Does The Michigan Sign-Stealing Scandal Offer a Lesson?

It turns out the scandal of the year in college football, the accusations of sign-stealing leveled against the Michigan Wolverines, has so far reinforced an old truism, about this sport in particular and about sports in general.

And that is, winning solves problems. Within some limits, it changes the narrative around an athlete or a team.

Let’s start with the latest example.

With head coach Jim Harbaugh serving the third game of a three-game Big Ten suspension that Michigan initially fought and then agreed to, the No. 3 Wolverines held on to beat second-ranked Ohio State 30-24 on Saturday. The archrivals each had been undefeated heading into the game – sorry, The Game.

The victory did a lot of things for Michigan. It gave the Wolverines a berth in this Saturday’s Big Ten championship against No. 18 Iowa (10-2), in which it’s favored by more than three touchdowns against the offensively challenged Hawkeyes. A win would make the Wolverines a lock for a third-straight trip to the College Football Playoff.

But perhaps most importantly, from Michigan’s point of view, is what the Ohio State win denied rival fans, not just in Columbus but everywhere. And that is the chance to say, “You couldn’t win if you weren’t cheating.”

What Happened

This might be a good time to tell anyone who hasn’t followed the case that, earlier in the season, with Yahoo!Sports leading the reporting, it was revealed that Michigan had been accused of sending a football analyst to the games of upcoming opponents to study their signs and signals. NCAA rules don’t ban sign stealing per se, but they do prohibit advance in-person scouting of an opponent.

Harbaugh, who had already served a separate suspension for the first three games this year, vocally defended his program but then had to sit out when Michigan and the Big Ten agreed to his late-season suspension. The Wolverines responded by beating Penn State and Maryland before their win over Ohio State, all without their head coach.

Now, the team’s season-long winning streak has to hold through this weekend, but assuming it does, then the sign-stealing case may just become a bump in a year Michigan fans will long remember fondly.

Which gets us back to the question at hand.

What Can We Take Away From All This?

As someone who has followed college football for decades and served for five years as the college football editor at The Associated Press, it’s the winning lesson. There are times when a controversy fades – particularly a rule-bending one – if the team under the spotlight wins it away.

As a Notre Dame alumnus, I can remember when, at the start of the 1993 season, a book called “Under the Tarnished Dome: How Notre Dame Betrayed Its Ideals for Football Glory” presented a fistful of accusations that then-coach Lou Holtz was running a dirty program. Holtz, gagged from speaking on the subject by the university, responded with his last truly great season on the field, leading the Fighting Irish team to a No. 2 finish in the polls.

A Sports Illustrated article from the time, published after Notre Dame upset Michigan 27-23 in the season’s second game, predicted the fallout. “If the Irish play many games like Saturday’s, the publishing industry will return to its traditional job of raiding Notre Dame for inspirational material,” it read, “and Holtz can give heartfelt reviews.”

In 2010, as a sensational quarterback named Cam Newton directed Auburn through a dream season, questions raged around him about whether his services were shopped to Mississippi State and then Auburn for that season. When asked about the issue ahead of the Heisman Trophy presentation, Newton just smiled. Then he won the award for best college player that year.

In the end, his Tigers were the undefeated national champs and, nine months later, Auburn was cleared by the NCAA.

This year, now that the Big Ten has closed its investigation of Michigan, we are in much the same position. The NCAA has an ongoing probe into the case that may take weeks or months – the governing body of college sports has a relatively small staff devoted to infractions and is primarily concerned with staging championships.

The NCAA may punish Michigan, or it may not, but the more the Wolverines win the less it is likely to matter to their fans – and even to their detractors. The real business will already have taken place on the field.

Michael Weinreb, a noted sports writer and author of “Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games,” acknowledged in a phone interview this week that bending the rules and outright cheating have been part of the game “from the beginning.”

And that’s true. Big Ten anchor Dave Revsine even recounts in his book “The Opening Kickoff: The Tumultuous Birth of a Football Nation” how seven of the 11 players on the 1893 Wolverines team were not actually enrolled at the University of Michigan.

But to Weinreb, what’s really sad about the modern-day, sign-stealing affair is that it “seems of a piece with where we are as a society – just the rule-breaking and the idea of win at all costs.

“It just seems to be more glorified than ever.”