What's this? Why no UFR? YouTube just implemented a daily limit of video uploads unless you've gone through a verification process that they have a 24 hour turnaround on. So it'll have to be tomorrow. Instead: this. Hooray!

Seems like everything has happened. I haven't put up one of these posts this week because there hasn't been much to talk about. It seems like everything bad has been reported, more or less, and that the Harbaugh suspension is the only thing that's happening before the NCAA issues a ruling in 2026.

There's a hearing Friday as Michigan seeks to get its temporary restraining order, which I am not qualified to opine about the likelihood of. You seem to get wildly different takes from the various law-talking guys out there.

As far as the NCAA stuff is concerned. It still seems clear that Stalions was operating on his own. Or, at least, it's clear there's no evidence tying anyone else into Stalions's scheme. Michigan set a land speed record for most quickly fulfilled FOIA when Larry Lage asked for Stalions expense reports, of which there are none. This is some small relief since given events that have already transpired there was a nonzero chance Stalions would file reports with column headers like "I NOT BOUND BY THE LAWS OF GOD AND MAN," etc.

Meanwhile, John Harbaugh confirmed what everyone suspected once Jim's contract offer was put back on the table: they went over all of Harbaugh's communications and found nothing.

Ravens head coach John Harbaugh on his brother Jim Harbaugh and the situation right now at Michigan due to alleged sign-stealing investigation. John said he's "proud" of his brother and "he stands tall through all this." pic.twitter.com/MhNB4559Vm

— Morgan Adsit (@MorganAdsit) November 14, 2023

Not surprising since the Big Ten admitted they had no evidence linking Harbaugh to Stalions immediately before suspending him anyway.

[After THE JUMP: chicanery!]

The money angle. The money angle has not been particularly compelling to me given everything else we know about Stalions, and the fact that he'd managed to get a job at Michigan that had some pretty high upside, salary-wise, if he'd managed to keep it. But FWIW, Josh Henschke has some details on a house that Stalions owned in California when he was at Camp Pendleton that he sold upon taking the analyst job in Ann Arbor. Our man appears to have cleared a nice profit over the course of three years.

The legal chicanery! Raj:

I regret to inform you that the most Michigan™ thing has happened, and that is UM Law prof Daniel Crane arguing in the Yale Journal of Regulation that NCAA bylaws prohibiting advanced scouting violate antitrust law. We are reaching never-before-seen levels of Michigan™.…

— raj.docx (@internetraj) November 9, 2023

This is because they are solely financial in their motivation and Alston has blown up the ability for the NCAA to restrict these sorts of things:

In recent years, NCAA rules that limit economic competition by member schools have been in serious antitrust trouble. In 2021, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the NCAA’s enforcement of rules limiting member school compensation of student athletes up to the full cost of their education violates Section 1 of the Sherman Act. National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n v. Alston, 141 S. Ct. 2141 (2021).  Six years earlier, the Ninth Circuit reached a similar decision regarding NCAA’s restrictions on student athlete name, image, and likeness rights. O’Bannon v. National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n, 802 F.3d 1049 (9th Cir. 2015). In the more distant past, the Supreme Court held that NCAA limitations on television broadcasting violated the Sherman Act. National Collegiate Athletic Assn. v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., 468 U.S. 85 (1984). The common thread of these cases is that NCAA rules that limit member schools from freely determining how to allocate their resources can run afoul of the antitrust laws, even if (or perhaps because) those rules are designed to achieve intercollegiate economic parity.

I don't think Michigan is going to bring this argument in front of the NCAA directly but it could be another reason—aside from all the good ones, you know—that the NCAA is disinclined to do much more than slap Michigan's wrist.

Another good reason. Bruce Feldman's article on the aftermath of the Wakeyleaks scandal—wherein a guy who Dave Clawson did not retain on staff became a radio announcer for Wake Forest and leaked the Demon Deacons' gameplans to their opponents—is another example of the NCAA looking at a pretty clear violation of the prohibition against in-person scouting and doing nothing. What's more than that, the NCAA learned of Wakeyleaks and did not tell Wake Forest:

That coach asked Clawson if anything ever happened with Elrod. Clawson was confused; despite the notoriety of “WakeyLeaks,” he hadn’t been aware that his friend had known about the scandal.  But the coach told Clawson that he’d actually called the NCAA in 2014 after he got a call from someone he didn’t know; he was trying to give him Wake Forests’ game plans right before they played. It all seemed very fishy and really suspicious, the coach told Clawson.

“Did the NCAA ever get ahold of you?” he asked Clawson.

“Yeah,” Clawson replied, slowly. “Three years later.”

Clawson was incredulous as to why the NCAA didn’t alert his staff after the organization had been tipped off in 2014.

“Maybe the NCAA didn’t feel like it constituted a rules violation. I don’t know,” he told The Athletic. “You’d think they’d have at least given us a heads up. We were compromised for three years. Those next three years could’ve been avoided.”

I have no idea how you turn around and hammer Michigan after literally ignoring that event.

More documents. Michigan supplied a PDF noting that OSU had decoded a lot of Don Brown's signs based on TV:

This is accurate. We were in possession of these documents as well. It’s a 7 page PDF. Here are some pages not included in Matt’s tweet. https://t.co/ignwFIshb5 pic.twitter.com/LbuyKXJkWi

— Josh Henschke (@JoshHenschke) November 10, 2023

Not against the rules, of course, but further indication that sign stealing is common, that you can get just about all of it off TV, and that player safety arguments are complete bunk.

Etc: J Brady McCullough on the Pac-12 teams entering the league that are like "wait… what?" A summary of the Michigan and Tom Mars letters to the court if you want to tl;dr it.