To everyone that's asked me what I think about the Jim Harbaugh suspension over the last few weeks: I appreciate the question, but I think we're totally missing the point.
Jim Harbaugh, the University of Michigan head football coach, was recently dealt a three-game suspension after Michigan was caught sending staffers to other teams' games to scout their play-calling signs, which is against NCAA rules. My one-sentence opinion is pretty straight-forward: the NCAA has a rule, and Michigan broke it, and therefore Jim Harbaugh should probably be punished. But I'm much more interested in what this incident says about the fading integrity of the NCAA than the fading integrity of Jim Harbaugh.
In an era where the Power Five conferences collectively make over $3.3 billion in annual college football revenue, I think it's utterly ridiculous that the NCAA forces teams to use the same system to call plays as high-school girls volleyball teams use to guilt trip you into stopping at their Saturday morning car wash: decorated Walgreens poster boards. For the last 30 years, the NFL has allowed coaches to relay play calls to players on the field using in-helmet radios. However, for baffling reasons, the NCAA has refused to permit this in college football, leaving coaches little choice but to rely on hand signals and sideline Beyoncé pictures to quickly give instructions to their players on the field. It's an absurd constraint to put on schools that often have athletics budgets well over $100 million.
Michigan got busted because they were sending people in-person to other games around the league to scout these signs. This is against NCAA rules because obviously getting to watch another team play before you play them yourself would give you an unfair competitive advantage. And as we all know, the only way to see a college football team play is to attend the game in-person. No other way exists to watch the game. Nothing. Great job NCAA; you really snuffed that one out.
And sure, scouting a team in-person is fundamentally different than watching the team on TV because if you're there live, you can see all the team's play-calling poster boards as you watch the game and then reverse engineer the entire playbook. But once again, that wouldn't be an issue if we just gave coaches radios rather than freaking poster boards. Nothing in the history of Western civilization has ever been written on a poster board that was intended to stay a secret. Anything you can read from the crowd with a $20 pair of Hobby Lobby binoculars was never private in the first place.
I guess all I'm trying to say is this. To me, the Jim Harbaugh suspension is not a story about an elite college football coach succumbing to the pressures of cheating. It's yet another story about the NCAA getting tangled in its own web of antiquated rules designed to perpetuate the charade of amateurism when every blade of grass on those fields is grown in the name of revenue potential.
I don't even care what Harbaugh did. He's not the problem.
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