At best, Jim Harbaugh is a loose cannon who basically does whatever he wants as long as he wants. He has pulled so many stunts as the coach of the Wolverines that we could never keep count, and he is making sure that he gets all the press so that he can stand up and talk about how fantastic he is at his job. He does this so well, in fact, that he has created a completely undisciplined team. They should have lost to Florida, and they should have lost to Indiana. His antics have made his team completely undisciplined, and he needs to find a middle ground.
The tomfoolery gets in the way
A coach that does nothing but mess around and post on Twitter is going to create a team that has 16 penalties in a game. That is just a fact of life for the kids in Ann Arbor, and they will continue to play football like this until he stops or the team is made to change the way they approach their games. They have looked like this all year, but they got frustrated by Indiana in a way that made them commit more penalties than they should ever admit. Indiana is not so bad, but Michigan looked terrible.
The team is not good enough
Michigan has a lot of good pieces, but they do not have someone to manage them correctly. Harbaugh has shown that he can load up on talent, but he does not know how to manage that talent.
He was a much better coach when he was not acting like a fool all the time, and he is wasting a lot of good and talented kids on his own image. He will get credit for bringing these kids to Ann Arbor, and he should be given a lot of heat for not using them in the right way. He just has not done a very good job caring for the program, and he knows that his teams are not always deep enough to win.
That is why he has these odd games with a lot of penalties or losses that he cannot explain.
Stick to football
Harbaugh needs to stick to football like he did when he was coaching in every other stop he has been in. Effectively, he has gotten too big for his britches, and he needs to be sent home to talk to his mom or something similar.
No one is telling this guy no, and that is why the Michigan team is all over the place. He thinks that he is very justified in doing whatever he wants, and that allows him to have the kind of ego that he has that is obviously impacting the way that his team is playing. His coaching is suffering, but we do not want to say it because he was so good in every other place that he has been at since he started coaching. It makes more sense at this point to censure him and get him back on track.