Bajakian Great Fit For Harasymiak & UMass
New UMass offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian's vision looks to be perfectly aligned with head coach Joe Harasymiak's.
Mike Bajakian didn’t know everything about UMass or Joe Harasymiak, but he knew enough to be intrigued when his phone was lit up by a text message this past December.
Bajakian only knew Harasymiak from going head-to-head against him a couple times when he was offensive coordinator at Northwestern and Harasymiak was the defensive coordinator at Minnesota and then Rutgers.
Still, when Harasymiak was named head coach at UMass earlier that month, Bajakian sent him a text recommending a young defensive coach he’d worked with at Utah for Harasymiak’s new Minutemen staff.
“A couple of days later Joe texted back and said, ‘Hey, the defensive staff is full,’” Bajakian recalls.
“‘But can we talk about the offensive coordinator position?’”
Bajakian had spent much of his past few weeks preparing as a finalist for the head coaching job at Central Michigan and when he didn’t get that gig, he hadn’t really had much time to consider his next move. But preparation for his interviews at Central Michigan revealed to him that the MAC was about to change.
“I did a lot of research on the Mid-American Conference and in all of my research, everything kept pointing to UMass at the top of all these rankings as it relates to facilities, as it relates to NIL, as it relates to coaching staff budget, etc.,” Bajakian says.
“I literally made lists of where the teams in the MAC ranked in these different categories and it kept coming back UMass at the top.”
So, when Harasymiak’s text came through, Bajakian’s mind immediately went back to those lists he’d made.
“Where they seemed to be positioned to enter the MAC was very attractive to me,” Bajakian says.
There were other pros as well.
Bajakian is a Northeast guy, having grown up in New Jersey and attended Williams College, 90 minutes northwest of Amherst. UMass would be the closest he’d work to home since 2000, when he coached quarterbacks at Sacred Heart in Fairfield, Conn.
And he knew from competing against him that Harasymiak’s defenses were well-coached.
“You could tell by the way they played the game that our philosophies would align,” he says. “It just really seemed like a good match for what I wanted to do and what he wanted to do.
“Part of why I thought our philosophies would align is what strikes you about the schemes we faced when going against him; schematically simple with an emphasis on effort and execution.”
That’s precisely what Bajakian wants his offenses to embody.
“How can we simplify enough for our guys to go out and execute at a high level, at a high speed and with maximum effort?” he says. “I know that Coach H stressed those things at Minnesota and at Rutgers because I played against him.”
Aside from those games as opponents, Bajakian and Harasymiak’s paths never really crossed in any meaningful ways, but both are from the Garden State and know many of the same people.
“He did his research on me,” Bajakian says. “I did my research on him and I thought, ‘You know what? This is the kind of coach that I want to work for. This is the kind of person to start with, the kind of person I want to work for and work with. And philosophically, the kind of coach that I thought would align with what I value in the game.’”
The alignment is obvious.
Harasymiak said the primary factors in his search for assistant coaches were what kind of people they were and how they taught the game.
“That's what I went to school for is to be a teacher and that's what coaching is,” Harasymiak said last month. “I think who you are and how you teach are the two most important things that we look for.”
We heard what kind of person Bajakian is from his old high school head coach, Fred Stengel, and his philosophy on teaching is basically identical to Harasymiak’s.
Longtime Michigan head coach Lloyd Carr is another of Bajakian’s mentors.
“Coach Carr started out as a teacher and a coach and similar to him, I've always thought that deep down I'm just an educator, I'm just a teacher,” says Bajakian.
“I may be coaching football, but teaching is what we do. (Carr) always approached coaching from the perspective of a teacher and I thought that was very beneficial.”
He may not have gotten the head job in Mount Pleasant, Mich., and he may not have been able to get the gig for that young coach either…
But Mike Bajakian was able to get close to home, at a program that has all the ingredients to make a big splash as it enters a new era, working for a head coach whose values overlap with his own so much that a Venn Diagram may look like a single circle.