[CTcard]

It's interesting to watch the B.ears reassess Harbaugh.  "I remember when we used to laugh at him for drafting so many Tight Ends"

It's not particular to our friends across the bay, but I am always fascinated how myths grow and eventually everyone knows various stuff - that is in the end kind-of-true at best.

Harbaugh did like TEs. That has morphed into pontificating that Harbaugh started the Stanford turn around by recruiting a ton of TEs and turning them into other positions - particularly fast OL. There is even a specific post over there noting that in his first year Harbaugh signed 9 TEs that ended up populating the roster at all sorts of positions. Strangely, it seems that 9 isn't even intended as an overblown reference to "a lot", they seem to actually mean 9.

While recruiting TEs at all made Harbaugh an outlier, what actually happened with Harbaugh's classes was:
2007 - 1 TE, Coby Fleener
2008 - 1 TE, Konrad Reuland (officially a JC transfer)
2009 - 4 TE, Jordan Najvar, Ryan Hewitt, Levine Toilolo, Zach Ertz
2010 - 1 TE, Davis Dudchock

Harbaugh's crazy-for-TEs reputation was really just about one year.
Not a single one of these guys played for Stanford as an interior lineman.
The only one who switched positions was Hewitt - who was always a bit of a hybrid.
The overall hit rate was pretty good.
And of course we found ways to actually use a lot of TEs.

[CTcard]

It's interesting to watch the B.ears reassess Harbaugh.  "I remember when we used to laugh at him for drafting so many Tight Ends"

It's not particular to our friends across the bay, but I am always fascinated how myths grow and eventually everyone knows various stuff - that is in the end kind-of-true at best.

Harbaugh did like TEs. That has morphed into pontificating that Harbaugh started the Stanford turn around by recruiting a ton of TEs and turning them into other positions - particularly fast OL. There is even a specific post over there noting that in his first year Harbaugh signed 9 TEs that ended up populating the roster at all sorts of positions. Strangely, it seems that 9 isn't even intended as an overblown reference to "a lot", they seem to actually mean 9.

While recruiting TEs at all made Harbaugh an outlier, what actually happened with Harbaugh's classes was:
2007 - 1 TE, Coby Fleener
2008 - 1 TE, Konrad Reuland (officially a JC transfer)
2009 - 4 TE, Jordan Najvar, Ryan Hewitt, Levine Toilolo, Zach Ertz
2010 - 1 TE, Davis Dudchock

Harbaugh's crazy-for-TEs reputation was really just about one year.
Not a single one of these guys played for Stanford as an interior lineman.
The only one who switched positions was Hewitt - who was always a bit of a hybrid.
The overall hit rate was pretty good.
And of course we found ways to actually use a lot of TEs.