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Before Jim Harbaugh took over as head coach three seasons ago, Stanford University had arguably the worst football team in a major conference in the entire country. The Cardinal lost 11 of 12 games in the season before he took over and did so by an average of three touchdowns.

Now, as 17th-ranked Stanford steams toward Saturday's annual rivalry game with No. 25 California, the team is 7-3 and in the hunt for the Pac-10 Conference title. All of sudden, Mr. Harbaugh is the talk of college football—not just for the lengths he has taken the program but for how he has done it.

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Associated Press
Jim Harbaugh made his Stanford coaching debut on Sept. 1, 2007.
One week ago, after his team took an unfathomable 27-point lead on the road against mighty USC, Mr. Harbaugh did something that took many fans back to a more bare-knuckled era in college football: He went for a two-point conversion. Although Mr. Harbaugh says the move wasn't personal, it was the coaching equivalent of trapping a grizzly bear and then squirting it with a water pistol, just for laughs.

"He's got one of those in-your-face attitudes," says former Stanford quarterback Jim Plunkett, a Heisman Trophy winner and two-time Super Bowl champion. "You need that in football."

If you set out to build the perfect coaching résumé, you might settle on something that's close to Mr. Harbaugh's.

He's a rah-rah guy who declared "we bow to no program here at Stanford" soon after his arrival. He has paid his dues outside the limelight—his previous coaching job was at the University of San Diego. He's a former quarterback who once guaranteed Michigan would beat Ohio State and delivered, and who took the Indianapolis Colts within a Hail Mary of the Super Bowl. He has NFL coaching experience and has coaching in his blood: His father, Jack, coached Western Kentucky, and his brother John is head coach of the Baltimore Ravens.

From the time he was "5 or 6," Mr. Harbaugh says, "I've wanted to play as long as I could, then coach, then die."

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As a player he quarterbacked Michigan in 1986.
But what sets Mr. Harbaugh apart is that he is doing all this at the Harvard of the West, where top talent is often unattainable. And unlike coaches in similar situations, who have turned to gimmick offenses to compensate for the talent gap, he's winning with a power running attack.

In other words, in the age of "genius" coaches, Mr. Harbaugh is doing it by scouting hard, recruiting hard, putting miles on the car and coaching up his players until they believe they're good enough. If you want the careful public persona of Ohio State's Jim Tressel or Oklahoma's Bob Stoops, look elsewhere.

In 2007, Mr. Harbaugh enraged many fans at his alma mater, Michigan, when he said he was discouraged from taking on a difficult major at the school because it would have taken time away from football.

The first signs of Mr. Harbaugh's aptitude, or interest, in coaching came before the 1994 season. While he was driving to his offseason home near Orlando, Fla., Mr. Harbaugh stopped to see his father, Jack, at Western Kentucky. The younger Harbaugh didn't understand why his dad was on campus. "He was like, 'What are you doing here? You should be out recruiting,' " the elder Mr. Harbaugh says.

Jim offered to help. After clearing it with the school president, he became an unpaid assistant, responsible for recruiting the area between Orlando and Tampa. Among the players he delivered to Western Kentucky from 1994 to 2001: Mel Mitchell, a defensive back who went on to play in the NFL; Willie Taggart, a Division I-AA All-American quarterback who is now Stanford's running-backs coach; and Rod Smart, a former pro running back better known as He Hate Me. Western Kentucky won the 2002 I-AA national title.

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With the Chicago Bears in 1991.
"It really became more than a hobby," Mr. Harbaugh says. "You're constantly meeting people—not just the players, but parents, coaches, aunts, uncles. It's just fascinating to me, getting to meet so many different people."

This is how Mr. Harbaugh chose to spend his NFL offseasons: getting up at 7 in the morning, visiting as many as eight high schools, chatting up a recruit's coach, then driving from house to house from 5 p.m. on, making hourlong visits with players and their parents. But he loved it then, when he wasn't even being paid for it, and still lives for it today.

"There's nothing like recruiting," he says. "Getting knee to knee and eyeball to eyeball. It's never about giving a spiel. I felt I could talk to players about the school and playing for Jack Harbaugh, who I knew would have a positive impact on their lives. At Stanford, we really believe in the model of academics being first and foremost."

Stanford has long struggled to win consistently. It has had its moments—the 1970 and '71 teams started the Big Ten's Rose Bowl jinx with a pair of upsets—but the school has appeared only once in the Rose since then. In the three years before Mr. Harbaugh's hiring, Stanford's recruiting classes ranked 57th, 41st and 53rd nationally, according to Rivals.com, a Web site that covers high-school recruiting.

By contrast, Mr. Harbaugh's 2008 class included Andrew Luck, a redshirt-freshman quarterback from Houston who is the top-rated passer in the Pac-10. The 2009 class was ranked 20th nationally, and next year's group is currently 15th.

Mr. Luck and Toby Gerhart, a Heisman-candidate senior running back, are the backbone of a bruising, run-based offense that ranks 10th nationally in scoring, at 36.1 points per game. The week before routing USC, Stanford scored 51 in a victory over then-No. 8 Oregon.

While Mr. Harbaugh's star rises, his alma mater, Michigan, braces for yet another loss to rival Ohio State Saturday. The Wolverines, the all-time winningest school in major-college history, are 5-6, leading to conjecture that Mr. Harbaugh might someday return.

Stanford's athletic director said this week that the school and the coach are close to finalizing a contract extension.

"It's been nothing short of thrilling," says former Stanford linebacker Jeff Siemon, a College Football Hall of Fame member who played linebacker on the 1970 and 1971 teams. As he watched the USC rout Saturday at his home, he says he texted former players the whole time. "To see them do so well, to humiliate USC, this is something we're not quite used to," he says. "We'd like to get used to it."

Stanford's Jim Harbaugh: The Perfect Football Coach? - WSJ.com

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