Michigan Island keeps shrinking.
As the college football world continues to wait for the Big Ten Conference to punish – or not punish – Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football program for what is being labeled as arguably one of the sport’s most all-time egregious cheating scandals, another Big Ten coach on Thursday waded into the sign-stealing, spygate, Michigan-self-inflicted scandal with both condemnation and one of the most remarkable tales of modern-athletics sportsmanship.
While Illinois coach Bret Bielema labeled the specter of the alleged cheating scandal inside Harbaugh’s “Michigan Man” program as “sickening, disgusting,” the veteran Big Ten coach and former Big Ten player recounted the ultimate example of sportsmanship during his tenure atop his first Big Ten head coaching stop at Wisconsin.
“Listen, when the point in time comes where I can say something, I’ll have a lot to say,” Bielema told reporters. “I went in this conference (at Iowa), I played in this conference, I’ve coached in this conference at two different schools.
“I remember being in this league as a head coach at another place, where I literally got a call from another coach the day after we played them. They called our people during the course of the game, it was (Pat Fitzgerald) at Northwestern, we’re in a home contest there. He called me and said, ‘Yesterday, we had a chance. Your signals were coming over our headsets.’ He told his people to put them down, change the channel and competed in the game.”
Bielema noted the stark contrast between the standup-actions of Fitzgerald’s Northwestern program juxtaposed against the scandal at Michigan which already has prompted the figure, Connor Stalions, at the center of the debacle – well, other than Jim Harbaugh – to resign his full-time position as a member of Harbaugh’s Michigan football department.
“I thought the highest moment of integrity, here’s a moment … right? What’s being discussed, I don’t know anything more than what I know,” Bielema added. “I said this a couple weeks ago, these stories are always so much better when you’re not in it because we don’t obviously play them.”
Bielema likewise noted the gamesmanship element of trying to decipher an opponent’s signals and personnel on gameday versus the intricate, illegal, advanced in-person scouting performed by Stalions and others on behalf of Harbaugh’s Michigan program.
“In 1992 when I became a G.A., I remember my mission in 1992 was to find out when they signaled personnel to go on the field,” said Bielema, whose Illinois team lost just 19-17 at Michigan last year. “So that’s how I started as a young assistant G.A. And you gather information every week that way, which is totally legal. We share, we’ve got buddies that play at other teams, conferences, right? But if something was going on off-campus, like it’s been noted they were out our games before we played last year, that opens up a whole … It’s sickening. It’s disgusting.
“I’ll let them figure that part out. And I think as coaches, we’ve got to hold the integrity of the league and everybody’s got to feel that everybody’s playing by the same rules and kind of go forward from there.”
Though Bielema just broadly addressed sportsmanship, it cannot be ignored that while Michigan has found itself under investigation by the NCAA, Big Ten and a third-party entity for the actions of Stalions, Harbaugh already opened this 2023 season on a school-imposed three-game suspension as the NCAA has continued to probe Harbaugh's illicit recruiting activities/cheating during the NCAA-mandated recruiting dead period during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.