The Swamp

govmentchedda wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 8:57 pm Good for UVA.

Shirley wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2023 9:21 am

govmentchedda wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 8:57 pm Good for UVA.

Worst team in decades. Gets program's first road win over a top-ten team. Sports

rass wrote: ↑Tue Oct 24, 2023 6:29 am Connor Stalions, huh?

A_B wrote: ↑Tue Oct 24, 2023 10:08 am It's mindboggling to me that at no point did harbaugh think "how are we so good at deciphering their plays?"

EnochRoot wrote: ↑Tue Oct 24, 2023 10:59 am Harbaugh (or handlers) are smart enough to keep him a couple of degrees away for plausible deniability's sake.

EnochRoot wrote: ↑Tue Oct 24, 2023 10:59 am Harbaugh (or handlers) are smart enough to keep him a couple of degrees away for plausible deniability's sake.

Washington Post wrote:Michigan’s sign-stealing operation is a college football scandal to savor

(excerpt) …So if the crime in question is commonplace, and the cops sent to punish it entirely Keystone, why is this a big deal at all? Why have so many in the industry, myself included, met this particular NCAA transgression with such mirth?

Because it’s Michigan. Because it’s Harbaugh. Because this is the single entity that’s sworn, screamed and evangelized that everyone is cheating but them, that Michigan is not only the only one doing it the right way, but the only one capable of it.

“It’s hard to beat the cheaters,” Harbaugh famously told Michigan hagiographer John U. Bacon. Bacon used the quote, in reference to Harbaugh’s opinion on recruiting in the SEC, as a chapter header in his hilariously titled “Overtime: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football.” I guess we figured out which way they crossed.

For decades, Michigan positioned itself against the cultural and economic changes in the sport, no matter how obvious or uncomfortable, as better-than. If Michigan was successful, it was setting the impossible model of competing with the Alabamas on the field and the Ivies in the classroom. But as the Bowl Championship Series era dawned in the late 1990s, the Wolverines became also-rans after making bad coaching hires both too outsider and too insider.

Rather than self-examine, Michigan’s sizable, moneyed fandom maintained that the success of programs such as archrival Ohio State and the heathen SEC were tainted by compromised morality and NCAA rule-breaking. While those programs hoisted trophies, Michigan boasted merit badges for a morality it alone defined. When you can stare directly at the widespread practice of millionaire coaching staffs breaking rules by dropping thousands of dollars to athletes living below the poverty line and cry foul because of the letter of the NCAA law, it’s evident your excess privilege has choked off the morality centers of your brain.

Then came Harbaugh, another native son, but one with an unimpeachable résumé of elevating Stanford, a brutally tough academic school, into a dominant Power Five program. Like any master politician, Harbaugh knew where his base was starving and amped up the “cheaters” rhetoric to both explain away his early struggles and justify the excessively slow pace the Wolverines took to returning back to national prominence.

The problem is now that Michigan has been made great again — the Wolverines are arguably the best team in the nation entering this weekend — it can’t do the one thing Michigan has staked its entire identity on: claiming the moral high ground.

The exposure of Stalions’s hilariously overorganized sign-stealing campaign comes on the heels of Harbaugh serving a three-game suspension for NCAA violations during the coronavirus pandemic recruiting “dead period,” as well as refusing to cooperate with the NCAA during that investigation. During his absence, Michigan players held up four fingers on the field to … honor (?) Harbaugh in a gesture that made it seem as if their coach had passed away and not simply been pinched for run-of-the-mill recruiting no-nos. Following his return, Harbaugh publicly promised a new “gold standard” for Michigan compliance with NCAA bylaws, a public attempt to reinstate his piousness.

Well, that lasted a month.

The real and unavoidable punishment for the Wolverines is in progress and will play out in the coming weeks: the asterisk rivals and media alike will attempt to pin on a potential national title season. As of now, Michigan is in a frantic race between now and January to undo the morality value prop it’s foisted on the sport for decades, and at least right now, it feels impossible it’ll escape the dreaded “Yeah, but” response that could haunt this team’s potential title forever.

If that happens, Michigan will serve out a worst-case scenario it itself defined: another big-time winner who did it the wrong way. That the Wolverines could experience the pinnacle of success without telling you how different, or refined, or apart from the chattel of this sport they are, is a fate worse than losing to Ohio State.

It’s just sign-stealing, though. All the cheaters do it.

Steven Godfrey is a national college football writer based in Nashville and is the co-host of the “Split Zone Duo” podcast.

brian wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2023 7:00 pm Godfrey roots for the SEC which has taken cheating in CFB to an art form. I guarantee at least half the schools in the SEC have similar operations.

govmentchedda wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2023 7:07 pm

brian wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2023 7:00 pm Godfrey roots for the SEC which has taken cheating in CFB to an art form. I guarantee at least half the schools in the SEC have similar operations.

You're proving his point.

brian wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2023 9:16 pm It’s a bullshit point though.

You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Fuck that. And fuck anyone clutching their pearls

Rex wrote: ↑Wed Oct 25, 2023 9:52 pm

govmentchedda wrote: ↑Thu Oct 26, 2023 4:38 pm

brian wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 2:56 pm God bless the Big Ten West.

A_B wrote: ↑Mon Oct 30, 2023 7:31 am

brian wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 2:56 pm God bless the Big Ten West.

Is the seven team tie chance still in place? Have to find it on the Sickos.