Punishment, fazed

 The NCAA landed on Michigan's shady football program with both feet yesterday, and there was much relief and (dare we say it) perhaps even rejoicing in Ann Arbor. This is because it doesn't hurt much these days when the NCAA lands on you with both feet, the feet in question being swaddled in fuzzy bunny slippers.

It's a gelded entity now, the NCAA. A velvet fist in a velvet glove, to extend the metaphor to another appendage.

And so Michigan has to pay fines that could exceed $30 million for Scoutgate and other assorted crimes from the sordid Jim Harbaugh Regime, and it will face some restrictions on recruiting, and a bunch of then-assistant coaches who no longer work in college football were assessed show-cause penalties. This includes the aforementioned Harbaugh, who's currently serving a four-year show-cause and got hit with an additional 10-year jolt.

Which no doubt stung like the proverbial wet noodle now that he's safely back in the NFL.

"Oh, whatever will I do!" one can imagine Harbaugh crying out there in L.A., mock-clutching his pearls.

This was not exactly the reaction in Ann Arbor, although it likely wasn't far off. The take there seemed to be that $30 million or so for a national title was a sweet deal, tainted though that national title will forever be.

Not that U of M fans care, though they should. But shame being as extinct as the dodo these days, a ring is a ring, no matter how acquired. And so the NCAA is like Miss Shields from "A Christmas Story", trying in vain to suss out who baited Flick into sticking his tongue on that flagpole.

"Those who did it know their blame," quoth Miss Shields/the NCAA. "And I'm sure that the guilt you feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive."

As if.

To be sure, it's a different day now, and the NCAA is just another entity driven by the profit margin, overseeing a professional enterprise in which the crimes of yesteryear are merely bidness as usual.  Everyone's out to get theirs, and the landscape is full of young men and women riding the transfer portal rails in search of the tastiest deal. Rules violations? Quaint as rotary phones.

And so why not hit the Wolverines athletic department with an up-to-$30 mill fine it will recoup by, oh, say, next Tuesday? Or tell an NFL head coach he can't be a college head coach anymore ("No Bemidji State for you, Jimbo!")? Or suspend current Michigan coach Sherrone Moore for an extra game next season, in addition to the two Michigan self-imposed on Moore this season?

Which will be Central Michigan and Nebraska, by the way. The Oklahoma game he'll get to coach, being one of those marquee deals and all. 

Some would call that not so much a punishment phase as punishment, fazed. Most of them, by odd coincidence, live in Ohio.

At any rate, in the NCAA's czarist days, the powers-that-then-were would have gone much more over-the-top, or so one can assume. They might have stripped the Wolverines of their national title, for starters. They might have made them vacate a clutch of Ws and hit them with a multi-year postseason ban. Not even Michigan's self-imposed punishment would have cut much ice.

And in Ann Arbor, they'd have been screaming and rending their garments instead of halfway celebrating.

Me?

Sometimes I actually miss the screaming and rending of garments. I'm weird that way.