The Big Ten Picks a Risky Fight With College Football’s Most Litigious People
The Big Ten’s three-game suspension of Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, which the conference levied on Friday, is one of the splashiest college football stories ever. Which is funny, because there is a strong chance that on pure football terms, it amounts to nothing. The Wolverines are undefeated heading into their first challenging game of the season, at Penn State on Saturday. They look like a buzzsaw. Harbaugh, if Michigan fails to get the suspension held up in court, will still be allowed to coach during the week, just not on game days. And because Harbaugh served a school-imposed three-game suspension to start this season for a completely unrelated matter, Michigan is the best-prepped team in the country to run a game-day operation without the man atop the org chart. The Wolverines can beat Penn State, and anyone else, with Harbaugh watching from his hotel room. (Michigan was already in the air to State College on Friday when the Big Ten made its move.) Against Penn State, Michigan was a 4.5-point favorite before the suspension. It is a 4.5-point favorite now.
The suspension also may amount to nothing because it may not stand up. Michigan lodged an immediate legal response, hoping to find a judge who might stop the suspension from going into effect before kickoff in Happy Valley. (The school already filed for a temporary restraining order, and the judge assigned the case
is a University of Michigan lecturer.) The chances that a Michigan win flips to a loss because of the suspension are low, and the chances the suspension even takes effect are well below 100 percent. An all-time college sports legal and political fight, centered on a juggernaut team trying to win a national title, has hit its apex in early November. And it
probably won’t change the 2023 season at all.
The national championship race will continue as it was before, but the legal fight is both thrilling and revelatory. It’s thrilling because this is the unusual college sports scandal without a real victim. Harbaugh may very well be getting a raw deal here, but for myriad reasons, he’s not a sympathetic figure. Michigan’s players would be getting a terrible shake if his absence ruined their season, but it probably won’t, because the players are too talented for that. College sports’ richest conference is heading down a legal rabbit hole with one of its two most powerful institutions, and the gloves were all the way off even before Michigan accused the Big Ten of handing down the suspension on the Friday of a holiday weekend so that the school couldn’t get a quick injunction to stop it. But this fight isn’t just a popcorn flick. It’s also a real-time effort by 13 Big Ten schools to bring mob justice to a 14th, which might deserve it, by trapping a commissioner who reports to all of them in the middle. And it’s a vivid education in what, exactly, can make college sports’ famously slow gears of justice turn quickly.
The scandal that landed Harbaugh in this predicament
is about sign-stealing. College football lacks the NFL’s radio communication between coaches and players, so teams have small armies of assistants who relay play calls via hand motions and signs. Stealing those signs is an art form, but you’re supposed to do it by poring over publicly available footage of games. Under NCAA rules, you are
not allowed to scout future opponents in person. But Michigan had a veritable network of gofers who were doing just that, apparently at the direction of a support staffer, Connor Stalions, who resigned after the operation came to light. The NCAA and Big Ten say they have mountains of proof, and nobody at Michigan has even tried to make the case that the program’s staff were not engaged in overt NCAA rule-breaking.
Continued….
Jim Harbaugh’s suspension adds a thrilling new wrinkle to this ridiculous scandal.
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