I debated if I wanted to write anything about Michigan getting no meaningful punishment from the NCAA for its sign-stealing scheme that tarnished college football for three seasons.1
I did a good job of mostly avoiding Twitter because whatever I posted would have been met with too many, “Cry harder!” replies to be worthwhile.
I’m not so self-important that I think the world just has to know my thoughts on every topic, but obviously there is a lot of interest in this overall.
Ultimately I was struck by something about this situation: Almost everyone was on the right track in analyzing this — except the people who said it was no big deal2.
(Could the Wolverines have won all those games in 2021 and ’22 without extra-curricular advance scouting? We’ll never know, but they had lost 15 of the previous 16 against Ohio State, so…)
I’ll always remember the 2022 Penn State and Ohio State games felt really weird in real time.
Before any of this came to light, I thought it really looked like Michigan knew what Penn State was doing before they did it, especially when the Wolverines had the ball.. They had the perfect answer for the Nittany Lions every time and ran roughshod over them as a result. (Of course it is possible for a defense to be predictable or have a tell in how they line up, so there are more explanations for this than illegal advanced scouting, which is another reason I never seriously considered anything really unusual was going on at the time.)
The ’22 OSU game was also pretty strange, but you get that in rivalry games sometimes, right? Look at the advanced stats, and they would tell you Ohio State probably won, let alone it was at least a close game. But Michigan won because of the big plays.
Unlike 2023, Jim Knowles took some responsibility for trying to win the 2022 game with the perfect calls on defense, too, then repeated the same mistakes in the CFP semifinals against Georgia.
The weirder thing about The Game in ‘22 was the Ohio State offense being completely shut down after moving the ball fairly easily early in the game, but anyway, it doesn’t matter now. That is all in the past…
What was I saying?
What’s amazing is nearly everyone was actually on the right track in predicting how this would all play out since the very early days of SignGate.
What actually happened — they were proven guilty, guys who are mostly gone got big (largely ceremonial) punishments, and the school was fined instead of receiving a postseason ban — was very much in the realm of possibility despite that violating common sense.
Plenty of fans and members of the media suggested Michigan was guilty but would walk because the NCAA has become toothless. Most of our major institutions have been failing for years, so expressing no faith in them is an easy call.
Well, the cynicism was rewarded, and that’s a shame, but I guess it’s the world in which we live today.
I stayed away from making predictions in print, but I felt like Michigan would get hit pretty hard because this case had some differences. It was worse than past cases in which schools got off light, which seemed to be confirmed by the Big Ten’s drastic action in 2023, but more than that, the NCAA’s biggest issue is proving things, but in this case the investigators pretty much started with the answers to the test.
Obviously something big was on the table or Michigan would have settled, and we already knew Jim Harbaugh and even Sherrone Moore were facing penalties.
So the NCAA had already confirmed it took all this seriously whether or not MGoBlog or lazy national writers thought it should, then the Committee on Infractions just didn’t do much about it because of a newfound grace that doesn’t make sense.
There’s the thing to remember in all this.
The synopsis of the case confirmed the gravity of Michigan’s actions over and over again (especially including attempts to evade being caught).
They even included the appropriate punishment (two-year postseason ban). Yet the Wolverines won’t be impacted at all on the field other than missing Moore for two games this year and one more next year (which also makes no sense, but you already knew that) in easily winnable games.
Friday's NCAA ruling again proves that there is no punishment commensurate with the crime...as a nation of misplaced empathy we don't have the stomach for it. Jeff Gilbert writes: pressprosmagazine.com/2025/08/16/gil…
— #PressProsMagazine (#@PressProsMag)
12:05 PM • Aug 17, 2025
Another takeaway is if enough people say stupid, senseless things enough times, our current thoughtless, feckless leadership class will eventually start to believe it is true.
In this case, those ideas are punishing the current players isn’t fair, and vacating wins doesn’t matter.
Although neither of those things were ever true, they have officially been codified by the NCAA so chalk up another victory for the weaklings in the chattering class.
The desire not to hurt current players who weren’t part of the transgressions is a nice thought with no real merit if you game out what that actually means: Handing out real punishment that might actually act as a deterrent becomes basically impossible.
Beyond that, these days half the roster or more can turn over in one offseason so it’s not like those guys can’t or won’t be leaving anyway for one reason or another.
As for vacating records, I agree there is a certain element of silliness to it, but NOT doing it is even more ridiculous.
Clearly it matters both to institutions and fans no matter how many times someone tweets to the contrary.
Ohio State doesn’t list its 2010 Big Ten championship in its records whether you remember it happened or not, and Terrelle Pryor is still persona non grata (though that is not the case for Jim Tressel). Louisville is obviously mad they had to take down their 2013 men’s basketball national championship banner, and even Michigan hasn’t been able to have any official celebrations of the Fab Five (now relegated to the second-biggest group of cheaters for The Victors) since they were caught receiving then-illegal inducements.
A former colleague likes to say, “Life is all about managing expectations.” There is no doubt that is true, and this is yet another reminder.
While many of the cynics were likely using low expectations as a defense mechanism, they were nonetheless rewarded.
Ultimately the only thing the NCAA’s COI accomplished was somehow eliminating whatever level of respect for its rule of law was left.
1 Show-cause orders don’t matter if you don’t want to coach in college again, and they can be worked around if a school desires; all these major colleges print money so I really don’t care about the fine at all. How much did they generate from winning three straight Big Ten titles and a national championship? Probably more than $20 million. Well worth it.
2 Of course it’s a big deal. I don’t have to explain to you that knowing the play before it happens is helpful. Literally everyone who pays attendant to football knows this, so anyone who says otherwise is being disingenuous. The coaches cover their mouths when they’re talking for goodness sakes! Does in-person scouting help more than getting signals from TV copy or picking them up early in games and using them later? I suppose that could be debatable, but I sincerely doubt the answer would be no. Connor Stalions and Michigan obviously believed it was or they would not have done it. Certainly they would not have KEPT doing it after one year and expanded the program. So yes, Michigan cheated. It mattered. It impacted the outcome of games. There is no denying this. Arguing otherwise is just obscuring the real picture.