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Tell me who I’m describing.

A guy who was born in Ohio rose through the coaching ranks after spending time at the University of San Diego, only to have things fizzle out as the coach of a professional team in the Bay Area. But he found a home and made an instant impact coaching and recruiting at a Power 5 program with a proud tradition that had fallen on hard times in the 21st century. Sometimes, he rubbed people the wrong way with his intense personality.

Twitter? He was all about it. Taking his shirt off? Just say the word. The 50-something coach was brash and unapologetically himself.

OK, who did I just describe? Was that Eric Musselman or Jim Harbaugh?

Honestly, it could’ve been either. That’s a weird, cross-sport, cross-region comp to make, but it’s sort of bizarre to see the similarities between their paths.

Of course, Harbaugh is the bigger household name (for now) because he’s been relevant in the football for most of the past 4 decades. Musselman has never been more relevant than he is right now. That’s an odd thing to say about someone who was the head coach for 2 different NBA franchises, but his popularity is reaching a new peak after leading Arkansas to consecutive trips to the Elite 8.

Hopefully, though, now is where any Musselman-Harbaugh comparison stops. Let me explain.

The worst-kept secret of this coaching cycle was that Harbaugh was a legitimate candidate to become the next head coach with the Minnesota Vikings. After spending 7 years trying to rebuild his alma mater, Harbaugh admitted that there was still that itch he wanted to scratch at the professional ranks after the way things ended with the San Francisco 49ers. It was a messy divorce after just 4 years, despite the fact that he led the franchise to 3 NFC Championship appearances.

When the Vikings speculation began, it wasn’t necessarily new that Harbaugh was rumored to be a candidate for an NFL gig. Plenty of NFL vacancies came and went without any sort of significant developments linking Harbaugh back to the professional ranks. This time, however, Harbaugh’s well-documented interview with the Vikings came on National Signing Day. Ultimately, the Vikings opted to go with Los Angeles Rams offensive coordinator Kevin O’Connell, and Harbaugh somewhat surprisingly returned to Michigan.

“Ultimately, I decided this is where I wanted to be,” Harbaugh said during a news conference to discuss spring practice. “And really, a lot of gratitude for that.”

By “decided,” Harbaugh conveniently left out the part where the Vikings interviewed him but reportedly never offered him the job.

So how does that relate to Musselman, you ask?

As long as Musselman is winning games at Arkansas, his name will surface at the NBA level. At least he should. He has an eye for talent after decades in the business. Not every coach can determine that guys from the University of South Dakota or Jacksonville University are going to develop into perfect fits in their system. Musselman was humbled and forced to tweak his philosophies over the years.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see tweets like this for the foreseeable future:

It’s been 2 decades since a 37-year-old Musselman got his first NBA head coaching gig with the Golden State Warriors. He got 2 years in Golden State and 1 with the Sacramento Kings. There were some frustrating circumstances surrounding both situations, some of which were in his control (a DUI in 2006) and some of which were outside of his control (Gilbert Arenas got hurt and left Golden State after Musselman’s first year because of a strange loophole with 2nd-round picks being unrestricted free agents after 2 seasons).

Right now, nothing suggests that Musselman has a Harbaugh-like itch to scratch at the professional ranks. He clearly has a passion for recruiting, as we saw with him landing a commitment from his third McDonald’s All-American in the 2022 class (5-star point guard Anthony Black) and firing off this tweet:

You better believe Musselman is still hungry after beating Gonzaga and reaching another Elite 8. Why wouldn’t he be?

Surely Musselman’s NBA background is a nice selling point on the recruiting trail. The guy knows what he’s talking about after 3 decades coaching in various leagues from coast to coast.

There are some similarities and some key differences with Musselman and Harbaugh (besides the fact that they’re different human beings).

One similarity they share is that both have athletic directors who have done right by them. Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel was the one who was willing to restructure Harbaugh’s contract after a disastrous 2020 season when many assumed would be his last. Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek was willing to give Musselman a new deal after his breakout season in 2020-21.

There’s no guarantee that Yurachek and Musselman walk stride for stride together the next decade, but at the very least, it would take an unforeseen development for that relationship to be at the root of a potential return to the NBA. Then again, seeing eye to eye with Manuel didn’t stop Harbaugh from pursuing the Vikings gig. Theoretically, Musselman could be on perfectly good terms with Yurachek and still consider the possibility of a return to the NBA.

But there’s a key difference here, and it’s one that should make Arkansas fans sleep a bit easier.

Think of the timing of Harbaugh’s interview with the Vikings. It came just after he finally got Michigan over the hump against Ohio State. The Wolverines won the Big Ten Championship and reached the Playoff … only to get pummeled by eventual-national champion Georgia.

Did Harbaugh see his ceiling at Michigan? And did he realize that 7 years in, Michigan still doesn’t (and maybe never will) have enough talent to win a national title? It’s certainly possible. Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly seemed to recognize they were at programs with a ceiling.

Harbaugh was reportedly interested in an NFL return because he wanted to win a Super Bowl. He was 1 score short of accomplishing that feat at the end of the 2012 season, and on 2 other occasions, he lost 1-score games in the NFC Championship. Harbaugh had 3 instances in the NFL in which he got closer to winning it all than he did this past season with his best Michigan team in his 7 years in Ann Arbor.

That’s a totally different situation from Musselman’s. Part of that is because the NCAA Tournament, while grueling and darn near impossible to win, isn’t designed to show a program’s ceiling like the Playoff is. Musselman has the No. 2 overall recruiting class with 3 McDonald’s All-Americans. He just assembled a team with a mishmash of transfers and 4-star recruits who made consecutive Elite 8 trips. By the way, the only other SEC coaches to do that in the 21st century were John Calipari and Billy Donovan.

We don’t know Musselman’s ceiling. This isn’t college football, where only 6 programs have won a Playoff game in 8-years of the 4-team system. This is college basketball, where we’ve had 9 consecutive NCAA Tournaments have at least 1 team seeded No. 5 or worse in the Final Four. Basketball isn’t an arms race in the way that football is, which is also why it can sometimes spit out far more random results.

It’s hard to envision a scenario in which Musselman leaves Arkansas unless he feels he’s maxed out the talent and resources available, and he gets a Brad Stevens-like opportunity to coach for a premier NBA franchise. In other words, it would probably take a whole lot more than the Sacramento Kings calling up Musselman and asking him to come back to the franchise that fired him after 1 season.

But Musselman can’t help people who want to connect dots. That’s a sign that he’s doing something right. Even if Musselman squashes the NBA speculation at every turn, it doesn’t mean it’ll be easy for Arkansas fans to drown out the noise.

All they can hope is that the Musselman-Harbaugh comps end with their propensity for being shirtless in public.