Michigan football hires defensive analyst Matt Adolph, who has strong Jim Harbaugh ties
Michigan Wolverines football has hired support staffer Matt Adolph, grandson of late, longtime NFL coach Dave Adolph, a close confidant and mentor to U-M head coach Jim Harbaugh. Adolph appears in Michigan’s staff directory as an ‘administrative specialist,’ with his Twitter bio sharing that he’s a defensive analyst.
A Columbus, Ohio, native, Adolph recently worked as a defense and special teams quality control coach (2022) at Northern Illinois. He was the special teams coordinator with Morehead State and also coached the outside linebackers for one season (2021) after working with the defense and special teams units at Valdosta in 2020.
Adolph spent three seasons at Michigan State as an intern, graduate assistant, and quality control coach (2015-17). He then joined the staff at Santa Barbara City College, where he coached the outside linebackers and served as co-special teams coordinator for two seasons (2018-19).
He spent the 2014 and 2015 seasons in the scouting department for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, where Harbaugh was in his final season as the franchise’s head coach in 2014. Adolph graduated from University of Kentucky, where he was a walk-on linebacker and long snapper.
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Adolph joins a Michigan analyst staff that includes James Brown (special teams), Jack Clark (offense), Nick Gilbert (offensive line), Bret Ingalls (offense), Doug Mallory (defense), Mike Mallory, Richard Minter (defense), Josh Sinagoga (offense) and Connor Stalions.
Harbaugh has a long history with Dave Adolph, who worked on high school, college and NFL staffs for parts of seven decades, from 1961 until he finished his career as a data analyst under Harbaugh at Michigan from 2015-16. He was Harbaugh’s defensive coordinator at San Diego from 2004-07. Adolph passed away at age 79 Feb. 12, 2017.
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“We have lost one of the truly great ones,” Harbaugh wrote on Twitter after Adolph’s passing.
Adolph coached as a defensive coordinator in four AFC championship games for three franchises.
The Michigan head man often credits Dave Adolph for inspiring him to wear pants — specifically khakis — while on the job as a football coach.
“Dave would wear khaki pants every day to practice — and most coaches that I had, I’d see them and they wore sweat pants and they wore shorts,” Harbaugh said on the Jed Hughes podcast in 2020. “And I go, ‘Dave, why do you wear the pants every day?’ ‘Pockets, put my script in the pockets, place for my pens, place for my whistle.’ It just made so much sense, it just made perfect sense. And so the next day I started to wear pants, too, and, sure enough, a place for chewing gum, for pens, scripts and all that.”
Adolph recalled telling Harbaugh that CEOs don’t wear shorts, too, a point that resonated with the Michigan coach.
At one time, there was also a sign hanging inside Schembechler Hall, Michigan’s team facility, that quoted Adolph in saying, “the uncommitted player, the out-of-shape player, the absent-minded player and the bad player all look alike.”
