Spy games

 Hats off to Purdue football coach Ryan Walters. He's not a man to let the truth off the hook if he's got it right there wrigglin' to be spoken.

He said the other day that, hell, yes, the Boilermakers were changing their sideline signals going up to Michigan, because the Spyverines were some cheatin' sonsabitches. Said he and his staff knew for a fact that little weasel Connor Stalions had been on the sidelines for some of Purdue's games, and therefore defensive measures must be taken.

And, OK, so Walters didn't exactly say it like that. But he did say the quiet part out loud, which is that Jim Harbaugh's crew are a bunch of cheatin' sonsabitches, and all the excuse-making and everybody-does-it-ing and persecution-complexin' ("They're just out to get us 'cause we're winning!") can't change that essential fact.

There's been a whole pile of the aforementioned rationalizing going on since Stalions' shenanigans got out, and all the video of Stalions whispering the other team's plays in Michigan assistants' ears hasn't quieted it in the least. They say the best defense is a good offense, and, man, have Michigan's supporters and media enablers been enthusiastically playing it.

And now there's this nugget to fuel their phony victimhood: Rumors that Ohio State hired its own private investigators to look into the going-on with their fiercest rivals, seeing how UM itself seems so half-hearted about it.

God knows if it's true. But if it is ... well, so what?

Playing fair fled the premises in big-boy college football when coaches started poaching other schools' commits. so any outrage over one school possibly investigating its possibly corrupt rival seems misplaced at this point. This is especially true now that Michigan has fired Stalions -- an acknowledgement, it would seem, that there was more to this spying business than folks in Ann Arbor were letting on.

The Spyverines have indeed been a juggernaut this season, but somehow the dirt keeps piling up around the program anyway. The FBI has been in town, investigating a former assistant for various computer hijinks. The school just fired another assistant who got caught trolling for 13-year-old girls. And to think SMU got the death penalty back in the day just because the Mustangs paid a couple of running backs.

Maybe Harbaugh and the Spyverines survive all of this, because they're that damn good. The excuse-making for them wouldn't have reached such absurd levels if they weren't; the story would have sunk like a stone, after all, if it involved some sadsack 2-6 or 2-7 outfit.

And not just because the 2-6 or 2-7 outfit clearly wasn't very good at cheating.

Michigan, however, has been good at it. All rationalization aside, they're 23-1 in the Big Ten since Stalions started touring the conference's campuses. Harbaugh's 2-0 against Ohio State after going 0-5 prior. It's been a triumphant march for him with the exception of last year's College Football Playoff semifinal -- when the Spyverines lost to TCU, which changed all its sideline signals after hearing something fishy was going on at Michigan.

I'm not gonna say all that was more than just coincidence. But I'm not not gonna say it, either.

Look. You can say this is no big deal, that it's just a team trying to get an edge in a no-holds-barred era of college football. But scouting opponents in person ahead of time, and shooting video of them, has been illegal in the college game for almost 30 years. You can say that shouldn't be so -- that it's a dumb and antiquated rule -- but it's still a rule.

And Michigan knowingly violated it. To what extent will be determined by the NCAA's investigation, since the Big Ten doesn't seem disposed to act on any of this. But it's almost impossible to believe, as more evidence of the scheme comes out, that Harbaugh and/or members of his staff weren't running the whole thing.

In the meantime, you can just imagine the latest indignant spluttering from the rationalizers, if there's any truth at all to Ohio State poking its nose into Michigan's rule-breaking.

"How dare they spy on our spying operation!  Why, that's CHEATING!"

Yeesh.