Quote:The greatest college coaches aren’t criticized for their year-round paranoia and micromanaging, they’re deified for them. This GQ profile of Nick Saban is every bit as psychotic as the Wickersham profile — they are essentially the same article — except the Saban piece comes with without any questions about his job security. The same goes for this Wright Thompson profile of Urban Meyer.

There’s a certain style of OCD tyranny that’s proven dominant in college football, and Harbaugh fits the mold better than just about anyone. “It can make Harbaugh seem spacy or rude,” Wickersham wrote, “but everything that isn’t coaching football is a distraction.” That sounds familiar.

Harbaugh sometimes brings glasses of whole milk to coaches meetings, believing it builds strength. While other staffs slave past midnight, he lets his coaches leave early a few nights a week so they can have dinner with their families; he even once babysat the toddler of one of his assistants so the coach and his wife could have a date. He eats lunch with a different group of players each day to get to know them. He buys cakes on birthdays and has a Will Hunting ability to calculate quickly how many days someone has been alive.

He’s obsessed with his own corny maxims, he wears the same pair of pants every day while drinking the same whole milk, and he gets a kick out of surprising players with birthday cakes and trivia. He’s brilliant, but he’s also sort of a dork. This is a college coach.