When Jim Harbaugh took over the Stanford program back in 2007, the program needed a culture change. One of Harbaugh's assistant at that time was Syracuse head coach Scott Shafer, who served as the assistant head coach / defensive coordinator that inaugural season.
In a Q&A released earlier today, Shafer talked about how Jim Harbaugh doing push-ups during team stretches helped to start the process of changing the mindset of a team that had spent years at the bottom of the conference.
Shafer explains that right before practice, as players were going through warm ups and stretching, Harbaugh would go out in front of everyone and start doing push-ups, and since Shafer and Harbaugh were on different sides of the ball, they naturally talked trash to each other throughout the day and especially at practice.
"We were trying to foster that environment because the Stanford kids were the opposite of a lot of other kids at that time." Shafer explained. "They were downtrodden and hadn't won many games. They were almost too, "Yes sir, no sir." We were like, Hey, we've got to get these kids to loosen up.
As a staff, they structured practices where everything revolved around competing. To no one's surprise, sometimes Harbaugh would even get in on a contact drill with no pads on to amp up the energy.
One day, while Harbaugh was doing his push-ups, a player asked to Shafer, "Coach, are you going to let him do that? He's trying to show you up doing push-ups." Shafer says he then ran up next to Harbaugh and started pumping out his own. They started off at 25 and added one every day. By the end of the season they were "150 of the worst push-ups you ever saw".
While there is a ton more that goes into turning around a program than that, it's a great testament to Harbaugh and Shafer as coaches. They recognized what the program, and the kids needed at the time, and weren't afraid to get their hands dirty and do something ridiculous to get things rolling.