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 14^th, 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.

What the Big Ten and NCAA lack is any evidence that Harbaugh directed the scheme or even knew about it. He may well have known; it would be naïve to take at face value any claim by any head coach that he had no sense of such a sprawling operation happening in his own football house. NCAA rules are built to give coaches little wiggle room: The association can, and often does, penalize head coaches for not exercising proper oversight of their own programs.

But the NCAA isn’t the organization throwing the book at Harbaugh. The Big Ten is, and the conference is doing so on a timeline of fast fast fast. It hasn’t cleared up why it needs to move so quickly. Stalions is gone, and Michigan is not running an illegal sign-stealing operation right now unless the program is filled with the absolute dumbest crooks in the entire world. Establishing how much competitive advantage they gained is impossible, and they certainly didn’t gain any against the three remaining teams they play in the regular season, because they haven’t played them yet. It strains credulity that Michigan, which has ripped every Big Ten opponent so far limb from limb, won games this year because of the cheating.

But the Big Ten is a political organism, and the commissioner, Tony Petitti, reports to 14 bosses. Approximately 13 of them are furious with Michigan, or at least see blood in the water. Petitti, according to all kinds of reporting and the public testimony of various athletic directors and coaches, has been hearing from a chorus of his member schools that he needs to act against Michigan and do it swiftly. Michigan’s flagrant violations of NCAA rules do not violate any specific Big Ten policies. But the Big Ten has a catch-all “sportsmanship policy” that it can use to punish behavior it deems egregious, and Petitti is giving that policy a workout. Needless to say (and as Michigan’s lawyers have argued), the conference has never deployed the policy in a case like this before. It is usually a tool to punish things like referee criticism or bad language. It is not, historically, a way to bypass NCAA investigations and punish cheaters.

Still, the Big Ten has a pretty fair case, on its face. It’s called a sportsmanship policy, and running a sophisticated cheating operation is not sportsmanlike. The conference has been rightly unmoved by some shameless Michigan obfuscations, including an effort by the school to liken other teams’ legal theft of Michigan’s signals to the decidedly not-allowed shortcuts Stalions and company took. The Big Ten also has bad arguments. The most specious is one about player safety; Petitti says opposing coaches told him that Michigan’s knowledge of other teams’ plays threatened the safety of opposing players by telling Michigan where the players would be on the field. That’s a bizarre point, both because it lends credence to Michigan’s otherwise laughable argument that legal sign-stealing is similar to illegal sign-stealing and because, if sign-stealing is a safety risk, there should not be any legal version of it.

But the weirdest thing about the Big Ten’s approach is how it has sped up the process. NCAA cases take eons to conclude. It took the association seven whole years to fail to punish the University of North Carolina for enrolling athletes in sham classes that were just as obvious as Michigan’s sign-stealing cabal. It would presumably take the NCAA less time to bring a hammer down on Michigan, but nothing is guaranteed in this arena. And the Big Ten did not wait around for a usual process to unfold. Instead, the Big Ten informed Michigan that the NCAA had shared evidence with the conference and “knew and could prove” that Michigan cheated. Probably so, but taking the NCAA’s word for it and ordering an express punishment via the drive-thru lane is unprecedented. Conference collaboration with NCAA investigations of programs in that conference is also not the standard order of business. And while the NCAA has a policy that could incriminate Harbaugh without proving his direct knowledge, the Big Ten does not. The conference stepped around that by saying Harbaugh’s sidelining is not a sanction on him personally, but on the school itself with Harbaugh as an embodiment “for purposes of its football program.”

So if it looks like the Big Ten is concocting on the fly a way to punish Michigan and satisfy 13 other schools, it’s because that’s what’s happening. In reply, Michigan is not going to go quietly into the night. Easily the most lawyer-packed fan base of any of college football’s historic powers, there is not a single Michigan fan in the world who has not been girding for war over this story for weeks. These are the most litigious people in college sports, and the lawyers who will represent the school as it wages a holy war are an all-star team of these football-obsessed Juris Doctorates (plus, probably, some expensive outside counsels who have been loyalty-tested). The Big Ten’s lawyers are in for hell.

None of this means that Harbaugh is a deserving martyr. He gets paid $10 million a year to coach a college football team, and at the very least, he failed to catch on to underlings engaging in an outlandishly catchable cheating operation that created serious vulnerabilities. Being made to sit out a few games, even big ones, is not the sort of cruel and unusual punishment that tips the scales of the universe away from justice. There is no moral wind at Michigan’s back today.

Nor is there any to support the other Big Ten schools, the conference office, or the NCAA. What those parties do have is strength in numbers and the knowledge that Michigan cannot take its ball and go home. The Wolverines agreed to be members of the Big Ten, send their television revenue into the Big Ten, and play by the rules of the Big Ten. Elements of the Michigan fan base are already saber-rattling about an eventual move out of the conference, but they’re not going to do that, at least not for this, at least not soon. It’s nearly all of college sports against Michigan, and in that context, the Wolverines do not have a lot. But they do have two teams capable of getting really pissed off and drawing a lot of blood from their Midwestern adversaries. One of those teams plays football. The other files for injunctions.