Doyel: National title for Harbaugh's cheating would render college football meaningless
Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh isn’t the destruction of college football. He's the messenger.
The sport had been disfigured beyond recognition before Harbaugh’s heel turn, a downward spiral accelerated by the approach of one tsunami and then another – NIL and the transfer portal – and the NCAA’s response of diving behind the nearest potted plant. But someday we’ll look back and ask:
When was college football kind of … over?
Could be late Monday night – Jan. 8 in the year of our Lord 2024 – if Michigan is crowned as national champion. Jim Harbaugh hasn’t been merely accused of cheating (twice). He has been caught.
Twice.
The first instance was during the COVID-19 dead recruiting period, when he kept recruiting many of the players who will play Monday against Washington in the College Football Playoff title game. In the years that followed Michigan was illegally stealing signs, a scandal uncovered this season as the Wolverines were building momentum toward the grand finale.
Understand this: We could be days away from Jim Harbaugh hoisting a national championship trophy to cap a season in which he was suspended twice for cheating – the first three games of the regular season, and the last three – because of two different scandals that helped the 2023 Michigan Wolverines achieve greatness.
When that time comes, if that time comes, college football will be thrown into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, to borrow from a book Harbaugh likes to thump. That’s from the New Testament, Matthew 13:42.
Perhaps it is right and good that Jim Harbaugh be remembered as one of the horsemen of this apocalypse. Because if Michigan wins the national championship in a season it was popped twice for cheating – violations that helped this very team – college football will become like something from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Meaningless.
Transfer portal, NIL cause Georgia 63, FSU 3
The system has been breaking down for years, well before Jim Harbaugh decided only fools play by the rules. The combination of NIL and the transfer portal hasn’t brought free agency to college football – it has brought chaos. Tell me, in what professional sport is everybody a potential free agent after every season?
No, not after every season – during every season.
That’s what we have now in college football, with everyone free to enter the transfer portal, typically after their final regular-season game in November. Seeing how 86 of the 128 teams at the highest level of Division I still have a bowl game to play, most of the 1,000-plus players in the portal are leaving with a game still to play. Close to 20 schools played bowl games this year without their starting quarterback, who was already in the transfer portal.
NIL is the accelerant of this dumpster fire, because schools are offering transfers more than the promise of a fresh start or starting job. Schools are now offering money, as much as seven figures for the best players.
Is this what we wanted?
Jim Harbinger I mean Harbaugh is the messenger, but the tipping point for this broken system – the moment it crumbled right before our eyes – was Dec. 30 when No. 6 Georgia beat No. 3 Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl. That was the kicker to a story the NCAA had been writing for years. NCAA officials serve at the pleasure of schools but advise university presidents how to proceed, and their advice was to dig in and deny players fair compensation or freedom – until the dam broke in the form of NIL and transfer portal.
And on Dec. 30, the Seminoles were washed away.
Less than a month earlier Florida State had been 13-0 and hoping for a spot in the College Football Playoff, but the Seminoles were denied that chance because the season-ending injury to quarterback Jordan Travis had demonstrably changed who they were.
Then came the disfigurement. Without Travis, without anything meaningful to play for – just the FedEx Ecclesiastes Bowl – 14 FSU players entered the transfer portal and nine others opted out to protect their status for the 2024 NFL Draft. Including Travis, 24 of the Seminoles' best players didn’t play against Georgia.
Victorious coach Kirby Smart was disgusted, and not with anyone at FSU. He was disgusted with the system that made such a result possible.
“People need to see what happened tonight, and they need to fix this,” Smart told reporters after the game. “It's really unfortunate for those kids on that sideline that had to play in that game.”
Jim Harbaugh, Moses? Nah, he's guilty as sin
One way or another this season will end with Harbaugh at its rotten core, one last spectacle of his creation.
The cheating he did during the COVID shutdown wasn’t the worst we’ve ever seen, more like something from the Kelvin Sampson playbook circa Oklahoma 2006 or IU 2007, when Sampson and his staff made hundreds of recruiting phone calls during a period such calls weren’t allowed.
Doyel in 2021: Anyone happy to see Kelvin Sampson going to the Final Four?
That was Harbaugh during the COVID shutdown. We’ll never know how many players on Michigan’s current roster were contacted illegally by Harbaugh, or how many were subliminally swayed to Michigan by the special attention. If the number is greater than zero – and it has to be – it’s too many.
The cheating since then has been more egregious, with Harbaugh’s analytics assistant, Connor Stalions, arranging for himself and others to scout opposing teams in person and use video cameras to steal their sideline signals. Harbaugh says he didn’t direct Stalions to do that, or even know about it, but he lost the benefit of the doubt during the COVID shutdown. And we’ve seen tape – “Sweet Jesus there’s always a tape,” as Scott Glenn’s Washington Post reporter says in the 1996 movie “Courage Under Fire” – of Stalions standing next to Harbaugh during games, studying the opposing sideline and telling him … something.
What was he saying? And why was Harbaugh listening to a low-level staffer, right then and there, as he called plays?
Look, no need to prosecute Harbaugh again. The case is over and beyond a reasonable doubt he has been found guilty. It’s not a matter of knowing he’s guilty, but accepting the results.
Doyel in November: Can't give JJ McCarthy a Heisman vote if UM coaches were cheating
Harbaugh survives because he’s a demagogue in khaki pants, making outrageous statements while his followers close their eyes, lift their hands and shout, “Preach!” He’s the guy who couldn’t decide in early 2022 between quarterbacks J.J. McCarthy and Cade McNamara, and used theology to explain.
“No person – that’s Biblical – no person knows what the future holds,” he told reporters before a September 2022 game against Hawaii. “Some people have asked, 'How'd you come to that decision? Was it based on some kind of NFL model?' No. It's really Biblical. Solomon was known to be a pretty wise person."
Last week Harbaugh chose another analogy – and more theology – to credit his coaching staff, which had won six games while he was suspended.
“Like Moses,” he said, “I’m going to die leaning on my staff – and no one’s got a better staff to lean on.”
After Michigan beat Alabama in the Rose Bowl to advance to Monday’s title game, Harbaugh considered his 2023 team’s journey – having its coach suspended for three games, twice, for obtaining an unfair advantage – and said the following with his typical blank stare.
“It's almost been an unfair advantage, all the things that the team has gone through,” Harbaugh said without self-awareness, irony or decency as the monster he has created – and the sport he has sullied – slinks toward a conclusion that feels inevitable, and worse.
Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Jim Harbaugh cheated twice to help Michigan reach national title game
