We don’t need a phony Presidential Medal of Freedom here, but this is our second NFL Thursday column in a row! We still love the NFL, despite its flaws, and this week we want to check back in on a focus of some previous pieces: Jim Harbaugh. Back in early 2025, we did a comprehensive analysis of Harbaugh’s coaching career—separate from his playing career. Our conclusion(s)? “Is Harbaugh overrated? Probably.” Well, don’t look now, but in Year 3 with the Los Angeles Chargers, it’s ugly.
The team is 0-4 with a scoring differential of minus-39 points. Factually, that’s the second-worst “margin-of-victory” statistic in the entire league, and despite inheriting a pretty good roster from previous head coach, Harbaugh is once again running an NFL team into the ground—just as he did with the San Francisco 49ers from 2011-2014 before bailing to go coach the University of Michigan. Well, as the Chargers are now destined to not make the playoffs, Harbaugh can’t go back to college.
Harbaugh did go 22-14 during his first two seasons in Los Angeles, after inheriting a playoff-caliber roster. Yet the changes he makes to most of his rosters ends up not working out too well long term; in Year 4 of his time in San Francisco. Harbaugh’s team regressed to .500 and missed the postseason. That curve seems to have accelerated with the Chargers, based on the current results; Los Angeles faces its next games against the Denver Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs, so 0-6 is looming.
The Broncos are only 2-2, but they won the AFC West Division last year and have played the toughest schedule in the NFL so far this season. The Chiefs are 4-0 and obviously have been very successful under Head Coach Andy Reid for the last 15 years, including emerging victorious in three Super Bowls (2019, 2022, 2023). It’s unlikely the Chargers will win those games before going on to their bye week. Coming out of that respite, they face the crosstown Los Angeles Rams, another likely loss.
Harbaugh is looking down the barrel of an 0-7 start to the season, and we say he gets what he deserves. Yes, the Chargers have a lot of injuries, but that’s the nature of the entire NFL these days. Whether it’s luck, misfortune, or preparedness, injuries happen to every team every season. Some rosters and staffs can overcome it; many cannot do so. When the team went 5-12 in 2023, it was because of injuries, and it cost former Head Coach Brandon Staley his job. Will the same happen to Harbaugh?
Probably not, since he’s higher profile and higher paid. Yet it cannot be denied that this is his pattern; even at Michigan, before his cheating scandal got going, Harbaugh started off okay with someone else’s roster, and then his teams got worse over time under his control and management. Remember how the Wolverines actually finished with a losing record in 2020? We do; it was the same thing that happened in San Francisco.
We want to focus here on Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert as a case study in point: Harbaugh is a QB killer. We saw him all but ruin the careers of Alex Smith and Colin Kaepernick in San Francisco, and he did the same to many a highly-touted quarterback in Ann Arbor before enabling the cheating. And even the benefactor of his cheating at Michigan—QB J.J. McCarthy—now has been exposed as a bust in the NFL, going from a 2024 first-round pick to a fifth-round pick discard.
But we digress: we admired Herbert from the start of his professional career way back when. His first four years in the league featured much individual success and a playoff berth in 2022, but after peaking individually in 2024 with a 101.7 QB rating, he’s gone steadily downhill since then to the point he’s bottomed out now, seemingly, at age 28 with a terrible 70.6 QB rating. Honestly, just watching him last Sunday on television against the Seattle Seahawks was somewhat painful, seeing his decline.
Admittedly, the Seahawks are the defending champs, and Herbert was on the road in a tough environment with his vastly inferior team. Yet nothing seemed in sync for him with his offense, and his overall completion percentage this season is now under 60 percent, which is nowhere near acceptable in this modern day and age of offensive efficiency that is expected from a top-echelon QB like Herbert. Needless to say, though, we can’t imagine Harbaugh’s attitude and demeanor play well with him.
We all have seen the memes of Harbaugh screaming, whining, and yelling during game action. We are sure he’s the same during practice, if not worse, which is why his teams tend to get worse after a few years under his reins. Projecting the Chargers record this year, beyond that probable 0-7 start, we see something like a 3-14 record for L.A. this year, and any coach should probably be fired after a disastrous fall like that, even if it is just Year 3 and the team owes them a zillion dollars.
So, as the headline notes … yeah.
