College Football: 5 reasons Michigan wins 2017 National Championship

1. Jim Harbaugh

Often eccentric, never dull and sometimes criticized, Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh is the primary reason that the Wolverines will win the National Championship in the 2017 season. Whether you dig his antics or not, there’s simply no skating around what a high quality football coach he is at this point. Though he missed out on the College Football Playoff a year ago, that he was close may have been a testament to his prowess as a coach.

When you look at last year’s Michigan team, one thing that people are going to bring up is the big names that comprised the team. And yes, this team had some great players with the likes of Jabrill Peppers, Taco Charlton, Chris Wormley, Jourdan Lewis and so on. However, this was also a team that was highly deficient in a number of areas. Perhaps the best example was how Harbaugh deployed Peppers.

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Peppers is talented and athletic enough to play multiple positions, but any coach would be doing him a disservice individually to move him around like Harbaugh did last season. At the same time, though, he felt it was necessary to play him in a hybrid linebacker role and to even give him carries on offense because he didn’t have full faith in the guys more natural to those roles.

And with a roster that he felt it necessary to make those types of decisions, he still almost made it to the CFP. Now with a better and more balanced roster — albeit a younger one — there should be no reason to doubt that he’ll get to the mountaintop this time around.