The Michigan Wolverines football team won their first national title since 1997 on Monday, but it’s not without controversy. The program was involved in a sign-stealing scandal that saw head coach Jim Harbaugh get suspended for three games, and ,according to longtime sports journalist Rob Parker, the title is tainted.
“This should be a nice story with a nice bow. Finally, the Maize and Blue get their national championship that their fan base has been wanting for so long. But they can’t fully embrace it or feel good about it,” said Parker on the Fox Sports show “The Odd Couple” this week. “Michigan’s National Championship is tainted. There’s no way around it. Is it tainted. If you were to touch it, you would have to wash your hands. It’s stinky, I’m sorry.”
Sign-Stealing Scandal
The Wolverines were involved in a sign-stealing scandal and Harbaugh was suspended for it. That’s true. But “tainted”? Can’t be “fully embraced”?
Why? Because we’ve decided sports is the arbiter of fairness and morality? Come on. This is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Illegal, seedy and salacious things happen all the time. Sometimes it becomes public and sometimes it doesn’t.
If you do a full autopsy on every single program that has won a national title in the FBS over the Past decade are you going to find champions that were 100 percent clean and did everything by the book and to the letter of the law?
I get it, sports is supposed to be about settling everything on the field of play. May the best team win, all things being equal. But they aren’t.
Programs do whatever they can to gain an edge, twisting and manipulating rules and breaking them.
For his part, Harbaugh has maintained his program’s innocence and doubled down after the title win.
“It went exactly how we wanted it to go to win every game,” Harbaugh said. “The off-the-field issues, we’re innocent and we stood strong and tall because we knew we were innocent. And I’d like to point that out. These guys are innocent. Overcome that … It wasn’t that hard because we knew we were innocent.”
Still National Champs
You can call Harbaugh out and say he’s lying and cry foul. But what’s done is done, and, whatever happened, it wasn’t enough to deny the Wolverines their national title. You can call it tainted, and maybe it is.
But that won’t stop Harbaugh, the Wolverines and their fans from calling themselves national champions.
