Last summer, amid the buzz surrounding Michigan’s football season, ESPN’s Carrie Brzezinski (Class of 2000) was at an off-site training session in downtown Manhattan. As the group was breaking for lunch, a co-worker ran upstairs with an urgent message: “Brzezinski, Harbaugh’s having lunch downstairs!”
Jim Harbaugh, the very reason for the excitement around the Wolverines, was with his wife, Sarah, at the French café across the street.
Even though she thought to herself, “From what I know of him, he might bite my head off,” Brzezinski rushed down to introduce herself, welcome him back to the Michigan family and talk football.
At first, Harbaugh kept the reason he was in New York a secret — the timing struck Brzezinski as strange since it was just a few weeks from the start of football season.
Another co-worker of Brzezinksi’s — a San Francisco 49ers fan who joined her to greet the Harbaughs — boasted on Brzezinski’s behalf: She oversees the creative department at ESPN (she is vice president, CreativeWorks and “SportsCenter” marketing).
Sarah then encouraged Harbaugh to share the reason he was in the city. Maybe Carrie could help, Sarah told her husband.
So Harbaugh pulled out a leather attaché, put on his reading glasses and handed Brzezinski a script. He was in town to work on the hype video that would play at the Big House as the Wolverines enter the field.
“Now I find myself making edits, asking questions to Jim Harbaugh,” Brzezinski recalled.
She noticed the piece was scripted for James Earl Jones, a famous Michigan alum who agreed to do the voice over for the video.
“How did you get James Earl Jones?” Brzezinski asked.
“I just called him, Carrie,” Harbaugh replied matter-of-factly.
Brzezinski suggested using video footage of Jones to establish him as the personality in the piece. Harbaugh had not thought of that and asked her if she could help get a camera crew together to shoot Jones.
Brzezinski made a call to her good friend Jon Paley, a fellow alum (Class of 1995) who runs The Vault, a creative agency ESPN partners with, and within 90 minutes, Paley had a crew ready to capture the footage of Jones.
Over the next month, Brzezinski consulted with Headcase VR, the creative agency for the video, and Harbaugh’s son, Jay, with edits and feedback on the piece.
“I would get texts from Jim Harbaugh: ‘Thanks for your help, Carrie,’” she said.
“I got the chance to talk football with Harbaugh that day and a few phone calls following that as he asked for my two cents on the edits,” she beams. “It was something simple, but it ended up being one of the coolest days of my career.”
— Marcus DiNitto
