Jim Harbaugh isn’t just wildly, idly firing off tweets that take strong jabs at Michigan’s chief rival.
The Wolverines coach knew exactly what he was doing when he took a shot at Ohio State over its memorabilia-for-tattoos scandal of a few years ago. The Buckeyes, he said Saturday, started the increasingly nasty exchanges.
“It felt like one got shot over our bow,” Harbaugh said (via the Detroit News) of his purpose tweet. “It wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction. I waited a good eight, nine hours and figured they might consider that it could be construed a certain way toward our program. Actually some of the scribes and pundits were construing it that way. So when no explanation came, [I] thought it was time to fire one over their bow.
“Consider things even right now.”
What fired up Harbaugh was a shot by Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith, who didn’t cotton to Michigan taking spring practice on the road to Florida.
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“If we were jump-starting our program I’d probably try to do that too, but we’re not jump-starting our program,” Smith told reporters at a soccer news conference. “We’re at a different place.”
That caused Harbaugh to tweet a rather low blow: “Good to see Director Smith being relevant again after the tattoo fiasco. Welcome back!”
Smith tweeted his apology last week. “My comments … were not meant to discredit our rival,” he wrote. “I apologize to UM student-athletes and my good friend Warde Manuel [the Michigan AD]. We at OSU look forward to continuing the greatest rivalry in collegiate football.”
Harbaugh noted Saturday that he and Manuel had spoken. “Brief conversation,” he said. “We saw it exactly the same way.”
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