The 49ers and Jim Harbaugh did not have the prettiest of splits. Harbaugh guided San Francisco back to prominence but was asked to leave after four years at the helm.
Nine years after the "mutual" parting of ways, time seems to have mended some of the wounds between team and coach. San Francisco owner Jed York had nothing but praise for Harbaugh, who is the Chargers' new head coach and held his first official press conference Thursday.
"I congratulated him when [Michigan] won the championship game," York told The Athletic. "We've texted back and forth. I think Jim is a helluva coach. I think it's a great spot for him. I'm excited for the Chargers. I think they'll be very, very successful."
MORE: Ranking NFL's 8 new head coaches in 2024
Harbaugh's NFL coaching career stands out as a bit of an outlier. Coaches often struggle when they go from guiding a collegiate team to leading an NFL squad. Just ask Nick Saban and Urban Meyer how their respective NFL coaching tenures went.
But Harbaugh going from Stanford to San Francisco was an unmitigated success. He took a team that had been 46-82 dating back to 2002 to a 13-3 campaign in his first season at the helm in 2011 and led the 49ers to their first NFC championship since 1997. The next season, he guided San Francisco to the Super Bowl, where the team lost to the Ravens, who were coached by Harbaugh's brother, John Harbaugh.
The 49ers then went to a third straight NFC championship, losing for the second time in three years, this time to the Seahawks. San Francisco went 8-8 in 2014, its worst season under Harbaugh, but overall had gone 44-19-1 in his four years at the helm.
Tensions between the front office and Harbaugh, though, ultimately led to his ouster. Though he left San Francisco with the fifth-highest winning percentage in NFL history, Harbaugh did not make many friends within the organization. He and general manager Trent Baalke reportedly had a "competitive tension" in 2013, but in 2014 that boiled over into torn trust between coach and general manager, NBC Sports Bay Area reported. York sided with Baalke and Harbaugh left.
"I was told I wouldn't be the coach anymore," Harbaugh said in 2015 on "The TK Show." "And then ... you can call it 'mutual,' I mean, I wasn't going to put the 49ers in the position to have a coach that they didn't want anymore.
"But that's the truth of it. I didn't leave the 49ers. I felt like the 49er hierarchy left me."
MORE: What uniforms will Chiefs and 49ers wear in the Super Bowl?
Over the years, York and Harbaugh have reconnected. The 10-year reunion for the Super Bowl team was held during Michigan's bye week in 2022, allowing Harbaugh to come to the gathering. Harbaugh even spoke at the event.
"We had connected a little bit before that," York told The Athletic. "And then we invited him to come out and told him that we set it up for that week because Michigan had a bye that week. And you're celebrating the 10th anniversary of a team going to a Super Bowl. It means something.
"And I think with anything, people mature, time passes and you tend to remember a lot more of the good things than maybe the not-so-good things. I'm happy for him. Again, he's heckuva coach."
Harbaugh has found success at every stop of his career. He guided San Diego and Stanford to success before San Francisco, then eventually led Michigan to a national championship in his ninth season at the helm.
As head coach of the Chargers, he'll be tasked with turning around a franchise that has struggled in recent years despite spending big on the defense and having one of the few true franchise-caliber quarterbacks in the NFL in Justin Herbert. York sees a team that reminds him a bit of the San Francisco squad Harbaugh took over and turned around in Los Angeles, and expects him to turn things around.
"I think it's a team that had talent that didn't sort of achieve what they hoped to," York said. "I don't want to speak too much about somebody else's team, but it's certainly a talented team. And I think he has a chance to do really, really well with the Chargers."
