Stanford thriving under Harbaugh

SAN FRANCISCO

Here’s your introduction to Stanford football coach Jim Harbaugh. This scene recently took place at the Big Game news conference.

Harbaugh: “I just always felt if you work hard, great things will happen. It’s part of my upbringing. I respect a job well done. I like to watch a guy direct traffic for an hour. I’ve done it. He was doing a really good job at that.”

Q: “You watched a guy direct traffic for an hour?”

Harbaugh: “I did.”

Q: “Where?”

Harbaugh: “San Diego.”

Q: “You just happened to see a guy directing traffic and you said, ‘That’s really neat. I’d like to watch him.’”

Harbaugh: “He was really good at it — with the hands, with the whistle, the way he was controlling the flow of the traffic. That’s the kind of stuff I like. I like watching people do something really well to the best of their God-given ability.”

You learn certain Harbaugh nuggets from this vignette. He likes to watch someone direct traffic. He appreciates technique. He appreciates hard work. He appreciates regular people. And if you hang around him, say, 10 minutes, you’ll hear him use his favorite phrase — “blue-collar.” Harbaugh uses it even though it’s a cliché and he works at the least blue-collar university in the known world.

“We’re a blue-collar football team,” he said at the luncheon. “Maybe for a day there, (Sunday after beating USC) we were a white-collar football team. We’ve got to get back to what our identity is. The hubris, the over-confidence can be a killer. We can’t afford that.”

Right there he slipped in “hubris,” which Aristotle, not a football fan, defined as overweening pride.

Q: “Is hubris a blue-collar word?”

Harbaugh: “It’s a Greek word.”

Q: Is it a blue-collar Greek word?”

Harbaugh: “If you’re blue collar, it doesn’t mean you can’t have intelligence. I think our players demonstrate that.”

As long as Harbaugh is quoting Aristotle, he’d better hope his team doesn’t have a tragic flaw, another Aristotle zinger. We’ll find out on Saturday.

Shortly before he died, Bill Walsh said Stanford should drop out of DivisionI football, said the Cardinal couldn’t compete or recruit against big-time schools. Harbaugh, with his blue-collar philosophy, has proved Walsh wrong. The Cardinal aren’t only competing. They’re thriving. They used to be a finesse team — a very bad finesse team. Now they are “physical” — another worthwhile football cliché. The Cardinal were tougher than USC and to emphasize the point Harbaugh went for that two-point conversion, a form of stepping on Pete Carroll’s neck and messing up his hair.

Harbaugh is a hot coach right now. Rumors swirl he may leave Stanford — he has not signed an extension. Some place him with the Raiders. Heaven help him. That wouldn’t be hubris. That would be a death wish, not a known Aristotelian category.

He has the crazy eyes — not always — but enough to make you wonder. You ask him a question and he looks at you a long time. There is silence. Then he answers some other question. Not always, but enough of the time to make you wonder how his brain wiring works.And he has opinions. Most coaches keep their opinions to themselves. Not this blue-collar philosopher.

Opinion No.1, on whether running back Toby Gerhart should get the Heisman Trophy:

“To me, Toby represents everything the Heisman Trophy represents. He literally takes our football team on his back. There was talk early in the season what can we do for Toby — put up a billboard here or there, and Toby said he didn’t want that. It’s really about the team, the team, the team to Toby. I personally think he shouldn’t only be in the discussion but, based on what he’s accomplished, he should win. The Heisman is one of those awards that evolved. Fifty percent of it is about preseason hype; 25 percent is about giving it to someone who’s on an undefeated team; and 25 percent is actually what the player is accomplishing.”

Opinion No.2, on what quarterback Andrew Luck does well:

“So many things. It’s like with a carpenter. Is the hammer or the saw more important? He does a lot of things really well, so when I rank these it’s not in any particular order. He’s physically gifted from mom, dad and God (Luck’s father, Oliver, played college quarterback at West Virginia and in the NFL for the Houston Oilers. That’s the dad part.) He’s a strong, mature youngster, mentally really strong. He’s able to grasp concepts. Game plans — he’ll have it tomorrow the way you want a quarterback to have it by Saturday. It’s really upper level the way he understands football. It’s not about ME, ‘look at ME.’ That equates to being able to lead. Guys rally around that. When you make yourself small and you make everyone else bigger, you become bigger. The other thing is Andrew’s really smart. He was valedictorian out of high school. It’s like someone hit the ‘A’ key on his transcript. He’s doing the same thing at Stanford. There are times in our meetings he’ll take notes and I know he’s doing it just to placate me because he memorizes it.”

Opinion No.3, and this brings us back to Gerhart, the ultimate Stanford blue-collar player. Harbaugh loves to talk about Gerhart:

“It took a while to really understand who Toby was because he wasn’t there in the spring (2007). He was playing baseball and when we got to training camp he made some good plays — ‘OK, this is a good back.’ And then he was out the first game of the year against UCLA with a tweaked hamstring. Second game he rushed for 140 yards against San Jose. You go, ‘OK, this is really impressive.’ You kind of see a little bit of the physical nature he runs with. But then he was out the rest of the season, so another spring of not knowing and then a training camp and then he got into some of those scrimmages and you go, ‘This is the guy. This is a heck of a player.’ So it took a while to understand who he was because when Toby Gerhart is just running and guys are tagging off on him that’s not the same kind of Toby Gerhart who’s in these games.”

You get the following picture of Harbaugh: Devoted to his players, devoted to we’ll-beat-you-up football, devoted to hard work and blue collars, dedicated to avoiding complacency.

“You have to be,” he said. “That’s the ills of hubris. It’s a killer. It’ll sneak up on you and you don’t even know it’s sneaking up on you.”

If the Cardinal can avoid the dreaded ills of hubris on Saturday, they ought to beat the Bears.

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular, go to the Cohn Zohn at blog.pressdemocrat.com/cohn. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.