players transferring in on one hand. USC had upward of 20 this season, including the quarterback who has led them to the brink of the College Football Playoff.

Michigan also is one game away from the Playoff. When Manuel decided to keep Harbaugh, the athletic director insisted on extensive changes. Harbaugh hired six new assistants, sweeping out veterans for younger coaches with new ideas who connected better with the players. Harbaugh connected better, too, thanks to the one older assistant he hired.

He brought back former assistant Biff Poggi as associate head coach and consigliere. If Mensa had a branch for emotional IQ, Poggi would be a member. He coached the coaches and made sure all of them, Harbaugh included, let the players know how much they cared.

“Jim’s a really bright guy,” Poggi, who will leave Michigan after this season to become coach at Charlotte, said Tuesday. “If Jim wasn’t a football coach, he’d be doing something really cool, like inventing something or running some start-up in Silicon Valley. I mean that. Jim is a traditionalist at his core, but like any great leader he is a guy who is constantly assessing himself. If he sees something he doesn’t like, or he thinks he can do better, he fixes it.”

By the way, the Wolverines’ 24-2 record over the past two seasons includes routs of Ohio State by the have-no-doubt scores of 42-27 and 45-23.

Harbaugh found a way to remake his program; Shaw did not. He leaves Stanford as its most successful coach ever, including Pop Warner, including Bill Walsh. Shaw chose not to elaborate on his reason for leaving beyond the gut realization that “it’s time.”

He insisted as a former coach the same belief that he has espoused all season, that Stanford is not far away from winning. Injuries ravaged the team. But the Cardinal also lost seven games by more than one score. The fans abandoned the team.

Shaw’s replacement must negotiate a turnaround without much help from the portal or NIL. Funny thing about Stanford – the university adheres to the entire NCAA Manual, including the section in which schools are told to remain an arm’s length from their athletes’ NIL deals.

It’s not an easy job. Harbaugh started Stanford on the road to success. Shaw kept the Cardinal at the top for a long time. In tandem, they made national success the standard on the Farm for more than a decade. You’ll find that somewhere between astonishing and parting the Red Sea.