In a wild divisional playoff game against New Orleans on Saturday, Smith threw for three touchdowns and ran for one as San Francisco won its first postseason game in nine seasons.
With all due respect to the Tim Tebow story line, the miracle of this season is the resurrection of Smith and the 49ers under Harbaugh, their first-year coach.
Until Harbaugh came along, Smith, the overall No. 1 pick in 2005, was on the scrap heap. He was injured, booed, demoralized, subjected to pay cuts. Today, the 49ers are one victory from the Super Bowl — they meet the Giants next week in the N.F.C. championship game — and Harbaugh is in the process of becoming a rare breed: a successful college coach who flourishes in the N.F.L. He made the transition look easy, taking over a team that went 6-10 last season and finishing the regular season 13-3.
“I thought he’d do well, but, boy, rolling in at 13-3 in your first year is almost unheard of,” Denny Green said.
Green coached Stanford from 1989 to 1991, then, like Harbaugh, left for the N.F.L. Green coached the Minnesota Vikings from 1992 to 2001 and the Arizona Cardinals from 2004 to 2006 and now coaches Sacramento of the United Football League.
The road from college to the N.F.L. is littered with the shattered egos of coaches who thought they were big and bad enough to take on the pros: Lou Holtz, Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino, Steve Spurrier, Pete Carroll. Each was humbled to varying degrees and scampered back to the sanctuary of the college campus.
At least in my mind, there has never been a mystery as to why so many college coaches fail at the professional level: control and ego. Many won’t even try. There is an unwillingness — or inability — to deal as equals with former scholarship players who once looked at the coach as the be-all and end-all.
Holtz had his rude awakening in 1976 when he was the coach of the Jets. He resigned with one game remaining that first season after going 3-10. He went on to have a stellar college career at Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame and South Carolina.
“In college, you control every single facet of the football program, from recruiting to handling players,” Holtz said last week. “You have more control of their lives, academically. They’re at the age where they’re growing, making decisions; you can mold them into the manner you want.”
Another significant difference between colleges and the pros is that coaching acumen is far more important in the N.F.L., where talent is more or less even.
“In the pros, the difference between winning and losing in the pros is so minuscule because they all have pretty decent athletes,” Holtz said. “The N.F.L. is more talented, it’s more skillful.”
For Holtz, compensation has a lot to do with the differences between the two levels. “When you lose in college, there’s absolutely nothing except devastation,” he said. “You lose in the pros, you’re still getting $18 million.”
Saban left the Miami Dolphins for Alabama after two seasons; Petrino slithered away from the Atlanta Falcons with three games left in his only season and took the Arkansas job. Spurrier resigned after two dismal seasons with the Washington Redskins and eventually took the job at South Carolina, following Holtz.
Carroll keeps bouncing back — he made the playoffs last season with a losing record with the Seahawks — but even he would be hard pressed to call his N.F.L. career a success, beyond being richly compensated.
Then there is Harbaugh, who, with a good but hardly superstar rsum, has revitalized a demoralized San Francisco franchise.
“Jim has the great ability to see himself, or parts of himself, in other players; I think that’s where the Alex Smith connection comes in,” said Tom Crean, the basketball coach at Indiana University. For two decades, Crean has had a unique view of Harbaugh and his brother John, the Baltimore Ravens’ coach. Crean has been married to their sister, Joani, for 19 years.
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