Inevitable

 You saw this jailbreak coming, if you didn't bleed maize-and-blue. Jim Harbaugh was always going back to the NFL, because too many people there wanted him and he was too successful there, And there was little reason left to stay at Michigan, no matter how big a wad the university threw at him.

He'd done what he came to Ann Arbor to do, which is bring the Wolverines a national title. He'd also been suspended half the championship season for various hijinks that happened on his watch, And it's likely the NCAA wasn't done with the school yet.

None of that will be an issue for Harbaugh in Los Angeles, where the chronically underachieving Chargers have an A-list quarterback and a lot of other juicy pieces. It's a scenario all but hand-delivered for a guy like Harbaugh, whose reputation for resurrecting tumbledown organizations in a hurry is well established.

Even a decade after leaving San Francisco to answer the call of his alma mater, it's doubtful anyone's forgotten what he did there. He took a 49ers franchise that had missed the playoffs eight straight years and put them in the Super Bowl in four years. The 49ers went 44-19-1 on Harbaugh's watch and reached the NFC championship game three times.

It took him a bit longer at Michigan, but eventually he got the Wolverines there, even if he didn't do it clean. But in his last season the Wolverines ran the table with a school-record 15-0 record, beat Alabama in an epic CFP semifinal and then handled undefeated Washington with ease in the title game.

Lots of Michigan diehards were convinced it was the beginning of a Harbaugh dynasty, especially when Michigan reportedly offered to make him the highest-paid coach in college football history. One of those diehards, just a few days ago, told me "He's not going anywhere," and then proceeded to lay out why: The family loved Ann Arbor, and the NCAA had already taken Harbaugh and Michigan off any additional hooks, and the interviews with the Chargers, Falcons and others were just Harbaugh's yearly flirtations to drive up his price.

It all made perfect sense. Until it didn't.

Until, of course, you understood Harbaugh was never going to be a college football lifer -- he'd already jumped from the former to the pros once -- and that the national championship was the perfect place to close this particular book. And whether or not the NCAA is done with Michigan over the Connor Stalions illegal scouting scheme sounds only like more whistling past the graveyard by the Michigan faithful.

Maybe the Wolverines are in the clear. Maybe they're not. But why would Harbaugh stick around to find out?

He wouldn't, of course. And didn't.