Mark Harlan has had some banner moments and some boneheaded ones in his time at the University of Utah.
When school president Taylor Randall extended Harlan’s contract in 2023, after Utah sports had enjoyed a fantastic collective competitive year, he said: “Mark is one of the top athletic directors in the country. He is the right person at the right time to continue leading our athletics programs as we navigate the changing landscape of college athletics.”
Utah teams won seven conference championships over that 2022-23 year, five in the Pac-12, and the Utes went to the Rose Bowl for the second consecutive year. The athletic director oversaw all the success.
At that time, Harlan called winning “contagious,” and he said that everybody at Utah “wants a piece of it.”
All good.
What everybody at Utah did not want is a lead sports administrator who embarrasses them.
All bad.
Some poet named Alexander Pope famously wrote, “To err is human,” and, indeed, everyone makes mistakes. But everyone isn’t Utah’s AD. Pope’s sentence continued, “to forgive [is] divine.” That, unfortunately for him and for a lot of people who feel connected to all things Utes, makes his erring more egregious, more embarrassing, the forgiving less heavenly. Which is to say, Harlan’s notable blunders have not only adversely affected him, they’ve adversely affected and reflected poorly on the school for which he works.
The man’s not the devil himself. As mentioned, he’s accomplished positive things, too, but the negatives are glaring, the latest of which happened a few days ago, when the athletic director took the time to ridicule on social media a teenager who previously committed to play football at Utah, but recently changed his mind — after Kyle Whittingham and other Ute coaches were hired at Michigan. Salesi Moa, a top prep prospect, was the target of that tweet, which, after substantial backlash, subsequently was taken down.
A high-profile administrator at Utah should know better than to engage in such pettiness, such nonsense. A young recruit, faced with one of the biggest decisions of his early life, a recruit with options all around, a recruit who thought when he agreed to join Utah football that certain coaches would be in place, coaches who now are gone, decided to follow them to Ann Arbor. Horrors.
Harlan couldn’t leave it alone, even as someone online pointed out that the AD himself a few years back had bolted to Utah from South Florida shortly after signing an extension there.
And as most folks around here remember, Harlan has previously engaged in other foolish behaviors.
His interaction with officials near the end of Utah’s football game against BYU in the 2024 season, going berserk arguing a holding flag that upon later review turned out to be the proper call, running onto the field, barking like an angry Rottweiler, and then hurriedly assembling a postgame whine session to reporters, is his most openly egregious moment.
He stared into cameras, speaking into microphones, moaning and groaning his way into infamy to such a degree that you likely recall much of what he said, but let’s run through it again:
“I’ve been an athletic director for 12 years. This game was absolutely stolen from us. We were excited about being in the Big 12, but tonight I am not. We won this game. Someone else stole it from us. I’m very disappointed. I will talk to the commissioner. This is not fair to our team. I am disgusted by the professionalism of the officiating crew tonight.”
Who said that? Yeah, Randall’s “top athletic director.”
After it happened, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark talked to Harlan, reprimanding him and fining him $40,000 for his boohooing.
Harlan issued a statement thereafter that said he recognized “that there are more appropriate times and avenues to express … concerns, and I accept the consequences of my decision.”
His full statement was more an acknowledgement than it was an apology. Either way, he humiliated himself, his athletic department and his university. Many of his team’s fans, as well.
Wait, there’s more.
Other Harlan mistakes: The athletic director was less than helpful in the closing chapter of the Pac-12’s implosion, and showed little enthusiasm for Utah joining the Big 12, setting a dark tone through that transition. He also misread and bungled, along with other powers that be, the end of the Whittingham era at Utah, nudging the longtime coach toward the door, which then led to coaches and players leaving, disrupting Utah football in a big way. It didn’t have to go down like that. But it did.
And now, publicly calling out young recruits who go a different way … well, that’s both boorish and beneath the position he holds.
Harlan can say and do whatever he wants. It’s a free country, or at least it used to be. He can and should celebrate his banner moments. As for his boneheaded ones, as he represents a stellar university and that university’s sports teams, he might want to back off. And when he can’t manage to do that, apologizing for that lack of control might mitigate the damage. And bring a little forgiveness.