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topicnews · August 29, 2024

Michigan football won its national title at the expense of its reputation

Michigan football won its national title at the expense of its reputation

Matt Hayes
| USA TODAY Sports Network

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Let me take you back to a more realistic time, when the snooty Michigan football team was furious because a coach was steering the pristine football program deep into the waters of NCAA violations.

By practicing too much.

And now, 15 years and what feels like a lifetime of mediocre football later, Michigan is trying to defend its long-coveted 2023 national championship — and the questionable structure it has built over the past four years — at any cost. Reputation doesn’t matter.

The days of standing on the shining hill and proclaiming we’re better than you are long gone. Michigan is no different than any other run-of-the-mill con.

The shell game goes back and forth, but not a pea in sight. The little scam is paying off, folks.

Keep your hands and feet in the car. The ride is bumpy and explains this dirty mess.

In the past 11 months alone, Michigan has suspended its football coach for three games, then suspended him again for three more games, clashed with the NCAA and the Big Ten over the conduct of investigations into multiple rules violations in two separate cases, lost its head coach to the NFL, promoted an assistant to head coach despite his one-game suspension in 2023 for his role in the first NCAA investigation – and hired him despite knowing he would play a major role in the second (still ongoing) NCAA investigation.

If you think that’s a lot, it’s because we haven’t even begun to peel back the layers of our shameless disregard.

The NCAA’s second investigation into alleged early surveillance of future opponents and the public circus that accompanies it — and even a Netflix documentary — takes us back to the last time Michigan grappled with NCAA rule violations by coach Rich Rodriguez. When then-Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman solemnly admitted her humiliation and embarrassment and athletic director Dave Brandon regretfully said, “Nobody wants to be found guilty of this kind of activity.”

Again, because you practiced too much.

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Meanwhile, back in today’s fantasy land, current Michigan president Santa Ono defended former coach Jim Harbaugh at every opportunity, taking to social media to support his coach, the same man the NCAA says “misled” investigators in the first NCAA probe into illegal contact with players during the 2020 Covid season.

And then there’s athletic director Warde Manuel, whose defense of all things Harbaugh was downright hilarious in the home stretch of the national championship season. It’s one thing to take on the NCAA over its silly rules and structure, but it’s quite another to take on your own league and its new commissioner over an employee who allegedly hatched a plan to scout opponents — giving Michigan an undeniable competitive advantage.

The same Manuel hired current coach Sherrone Moore despite knowing full well that Moore had already been suspended once for standing up to the NCAA during the initial investigation. Manuel also knew that Moore exchanged 52 text messages between himself and his former employee Connor Stalions the day after Stalions’ alleged scouting scheme was exposed, according to the NCAA.

And while we’re on the subject of Stalions and his alleged scheme, I want to make one thing very clear: There isn’t a coach in college football who doesn’t know the contribution each and every member of the team makes on the sidelines on game day.

If you believe that the obsessively controlling Harbaugh would allow any random low-level employee to infiltrate his program and trust him with in-game decisions without knowing everything about said low-level employee, then you are the same person who believes in a grand conspiracy that kept Florida State from making the playoffs.

That’s what happens when a program sells its soul for a championship, when desperation leads to deception and, worse, foul play and rule-breaking, when chasing (and eventually catching and overtaking) archrival Ohio State is more important than the basic moral agility of a “Michigan Man.”

There is no better explanation and confirmation of the extent of the deception than the NCAA’s initial investigation into Michigan. Earlier this spring, the NCAA imposed three years of probation on Michigan and Harbaugh received a four-year hearing order in response to illegal contact with players – and, even worse, Harbaugh’s “misleading” of NCAA investigators.

In June of that year, months before the Big Ten resumed play in October 2020, Harbaugh and Big Ten coaches discussed the unique circumstances of the pandemic in a conference call. At the time, Harbaugh accused Ohio State coach Ryan Day – the same Day whose teams had beaten Michigan every season since Harbaugh returned to his alma mater in 2015 – of illegal contact with players.

That’s exactly what Harbaugh and his team did at the same time and were later sanctioned by the NCAA for it.

And who would have thought? In his first public comment on the NCAA cases since leaving Michigan, Harbaugh stood tall and puffed out his chest earlier this month. Just like a Michigan man.

“Never lie, never cheat, never steal,” Harbaugh said during a weekly Los Angeles Chargers press conference. “That lesson was taught to me.”

Says the coach who lied, cheated and, yes, stole signals.

The brief deception was worth it, folks. Reputation doesn’t matter.

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