WHO IS LIVING IN RUMORVILLE? WE’RE NOT FORGETTING MICHIGAN’S SCANDALS

Jim Harbaugh is trying a crooked overturn of the truth, but if the Wolverines win a national championship, the fact remains he was suspended six games this season for Big Ten and NCAA wrongdoing

     A fraud was executed on PPP contracts. Understand the dope here? The NCAA has condemned Michigan’s football program of such swindles during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when recruiting violations should be the last subject on a coach’s mind. It doesn’t matter if the NCAA is fading as a football organization because it saw fit to suspend Jim Harbaugh for three games, maybe longer next season.

     Yet, as he prepares for a national championship challenge against Washington, Harbaugh thinks those facts arrive from an outer planet. “I don’t know if you want to live in rumorville or speculation, but we just don’t really have any room to be doing that at this point,” he said Wednesday.

     The Big Ten isn’t fading, holding firm as one of two superpowers in control of college football’s dizzy realignment. In its 127th year of existence, that conference also suspended Harbaugh for three more games because his team was involved in illegal sign-stealing inside dozens of stadiums, defying an in-person edict not to use electronic equipment while spying play calls.

     Yet, as NFL franchises could extend $18-million-a-year offers to sign Harbaugh as a head coach, he believes we’re the ultimate wrongdoers. “Our time is spent elsewhere,” he said.

     What’s happening now is a crooked overturn — or an attempt, anyway. Having finished the season 13-0 and eliminated Alabama in overtime Monday, Harbaugh senses he’ll leave Ann Arbor in glory while the rest of us ignore his lawlessness. That’s because the College Football Playoff system runs on its own ignition and doesn’t care about the NCAA and Big Ten rulings. Even if an infractions committee eventually declares that Michigan must annul victories, the CFP won’t mind if the biggest violator, Connor Stalions, cut off 10 heads on campuses. If so, the group wouldn’t have allowed the Wolverines into the sport’s final four. The banner will remain in the Big House.

     So, Harbaugh will live the rest of his life in rumorville. Never mind that losing coach Nick Saban, who called out his counterpart for corruption last weekend, made a curious remark after quarterback Jalen Milroe was stopped up the middle on the game’s final play. “We called three plays,” Nick Saban said. “One they called timeout, one we called timeout, and the last one that didn’t work. The fact that it didn’t work made it a really bad call. You know what I mean? But we called timeout because we had a bad look. We had a good look on the first one. They must have known it.”

     They must have KNOWN it? That could be complaining from a 72-year-old who has won only one championship in the last six years. Or, was Saban making a crude assumption about a cheater? In the same national media teleconference, Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy let it be known that players weren’t responsible for sending Stalions on dirty travels.

     “We did things the right way as players,” McCarthy said. “It would be very unfortunate (to) not get recognized for all the hard work that we put in and everything we accomplished over this last year. But at the end of the day, you know it's not going to change the amount of accomplishment and the amount of pride for being on this football team. We know the work that we put in, and we know that we did things the right way. Whatever happened, with all the outside controversies, it's out of our control, and whatever the NCAA wants to do is out of our control, but we're going to appreciate the things we did control.”

     Then McCarthy said Michigan was forced to one-up Ohio State in a swirl of sign-stealing, though he said the Buckeyes were doing so — legally. Fascinating. “It’s just a thing about football,” he said, estimating 80 percent of college teams participate. “It’s been around for years. We actually had to adapt because in 2020 or 2019 when Ohio State was stealing our signs — which is legal and they were doing it — we had to get up to the level they were at, and we had to make it an even playing field.”

     Oh, so Michigan had to employ Stalions and his crew — illegally. No wonder McCarthy clarified his comment to the Associated Press. “When I said we need to level the playing field, I meant in terms of how we change our own signs, how we develop our signs and how and when we distribute those changes when we know signs are likely to have been stolen,” he said. Wait, didn’t he said Ohio State was “legal” in his original missive?

     “We do watch so much film and look for those little tendencies and spend like 10, 15 minutes on one clip alone just looking at all the little details,” McCarthy said. “You could say it’s all sign stealing, but there’s a lot more that goes into play, and a lot of stuff that gets masked, a lot of work that gets masked just because of the outside perception of what sign stealing is all about.”

     It’s not about an outside perception. It’s that Michigan brazenly broke a rule and, according to 90 percent of Harbaugh’s college brethren, should face further suspensions. This is a scandal. Don’t tell the Wolverines. “I feel like we just have a high football IQ here at Michigan,” defensive lineman Mason Graham said. “And you know, we go over specific situations multiple times a week, kind of just learning more about the game every day, every meeting, just kind of just building the IQ and being smarter football players all around so we pick up on things faster. Even if it's in-game adjustments stuff, I think little stuff like that film study really helped us this year. We've kind of been working all the way up until this moment. Things happen along the way that don't fall into place. We've overcome a lot of adversity this season. I felt like it's brought us closer together.”

     Next week, Harbaugh either will party or pity. He has hired agent Don Yee to represent him, as Tom Brady did during his playing career, and as ESPN reporter (and Harbaugh insider) Adam Schefter said, he’s waiting for the right NFL offer. It makes sense that the Los Angeles Chargers, who have a quarterback in waiting per Justin Herbert, finally will offer a jackpot and give him the power he wants as a coach and front-office chief.

     In Harbaugh’s world, the NCAA and Big Ten won’t matter then. He will land with a masterpiece contract in L.A., the town of Shohei Ohtani and LeBron James, and he’ll try to take over the football scene from the Rams. He’ll call it the real world.

     I’ll still call it rumorville.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.