Mob justice comes to Ann Arbor

Some time in the last year or so, “someone” came up with a clever scheme to get rid of Ohio State coach Ryan Day’s nemesis, Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh.

Day had learned during the 2022 season that a low-paid junior staffer at Michigan named Connor Stalions was trying to steal other teams’ signs by an innovative method that was probably against NCAA rules. Note: stealing signs is itself not against the rules, and pretty much every team — and certainly OSU — has somebody whose job it is to try to steal other teams’s signs.

What Stalions cooked up was a scheme to steal signs by having a bunch of internet randos, who he would Venmo $50 per game for the purpose, go to games and phone video the proceedings, so that Stalions — an obsessive fan whose recent literary efforts include a 600-page manifesto on how to construct a dominant college football program — could use those videos to help decode the signs of the teams that were being filmed.

The problem here is that the NCAA rules prohibit advance in-person scouting of other teams by a team’s coaches. To be clear, you can steal a team’s signs by watching TV broadcasts, or during your game against that team by watching their sideline, but coaches can’t engage in in-person advance scouting. Stalions thought he had found a loophole in this rule, because he wasn’t using coaches. He himself wasn’t a coach, or apparently attending the games, and his network of internet randos certainly weren’t.

So “someone” got the bright idea of hiring a private investigative firm to get all the details of Stalions’s operation — OSU had changed their signs before the 2022 Michigan game because they were already aware of it, which didn’t keep them from getting routed — and then to gradually leak the details of that investigation to the media in the most sensationalist way possible.

This ratfucking operation commenced about three and a half weeks ago. Over that time, the sports media was whipped into a frenzy, with accusations flying that this was the worst sports scandal since the Black Sox, that Stalions’s $50 Venmo scheme was giving Michigan a 21-point advantage, or was like letting them have 15 players on the field, and similar hysterical nonsense, that was lapped up by clueless sports “journalists.”

This was all totally absurd. Again, sign stealing is legal, endemic, and probably has almost no competitive effect (If it did teams would go to greater lengths to make it harder to steal signs). Stalions’s scheme may have broken the rules, but the NCAA itself had been considering getting rid of the rule on advance in-person scouting by coaches, given their own conclusion that such scouting produced, in the NCAA’s own words, at best “minimal competitive advantage.” This is especially true in regard to sign stealing, given that sign stealing was already widespread, without any help from advance in person scouting by coaches.

But the media had been whipped up into a frenzy that was generating plenty of prime clickbait, so nobody was bothering with details like this.

Instead, what happened is that a whole bunch of Big 10 schools — how many it remains to be seen — demanded that the conference immediately punish Michigan by suspending Harbaugh.

It’s difficult to describe adequately how bizarrely unjustified this demand was.

First, there’s literally not a shred of evidence that Harbaugh himself had any knowledge of Stalions’s scheme. He has denied in the strongest possible terms that he did, and there’s no reason to doubt that he thought Stalions was stealing signs using the methods everybody else’s sign stealers were using.

Second, these demands were coming prior to any real investigation of what Stalions had done, what effect, if any, it had on the games Michigan played, and whether that hypothesized effect was substantially different than everybody else’s sign stealing. To this day, not a single Michigan coach, or even Stalions himself, has been interviewed by either the NCAA or the Big 10.

Instead, what happened is that a bunch of programs tired of getting their heads beat in by Harbaugh, led we can be quite sure by Ohio State, demanded during a conference call with the conference’s new commissioner, a Harvard Law School graduate named Tony Petitti, that Harbaugh be suspended because, um, what happened was REALLY BAD, and Harbaugh was responsible for it because he was responsible for any REALLY BAD thing that happens while he’s coach. (There is no provision in the Big 10’s governing regulations for this kind of agency theory of sign stealing, but I guess they don’t teach that kind of thing at HLS).

So Petitti waited until the middle of the afternoon on a court holiday, and then suspended Harbaugh for the rest of the season, on the theory that he wasn’t actually punishing Harbaugh himself — this would be blatantly illegal under the conference’s rules, which again have no provision for punishing someone in Harbaugh’s position in re this dispute — but punishing the institution, by suspending the team’s head coach. This is the kind of argument that doesn’t pass the red face test, but I guess they don’t teach that at Harvard either. This was also done 20 hours before Michigan’s game against Penn State, one of two remaining games that will decide the Big 10 title and a berth in the college football playoffs. The Ohio State game, two weeks from tomorrow, is the other.

The real scandal here has nothing to do with Connor Stalions’s idiotic but most likely practically meaningless rule skirting, but is this:

The central point here is that the Big 10 is trying to punish Michigan WITH NO PROCESS. Not “due” process — any process.

You can just ignore the absurdity of the underlying substantive complaints about Connor Stalions’ rinky dinky nonsense. Even if this were about something really serious, you can’t levy punishment on the basis of nothing but bald accusations! That’s an incredibly simple principle.

That applies even to a fine to the institution, let alone to something like suspending Harbaugh — and again there isn’t even an ACCUSATION that he approved Stalions’ little Venmo scandal.

Michigan shouldn’t accede to any punishment, because punishment by conference call is inherently outrageous, no matter what the punishment is.