Big Ten commish has only bad options as pressure to punish Michigan mounts

So much about the Michigan sign-stealing scandal is still unclear, but one key piece has become obvious: Tony Petitti, the new Big Ten commissioner, has only a series of bad options to deal with the growing calls for punishment from inside the league. 

Petitti could choose to do nothing, citing the need for the NCAA to finish its investigation, and deal with any fallout after the season. 

He could invoke the league’s sportsmanship policy and do something drastic like make Michigan ineligible for the Big Ten title. 

Or he could find some sort of middle ground like suspending coach Jim Harbaugh, which would suggest the seriousness of the allegations against Michigan but not prevent the team from pursuing its competitive goals. 

But all of those options, and perhaps some others being discussed among Big Ten administrators right now, are problematic. 

If Petitti stands down on this, he will look like a weak leader and suffer a massive credibility hit with the coaches and athletics directors who are rightfully aggrieved by an alleged sign-stealing operation that would absolutely impact competition if it was as elaborate and brazen as it seems thus far. 

If Petitti concludes that Michigan’s conduct was egregious enough to forfeit games or be banned from the postseason, he risks being accused of overreach and punishing players who — at least to this point — likely have no culpability in the ethical breach that was committed. 

And even if he were to put the punishment on Harbaugh, which might be the path of least resistance, there’s a huge risk in sparking an ugly legal fight that would leave everyone sullied to some degree. After all, nothing so far has connected Harbaugh to the alleged activities of Connor Stalions, a low-level staffer who was apparently sending associates all over the country to film the sidelines of future and potential Michigan opponents in an attempt to decipher their signals.

Though sign stealing is legal and part of the sport, in-person scouting is against NCAA rules. While the impact of what Stalions allegedly did can’t exactly be quantified, there’s little question that it’s an advantage in football to know what play an opponent is going to run. If that information was obtained through illicit means, it could potentially affect anything from player health and safety to gambling results. 

Not everybody thinks rules matter when it comes to sports, and particularly within the NCAA ecosystem, but it’s important to understand why this has made Michigan’s conference brethren so angry. Yes, some of it may be rooted in the Wolverines’ dominance over the last 2½ seasons. But if they believe that dominance was achieved at least in part by cheating, it’s a legitimate problem that cuts to the integrity of the game. 

And making this worse for Petitti is that it’s all unfolding in real time, with just a month left in the season. That’s not a lot of runway to figure out what’s fair for Michigan while also showing the rest of the Big Ten that he cares about justice for them. 

There’s a faction in the league that is seething even more now than it was at the beginning of the week because of how dismissively the College Football Playoff selection committee handled the Michigan issue. Boo Corrigan, the NC State athletics director and chairman of the committee, essentially said that this was an NCAA problem and not something for the CFP to litigate. Bill Hancock, the CFP executive director, said: “There’s no substantive evidence that anything happened that might have affected the game. All this committee does is evaluate what happens on the field during games. That’s why we are where we are.”

To many in the Big Ten, that sounds like a cop-out. Affecting the game on the field is the entire reason everyone tries to steal signs. If you’re taking it to the extent Michigan allegedly did, it skews the entire process of how you evaluate not just Michigan but all the teams Michigan played while having illicitly obtained information. 

So with the CFP deciding it wants nothing to do with this and the NCAA investigative process almost certainly dragging out well past the end of this season, any immediate consequences will have to come from Petitti.

And he’s getting hit from every direction. 

This has to be an uncomfortable position for Petitti, a longtime sports and television executive who took over at Big Ten headquarters earlier this year. This is supposed to be his honeymoon phase. Instead, he’s been placed squarely in the middle of a situation that will make important constituents mad no matter what he does and will force him to act with incomplete information. 

What many people forget, though, is that sports aren’t the American legal system. You aren’t innocent until proven guilty, and you don’t have to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. Unless Stalions and/or Michigan have some alternate explanation for why he was paying his buddies to be at games with cell phones pointed toward sidelines, Michigan is responsible for violating an NCAA rule and should pay a price this season. That’s black and white. 

What that price should be, though, is almost impossible to say because there’s no precedent and no punishment that will seem proportional. 

Even in 2010, when the college football world was roiling over allegations surrounding the recruitment of Cam Newton, he went through a short suspension and reinstatement process that essentially put any wrongdoing on his father. People may have rolled their eyes, but once the NCAA cleared him to play, that was that. 

It seems unlikely that a similar type of remedy would be available to Michigan for a lot of reasons, but mainly that people are better at covering their tracks on pay-for-play than Stalions, who put his business on a public Venmo profile, used his own credit card to buy tickets to various games and even bragged to some folks about what he was doing. 

At best, Michigan’s only real defense here is that Stalions was a lone wolf and the coaches, including Harbaugh, didn’t know how he was getting his extensive scouting reports on other teams. The school would then have to hope that any links proving involvement from coaches would come out much later. 

But that’s a risk for the Big Ten, too, if Pettiti doesn’t punish the Wolverines. Imagine Michigan celebrating a national championship, only to have an investigation reveal months later that Stalions’ plan was being endorsed at a higher level. The taint of that would stick to Michigan and the Big Ten for generations, especially when the conference would have had a clear opportunity to prevent it from happening. 

On the other hand, if Petitti chooses the nuclear option and shuts Michigan down, it could end up in an embarrassing legal fight. If Michigan, say, went to court and got an injunction that allowed it to play for the Big Ten title, Petitti might as well hand in his resignation on the spot. How could he possibly lead the conference under those circumstances? 

For Petitti, there’s not much time to act and few good options available. But with the rest of the Big Ten putting pressure on him to do something, standing aside while Michigan goes on with business as usual doesn’t seem like one of them.