Many college football fans have been made aware of the controversial situation that the Michigan Wolverines and their head coach Jim Harbaugh have been in this season. While not everything is out in the open yet due to the Big Ten not releasing evidence from their investigations, people are still itching to come out with their opinions on the matter based on what we do know.
Towards the middle of the year this season, there were rumors of illegal sign stealing taking place within the Michigan program and the NCAA investigated these rumors when they came out. The NCAA eventually dropped their investigation on the matter with no actions done to the program leaving Michigan fans feeling relieved. However, this feeling of comfort did not last very long because the Big Ten started to investigate the situation just a few days later. They were keeping their evidence private to the investigations but rumors were still floating around.
The Big Ten later suspended Harbaugh for the remaining 3 games in the regular season with two of those opponents being AP top 10 teams in the nation. They suspended him on Veteran’s day, a national holiday and a day before their game against Penn State University. All courts were closed on this national holiday meaning that Michigan was unable to go to court to challenge the case with their lawyers.
This seemed very obvious that this was purposeful as everyone viewed Michigan as an overrated team due to their early season weak strength of schedule and the sign stealing rumors. Penn State was considered to be their first big game of the season and Penn State was ranked 10 in the nation. The Big Ten appeared to be trying to weaken the Wolverines’ play by taking out their head coach less than a day before their big game versus Penn State and were given no chance to fight the case.
The Big Ten has been notorious for investigating often for things involving Harbaugh throughout his Michigan career. He was suspended for the first three weeks of this season as well due to recruiting penalties during the COVID-19 dead period. This very soft infraction was given a quite large punishment which was forcing Harbaugh to miss games against East Carolina University, University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), and Bowling Green University. This penalty seemed very unnecessary with the actions that took place to get this suspension. Harbaugh had bought lunch for a recruit in a COVID-19 dead period which gave him this punishment of a three game suspension.
The suspension for the final three games of the season was also very questionable based on what we knew. We have seen evidence of an assistant coach, Connor Stallions, for the Wolverines going to games and doing in person scouting and sign stealing. Stallions was relieved of his duties by the university as everyone started to figure more and more out about him. It seemed as though he was a little unfit for the job based on the actions he was doing and the things he wrote about the university and his job position. There was all sorts of evidence that he was doing this sign stealing. There were screenshots of him getting and sending money with Michigan boosters for tickets to future opponent’s games and even some evidence of him at games. There were also rumors of him writing in a journal about his plan to overtake the football program and eventually run the program in the head coach position. Clearly the people in the program did not see this in him and realize what he was doing or what his plans were.
There was also another coach within the program, linebacker coach Chris Partridge, that was fired during the court trials that took place after the Penn State game. We are unsure as to why he was fired but it is assumed that he was also involved in the scandal. There however is not evidence that was linked back to Harbaugh that we know of. This seemed to be a punishment on Harbaugh just because he was the head coach of the program. This would be understandable not only because he is the head of the program, but the Big Ten has been looking for ways to suspend him left and right. It is likely that while in court, the Big Ten had reasonings for the punishments they were trying to put on Michigan and their staff. But because Michigan had fired the people involved in the cheating, they thought they had another reason to punish Harbaugh because they didn’t know how else or who else they could punish for these scandals In my opinion, this is a very unfair way to handle the situation and the Big Ten clearly wanted a way to get out of the situation and saw a target on Harbaugh’s back.
These situations involving Harbaugh have really shown that the Big Ten does not like him being a head coach in their conference. This hatred may also play a large role in Harbaugh’s decision to stay or leave the program next year. If Harbaugh decides to leave, it will most likely be because he can either get a better position elsewhere outside of college football or just because the Big Ten refuses to sit back and let him do his job. We will get more and more answers as time goes on but for now we can only admire the great season the Wolverines have been having this year and see how the rest of this situation plays out.
