Shortly after leading Michigan to the national championship, Jim Harbaugh said the season "couldn't have gone better" for the Wolverines. "It went exactly how we wanted it to go, to win every game."
History will remember the Wolverines as unblemished, 15-0. It might also attach an asterisk to their perfection. Harbaugh was suspended twice this season for NCAA violations within his program, first for allegedly misleading NCAA investigators about recruiting violations in 2020, and later for an illegal sign-stealing operation that was spearheaded by ex-analyst Connor Stallions.
Harbaugh's first three-game suspension was self-imposed by Michigan and the university decided against protesting the other, though there is no proof that Harbaugh had any knowledge of the sign-stealing scandal.
"The off-the-field issues, we're innocent," Harbaugh said after Michigan's 34-13 win over Washington sealed its fist national title since 1997. "And we stood strong and tall because we knew we were innocent. And I'd just like to point that out."
Sitting alongside quarterback J.J. McCarthy, running back Blake Corum and cornerback Will Johnson, Harbaugh said his players are innocent, too.
"It wasn't that hard (to overcome) because we knew we were innocent," he reiterated. "So yeah, that's really what I wanted to say. It went exactly how we wanted it to go."
Harbaugh, 60, may have coached his final game at Michigan, with the NFL likely to come calling. If so, he'll leave with a 40-3 record over his final three seasons, including three straight wins over Ohio State and three straight Big Ten championships to go with Monday's national title.
Harbaugh has long viewed the Super Bowl as football's greatest prize. But he said that winning the national championship, at his alma mater no less, will "check the biggest box" of his coaching career.
"For me personally, I can now sit at the big person's table in the family," he said with a grin. "They won't keep me over there on the little table anymore. My dad, Jack Harbaugh, won a national championship (at Western Kentucky in 2002), and my brother won a Super Bowl (with the Ravens), so it's good to be at the big person's table from now on."
Harbaugh said he hopes to eventually be remembered, above all else, as a "Michigan man," which he described as "doing something that's bigger than yourself, caring about somebody other than yourself, never being outworked, doing right."
"You don't lie. You don't cheat. You don't steal," he said.
After returning to Michigan in 2015, he pulled the program out of the morass of the Brady Hoke-Rich Rodriguez era and eventually restored it to greatness. He may have closed his time in Ann Arbor by leading the Wolverines over the all-time plateau of 1,000 wins, which no other college program has reached, and to their first 15-win season ever in the span of a couple months.
"To reach a thousand wins and win the national championship in the same year, man, doesn't get much better than that," said Harbaugh. "I would really ask you that: Who could possibly have it better than us? Nobody."