Daniel Uthman

USA TODAY Sports

EUGENE, Ore. — On a January day in 1995, Willie Taggart came home from track practice at Manatee High School and was handed a phone message by one of his sisters.

“Somebody named Jim Harbaugh from Western Kentucky called you,” Taggart remembers her saying. “Here’s his number and he wants you to call him back.”

Taggart’s family lived in an apartment in Palmetto, Fla., at the time and did not have long distance calling. So Willie took the number to the nearest pay phone and called Harbaugh collect.

“He answered the phone and we started talking and he asked me if I knew who he was,” Taggart said recently. “I said, ‘The only Jim Harbaugh I know plays for the Chicago Bears.’ ”

“That’s me,” Harbaugh said.

“Yeah, right,” Taggart said.

“No seriously,” Harbaugh said. “Here’s my dad right here, you can ask my dad.”

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Harbaugh’s father Jack had recently completed his sixth season as Western Kentucky’s football coach but had spent the months since politicking to keep the school from dropping the sport. A five-to-four vote to drop shifted to five-to-four to keep, but on the condition that the Hilltoppers cut 15 scholarships, two assistant coach positions and half of their football budget.

“The program looked like it would probably be best if they dropped it, because it was going to die a slow death rather than a fast death,” Jack Harbaugh said.

Jim, who was passing through Bowling Green, Ky., on a drive to an offseason home in Orlando, saw how dire the situation had become. And to the surprise of no one who has observed him since, he had a novel idea of how he could help.

“What if I came as a full-time coach at no pay and signed a contract, and then I can’t be with you during the season, but I can recruit?” Jim said, according to his father. “I’m going to Florida tomorrow, and I can get on the recruits.”

While Jack sought approval from the school president, Jim took and passed the NCAA recruiting certification test. “Did very well on it, I might add,” Jack said. “And pay was not a problem, because there was none.”

By the time he returned to his father’s office, Jim was a Hilltoppers assistant. On the desk was a packet Western Kentucky had bought that listed the top 150 players in the I-4 corridor of Florida between Orlando and Tampa. The first name Jim saw was a quarterback named Willie Taggart.

The first recruiting experience of Jim Harbaugh’s coaching career was about to become the only recruiting experience of Taggart’s playing career that mattered.

Successful college football recruiting involves two key factors: strong relationships and a strong work ethic. And as Harbaugh and Taggart celebrate their first National Signing Day as Power Five college football coaching contemporaries, the relationship and effort that began with that collect call continue today.

“I'm following the blueprint,” said Taggart, who spent 12 seasons as a player and assistant coach under Jack Harbaugh before joining Jim for three seasons as running backs coach at Stanford. “I took the blueprint and put my own spin on it a little bit, but the base, the foundation, everything we do is pretty much what you see (Jim) Harbaugh doing (at Michigan).”

Renewed emphasis

Taggart hasn’t yet jumped in a swimming pool to celebrate a commitment or planned a trip to Rome for his team, but in less than two months as head coach at Oregon, he has shown “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind” — to borrow a Harbaugh family phrase — when it comes to recruiting.

“I love it,” he said. “I love recruiting and I hate that we're only allowed to go out on a limited time, unlike the assistant coaches. I think the head coaches should be able to go out a lot more than what we do, but it's great. You get a chance each year to meet a new family, new friends, and probably the most important thing, you get to change somebody's life every year.”

Brandon Huffman, national recruiting director for Scout, said Taggart has changed Oregon recruiting for the better in a variety of ways in a short time. Beyond hiring a staff of assistant coaches known for their recruiting acumen, he has used social media to send subtle clues of his travels on the recruiting trail. He and the staff have offered numerous class of 2018 prospects, nearly all of whom respond by sharing the Ducks’ logo and brand across social media themselves.

“And it's no surprise,” Huffman said. “He comes from the Harbaugh coaching tree, and nobody enjoys recruiting like Harbaugh does. So Taggart's got that same energy, that same emotion, and I think this reminds me a lot of how Harbaugh his first year he recruited to Stanford, they were coming off a one-win season or a winless season and he offered kids that couldn't even spell Stanford. It was just to try to get Stanford talked about again.

“All of a sudden kids were talking about Stanford, and it's crazy how quickly he got the tables turned there.”

The open recruiting period leading to signing day was not without challenges for Oregon, however. In addition to striving to make up ground with the 2017 class, two incidents in back-to-back weeks forced the Ducks to as much explaining as selling.

First, three Oregon players were hospitalized in serious condition from overexertion in an offseason team workout under the direction of new strength and condition coach Irele Oderinde, who was subsequently suspended for a month without pay and given a new supervisor outside the football team. Then, early on Jan. 22, less than a week after his hiring, co-offensive coordinator David Reaves was arrested for driving under the influence of intoxicants. Oregon is in the process of terminating his contract.

Taggart said the staff reached out to committed prospects immediately after learning about Reaves’ incident because they didn’t want them to hear it from other sources. Visiting prospects and their families, meanwhile, spent part of their time on campus in a “players panel”, a coach-free forum where high school players and their parents can ask any question they wish of current Ducks players.

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“We knew a lot of people would use it against us,” Taggart said. “So the big thing is being honest and be up front with them and not try to hide anything or cover anything up, because it's not worth it. I think in each situation we did the right thing as a university.

“Unless you're doing something malicious, that's when you try to hide something, but in either of those situations there was nothing we were doing malicious. In Reaves' case, he made a bad decision, and it was a learning lesson for everyone — our players included. It's about making good decisions, and that's something that's important to me that we have good mentors for our players. And I tell each and every last one of our staff, you can't be on our staff if you're not a good mentor to our players. And I'm not going to budge on that one.”

Huffman said Oregon should feel confident in being able to close this recruiting cycle with a national top-25 or top-30 class considering the two controversies and the mere six weeks it had to solidify its 2017 group of signees. He credits Taggart’s recruiting emphasis and approach for that.

“He knew that Oregon is still hot a name, it's still a brand, and even though they were not good this year, they're not far removed from the Heisman trophy winner and playing in the national championship game,” Huffman said. “He was able to capitalize that it's still Oregon, it's still a Nike school. While it's a one-year blip on the radar, they quickly moved to make a change, and he's really hitting the pavement hard and keeping that fresh in their mind.”

Proven practice

Taggart assistants know what it means to hit the pavement hard. And he makes them put it in writing to prove it.

Mike Sanford, Western Kentucky’s first-year head coach and an assistant to Taggart in 2010, said that prior to the six-week spring evaluation period, Taggart had each assistant fill out a form of the eight to 10 high schools they would visit each day. Then he held them to it, like a contract. “Some schools are an hour apart,” Sanford said. “Do the math; it’s pretty challenging.”

It’s also rewarding, Sanford said. That experience helped Sanford and in turn Western Kentucky forge relationships with coaches in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and the rest of the region. And visiting four times as many schools as other teams might in a single day? “You can actually uncover some talent doing that,” Sanford said.

“The year I spent with him in Western Kentucky in 2010, I feel like I got my undergrad, my master’s and my doctorate in how to recruit. One thing I thought Willie did great with our staff was to really push the envelope in terms of, quite frankly, how hard we worked as assistant coaches.”

Depending on whether one’s role in college football is to wear maize and blue, to coach a Power Five program or sit on one of the many committees that examine recruiting practices Harbaugh’s envelope pushing can turn a person into a fan, friend or foe.

As a teen-ager, Taggart’s first intuition was that something was fishy. Jack Harbaugh recalls Taggart being so convinced it was a high school teammate pranking him that Taggart said, “Why don’t bring Mike Ditka along with you? I’ll be here.”

The following Tuesday, Jim was there in Manatee’s cafeteria during Taggart’s school lunch period. When they walked out of the Manatee fieldhouse after school, 60 people were there to greet them with Michigan Wolverines and Chicago Bears. And later at the Taggarts’ apartment, Harbaugh joined the family for dinner, his recruiting pitch and a game of catch with Taggart’s father.

“You would think Jim would be nervous, but it was like he was at home,” Taggart said. “And I think everyone appreciated that more than anything. He was just like one of the guys.

“We just hit it off from there and became best of friends, and I always leaned on him and to be honest with you he's been my role model. I've been trying to be like Jim Harbaugh since I met him. And I really think I've had a lot of success by doing that.”

Since then Taggart and Harbaugh have been in each other’s weddings, and Harbaugh has made periodic visits to the Taggart family home for cookouts and fellowship even when Willie was elsewhere.

Both men have made hundreds of visits to other families in other houses across the country in the intervening years. But that first interaction set the precedent and practice.

“It started from the very beginning, the circumstance with Jim finding his name and he becoming his number one recruit,” Jack Harbaugh said. “Jim does the sleepovers and climbs trees and all the different things that he does, but he was doing that back then. It's amazing how that whole thing is tied together with his first recruit to how he recruits now.”

Contributing: Nicole Auerbach from Bowling Green, Ky.