Rubin: 'Free Harbaugh' and 'Michigan vs. Everybody' would score better for a true underdog

“Detroit vs. Everybody” works because the city is a plucky underdog. “Michigan vs. Everybody,” as in the university, is like Cranbrook vs. Everybody. Or Saks Fifth Avenue.

U-M football players wore the slogan on shirts and knit caps on their way to smother Penn State last week, and students and fans have been lining up for their own pieces of defiant sportswear all week.

Meantime, U-M has a $17.9 billion endowment, which is literally more than the gross national product of 60 countries, and even the basement-level flunky in the football program who apparently Watergated an illicit scouting operation earned $55,000 a year before he resigned.

It may have been rash for the Big Ten to suspend head coach Jim Harbaugh for the last three games of the regular season before its own investigation was complete. It was unquestionably shabby to impose the suspension on Friday afternoon on a national holiday when the courts were closed and the team was 35,000 feet above Pennsylvania.

But a school with a football stadium that seats 107,671 is not a sentimental favorite, unless maybe it's going up against the Purple Gang. And no matter how many people wear their "Free Harbaugh" T-shirts beneath their "Michigan vs. Everybody" hoodies, he's not a martyr.

He's actually more of a Jerry Tarkanian — a reference you’ll immediately object to if you’re a Wolverines fan and you remember Tark the Shark, but might resent a little less when I explain it.

A shark in a sports car

I overlapped with the late Mr. Tarkanian in Las Vegas, where he once got mildly drunk and told our UNLV basketball writer, "I don't get why other coaches don't like transfers. I love transfers. ... They already have their cars."

That's not the part that harkens to Harbaugh, but I've always enjoyed the honesty, so there you go.

Tarkanian won an NCAA championship at UNLV in 1990 and was spectacularly successful at three colleges, sometimes with players who could barely read and almost always with players who didn't graduate. That's also not where he converges with Harbaugh.

The connection comes in attracting spotlights, or even chasing them.

Tarkanian wrote newspaper columns attacking the NCAA and sued the organization twice — winning a $2.5 million settlement for harassment the second time, if you're keeping score at home. He coached flashy teams in a glittery city, and the NCAA practically stationed an investigator in his garage.

A friendly rival, acknowledging that almost every program poked at the margins of the rules, compared it to a line of cars on the freeway doing 10 mph over the limit, and Tarkanian passing everyone in a red convertible.

Enter Harbaugh, returning to U-M beneath a canopy of fireworks. He sleeps over at a recruit's house, he schedules spring practice in Italy and France, he holds satellite camps and thinly disguised recruiting festivals from coast to coast and also Australia and American Samoa.

He's heaps of fun, and he mostly wins. He's not just driving the red convertible, he's tooting the horn.

He's spent nine entertaining years waving his arms over his head. Now things have gone a bit sideways — a U-M-imposed suspension for the first three games of the season, a Big Ten sanction for the last three — and it's, "Whaddaya lookin' at me for?"

Why the buck stops

U-M has not denied or even mildly squawked at reports that across three seasons, player personnel analyst Connor Stalions bought tickets to future opponents’ games and filled the seats with pals shooting cellphone videos that he studied to decipher the teams' signals.

Oh, and was that the G. Gordon Liddy of college football wearing sunglasses and Central Michigan University gear on the sideline at the Chippewas' nighttime opener Sept. 1 against Michigan State? Mum's the word.

No one is saying, and Harbaugh has emphatically denied, that the head coach knew Stalions had been violating one of those pesky rules that's supposed to help low-budget schools level the playing field. If nobody can send scouts on the road, the theory goes, maybe the Toledos and Appalachian States have a chance, far-fetched as it may seem.

Someone higher on the food chain than Stalions must have been aware, though, because player personnel analysts don't alert linebackers that the opponents' next play is going to be a jet sweep or a screen pass or the rare triple lindy.

Harbaugh is taking the fall because he's the boss and he's still around, and who would the conference penalize if he's on an NFL sideline next year?

The buck stops where the bucks stop, and that's the head coach. Or his lawyers, if they can win a temporary restraining order Friday and get him back on the sideline.

"This has gotta be America's team," he said at his Monday news conference. "America loves a team that beats the odds, beats the adversity, overcomes what the naysayers, critics, so-called experts think."

Never mind that Michigan has been ranked No. 2 in the country since before the season started. Never mind that's it's been the betting favorite in every game, including the first three where Harbaugh was suspended by U-M for improper contact with potential recruits and being less than helpful with NCAA investigators.

It's poor, downtrodden Michigan vs. Everybody − unbeaten, untied and unapologetic.

Neal Rubin's college football rooting interest is the University of Northern Colorado, 0-10 this fall but with high aspirations for Saturday against Portland State. While he has a master's from Michigan State, he earned most of it at an extension campus in Birmingham, which somewhat dulled the romance of the experience. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Harbaugh, U-M miscast as underdogs in 'Michigan vs. Everybody' shirts