Where Jim Harbaugh Might Coach Next Season

Which team is most likely to hire Harbaugh?

Grant Cohn | Jan 10, 2024

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San Francisco 49ers

It seems Jim Harbaugh could return to the NFL in 2024.

He just won the College Football National Championship at Michigan and hired NFL agent Don Yee, who also represents Sean Payton.

Which team is most likely to hire Harbaugh?

The Chargers immediately come to mind because they have an elite quarterback in Justin Herbert, and the NFL is a quarterback driven league. For Harbaugh to leave a great college program, he'd be unwise to join a team that doesn't have a great quarterback, because the draft always is a crapshoot, and if he tries to take a college quarterback in Round 1, he easily could end up with the next Zach Wilson or the next Justin Fields.

The Chargers are a great fit for Harbaugh because he played for them late in his career, plus he coached at the University of San Diego, so he has California ties. Presumably, his family would be open to moving to Los Angeles.

But the Chargers are a historically cheap franchise that might not want to pay Harbaugh what he's worth, which is more than most head coaches. Plus the Chargers are in the AFC, as is Harbaugh's brother John, who coaches the Ravens. It's possible Jim would rather coach in the NFC.

One sleeper team to watch is the Dallas Cowboys. If they lose in Round 1 of the playoffs to the Green Bay Packers, Mike McCarthy could get fired. And if he gets fired, the Cowboys certainly could afford Harbaugh. Plus they have an MVP-caliber quarterback in Dak Prescott whom Harbaugh might want to work with.

If Dallas were to hire Harbaugh, the Cowboys and the 49ers once again would be the best rivalry in sports.

Jerry Jones needs to make this happen.

Published Jan 10, 2024

GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.