ESPN’s Rece Davis interviewed Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh one-on-one not long after Michigan won the national championship on January 8, and looking back, he had one regret.
Davis on The College GameDay Podcast this week, gave listeners and co-host Pete Thamel a little behind-the-scenes perspective of the chat.
Obviously, the big question with Harbaugh after the national title game was what does his coaching future hold. Harbaugh has already interviewed for two NFL head coaching vacancies with the Chargers and Falcons.
Davis said his gut instinct said Harbaugh was leaving, but he didn’t get an inkling either way when the two sat down.
“It wasn’t like he walked in there going, ‘I’ve done my job, and now I can’t wait to get back to the NFL,'” Davis said. “He was pretty much quintessential Harbaugh in terms of the way he answered it.”
Rece Davis told Thamel that he needed to come up with creative ways to ask Harbaugh about whether he would stay at Michigan or take another job elsewhere. He knew the coach wouldn’t answer definitively if he flat-out asked, “Are you leaving?”
“You know if you asked that, that direct, and it make you feel like a tough guy,” he said. “But you’re not getting anything. So I tried to find some ways to get to it.”
“He was very cordial and friendly and knew the questions were coming,” Davis added. “He was really good about it.”
But of the creative ways Rece could’ve asked the question, he said there was one that just slipped his mind.
“There’s always a question that you left on the table, and this was just a miss by me,” he said.
“I thought, the follow-up question that I missed – and I regret – what would it take to get you to leave Michigan?” Davis added. “That’s a pretty basic question that I missed, and I wish I had asked it that way.”
Still, Rece Davis felt like had he asked the question like that, Harbaugh wouldn’t have budged.
“I do take solace in this, Pete. Knowing Jim as you and I do, I would’ve gotten the same answer to that question had I asked it, that I had gotten with some of the others,” he said. “Which also would’ve been very similar to the answer that I would’ve gotten if I had said, ‘Jim what do you think about the move from horse-drawn carriages to modes of transportation by horseless carriage?’ It all would’ve been similar, but I do wish I had asked it. I wish I had asked it that way.”
