Tony Sanchez will meet Jim Harbaugh on the field today at Michigan Stadium, when his UNLV Rebels face Harbaugh's Wolverines. But he has met him before.
He was sitting in a hallway at Stanford around 2008, minding his own business, when the Cardinal football coach walked down the hall with his usual tunnel vision — and suddenly stopped and asked who he was.
"I'm the coach at Cal High (in San Ramon, Calif.)," Sanchez told Harbaugh.
With a decade of high-school coaching experience, but in only his fifth year as a head coach, Sanchez was trying to absorb as much as he could.