Michigan has five days left.
On August 25th, the NCAA handed down their Formal Notice of Allegations to Michigan concerning sign-stealing and a bunch of other stuff that we can't be positive of the specifics on but still have a pretty clear idea of what it entails:
According to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, the formal Notice of Allegations is “mostly unchanged” from the draft notice obtained by ESPN earlier this month, which indicated that Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore and former Michigan staffers Jim Harbaugh, Chris Partridge, Denard Robinson and Connor Stalions – the architect of Michigan’s impermissible in-person scouting operation – were all accused of committing Level I violations. Former Michigan assistants Jesse Minter and Steve Clinkscale were also accused of recruiting violations unrelated to Stalions.
If you've been feverishly following the scuttlebutt around this scandal, you probably already know that the Wolverines have used up 85 of their 90 days to respond to the NCAA (assuming they aren't granted an extension and haven't done something in secret, which would be weird but not completely shocking, and also assuming that it's 90 days from August 25th which maybe it isn't but for the purposes of this article that's what we'll go with).
I'm not a fancy, 300-dollars-an-hour PR guy, but my first thought at Michigan's slowness to respond is that while there's no good time to remind everyone what cheating cheaty cheats they've been, there is an increasingly bad time. And that's every second from now that they don't say anything.
It's true that a lot of this could be moot. I've been saying for a while now that someone getting their hopes up about the NCAA applying some kind of fair or consistent punishment to the Wolverines is like getting your hopes up that you're not lactose intolerant, actually, and your nephew's birthday ice cream cake is the perfect vehicle to prove it.
I know that a lot of you might think that the imminent, NCAA-mandated death of Michigan football is a near certainty, so I'll just gently remind you that this is the equivalent of Snagglepuss trying to issue a warrant on Hannibal Lecter. I'll throw in a third pop culture reference and add that we're not exactly dealing with Fat Tony here:
Barring an extension, five days is five days. Since Michigan rudely decided to not play a football game for me to make jokes about this weekend, I've got some options for athletic director Warde Manuel and his team for when he should take some time off from being the chair of the selection committee for the College Football Playoff (???) and scrawl a "nuh uh" on the back of a napkin and send it back to the NCAA:
TODAY
Arguably one of the better days to do it, since I'm writing this article well before publication and will be at my regular full time job with no means to change anything. Dropping this kind of news on a Monday wouldn't necessarily be ideal for Michigan as it'd thrust them front and center of the sports news cycle for an entire week, but it'd give everyone time to get the memes out of their system and has the side benefit of making me look like a chump.
FRIDAY
Ah, the ol' Friday news dump. A tried and true method for burying stories you don't want people to think about for too long, a nice little press release on a late Friday afternoon is the perfect way to shovel dirt on a topic right before the college football-caring public gets distracted by a top five matchup between Ohio State and the Indiana Hoosiers, somehow.
There are potential risks! This move could backfire depending on the initial Notice of Allegations and how spicy the Wolverine response to it actually is. To the news cycle, there's a world of difference between "we found out that Jim Harbaugh killed and ate a guy" and "probation for three years and the loss of a couple of scholarships."
SATURDAY MORNING AT LIKE FIVE A.M.
Just to piss everyone off.
LITERALLY THE LAST POSSIBLE SECOND
I actually think this is the most likely option, and probably the worst one for Michigan. Turbo-charging the week of The Game, by giving both Ohio State the football program and Ohio State the furious Mongol horde of fans looking to burn and pillage extra motivation, is not the best idea anyone has ever had.
Still, if I've learned anything from this season of watching Michigan football flop around like a dying bluegill on the deck of the rickety pontoon boat that is college football, it's that the Wolverines are full of bad ideas and not afraid to try all of them.
Maybe they think they'll beat the rap! Maybe they actually have beaten the rap! Maybe the rap is so bad that they're just stalling as long as possible to confront said rap, or maybe the rap is basically toothless and they're ignoring it because they can!
It's all possible, but the countdown to the NCAA's hammer/gentle tickle and The Game begins right now.
Photo credit: Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
