Michigan football is either dirty or sloppy
It was merely a week ago — those sweet, innocent days in idyllic Ann Arbor — when the righteous due process fighters of Michigan were ready to eject from the Big Ten before marching to Indianapolis with their cadre of whiteshoe lawyers to set the NCAA on fire.
Jim Harbaugh, the blameless overseer of the most honorable college football program known to man, was at the ready to fight his three-game suspension, armed with his deep reservoir of courtroom savvy gained from countless hours watching Judge Judy.
Sherrone Moore, the offensive coordinator who had been entrusted with the sacred duty of leading Michigan’s gallant Wolverines in Harbaugh’s stead, had underscored the unfairness of this predicament by crying on national television.
And Michigan president Santa Ono was there to proudly accept your thoughts and prayers, posting on social media how proud he was that his school had persevered because, “Like any community, we face our share of challenges and adversity.”
Ah, well. Sometimes we all struggle to read the room.
It turns out the program-wide change in tone Thursday, when Michigan agreed to accept Harbaugh’s suspension and drop all litigation against the Big Ten, was not a coincidence. Nor, as Michigan claimed in another unintentionally hilarious statement, was it intended to put the focus back on the student-athletes as they prepare for the most important games of the season.
In fact, it was a capitulation — not to the Big Ten or the NCAA, but to the reality that now must guide the narrative for the rest of this season and what is now likely to be the short duration of Harbaugh’s tenure. Michigan is either a dirty program or an exceptionally sloppy one, and if things are already moving this quickly, the coming days and weeks should clarify which one it is.
As inept as NCAA enforcement sometimes seems, there’s a reason you do not want them on your campus digging through whatever cell phones and computer records they have access to. You never know what they might find, and in this case, it seems they found linebackers coach Chris Partridge.
On Friday — what a coincidence, just one day after Michigan bent the knee to the Big Ten — Michigan fired Partridge and did not give a reason. That makes him the third staff member to be let go during this calendar year, which is not the kind of thing you typically see at a program that has won 23 of its last 24 games.
It would not have taken a Michigan law degree to connect the dots between Partridge and his good buddy Connor Stalions, the sign-stealing guru extraordinaire whose illegal spying activities started this whole mess. Pictures of the two of them together were as easy to find on the Internet as those “Michigan vs. Everybody” shirts that should now be shipped directly to the Comedy Hall of Fame.
Shortly after the news of Partridge’s firing broke, Yahoo! Sports filled in one of the gaps with a report that the NCAA discovered evidence of Partridge tampering with computers to try and cover up Stalions’ scheme after it first became public knowledge. And thanks to Yahoo! there is now another character in this drama: “Uncle T,” a booster who apparently helped fund Stalions’ activities.
We don’t yet know much about Uncle T, but we look forward to meeting him in the next episode of The Marvelous Michigan Misconduct. It’s a tale of a program so convinced of its own purity that it unknowingly allowed one $55,000 per year staffer to pull a fast one on an entire room full of multi-million dollar coaches to the point where they relied on him to produce key opponent information in the middle of games without asking a single question about how he got so good at knowing what play was coming.
If you thought some of the “Ozark” plot lines were unrealistic, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
To be perfectly clear, there is still no proven connection between Harbaugh or any Michigan assistant coach and knowledge of Stalions’ activities. Even with Partridge, according to Yahoo!, his evidence-destroying impulse came after the story blew up. That was more than enough to fire him, but not enough to prove he was in on it.
But it’s also relatively early in the investigation, and it appears Michigan has shaken free of its bias toward innocence and outrage. If we were placing bets, it seems far more likely that the evidence trail does not end here.
What’s now incontrovertible, though, is that Michigan’s program was as much of a mess internally as it has been air tight and solid on the field. Usually those two things move in the same direction.
That Michigan sits here at 10-0 despite all this unnecessary chaos is a huge testament to Harbaugh’s coaching ability while revealing in a bad way his skills as a personnel manager and program leader. And that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t sanction Stalions’ activities.
But he is, at least on some level, responsible for The Talented Mr. Stalions becoming part of that staff. How did Stalions go from a random “recruiting analyst” to the guy who was holding a big card with the opposing team’s signs and whispering in defensive coordinator Jesse Minter’s ear? Who vetted him? Who promoted him? How did he become so trusted within the program?
After weeks of obfuscation, it seems Michigan is finally ready to take those questions seriously — even as this entire story becomes more of a mockery with each passing day.
Contact Dan Woken at dwolken@usatoday.com.