How Michigan Football Turned Cheating Scandal into Rallying Cry

Sports Illustrated

The Michigan football program has been under fire this season due to alleged cheating. SI hosts Robin Lundberg and Dakota London discuss whether the program has turned the negative press into motivation in the locker room.

Transcript

00:00 Congratulations to Michigan, who have turned cheating

00:02 into being a victim.

00:04 I'm Robin Ludberg here with Dakota London.

00:05 And Dakota, can Michigan really use all this

00:08 as a rallying cry?

00:09 - I think so.

00:11 Look, I think in the midst of a season,

00:13 I have the obvious motivations

00:15 of you wanna win a championship.

00:16 But as that season goes along,

00:17 if you can grab other stuff

00:19 that makes you wanna play that much harder,

00:20 that extra 1%, and I feel like this is where they are.

00:24 You got the coach crying,

00:25 the offensive corner crying on the sideline.

00:27 They clearly use this as a rallying cry.

00:29 They say, "Hey, listen, you think that we can't win

00:31 "these games fair and square, so we're gonna prove you.

00:33 "Now we're just gonna come out with that extra uh,

00:36 "to say we're the best team."

00:38 And it could work.

00:39 Look, if it works, great.

00:41 - Well, let's see them beat a team

00:43 that has learned how to utilize the forward pass first,

00:46 because Penn State can't throw the ball at all.

00:49 All of this is embarrassing in my mind,

00:51 for Michigan, for anybody associated with the program.

00:54 I'm not saying they aren't a good team.

00:56 That's not the claim.

00:57 They cheated.

00:58 They were caught cheating.

01:00 Stealing signs is not illegal, but advanced scouting is.

01:03 They broke that rule flagrantly.

01:05 They were filming other teams on the sidelines, allegedly.

01:09 That's essentially Spygate 2.0.

01:11 So you get caught cheating,

01:13 and all of a sudden, everybody's against you?

01:15 No, no one is against you.

01:17 What is against you is what you did.

01:19 You got Conor Stallion's, you know,

01:21 going incognito, perhaps, on sidelines

01:24 and everything like that,

01:25 standing next to Jim Harbaugh on the sidelines.

01:28 There's video of him throwing up signs

01:30 that other people were interpreting.

01:32 All the other schools were like,

01:33 "Yo, something shady is going on here."

01:36 So no, it's not a complex of everybody is out to get them.

01:40 It's a complex of you cheated and you got caught,

01:43 and they did that to themselves.

01:45 - Yeah, but again, perception is reality.

01:47 So if they internalize it as,

01:49 "Now it's everybody against us."

01:51 You look at the '07 Patriots.

01:52 I know they didn't get the job done,

01:53 but that was after Spygate,

01:54 and they used that as a rallying cry to say,

01:56 "We're gonna prove just how great of a team we are."

01:58 You look at the Astros, after their cheating scandals,

02:01 they ended up winning the World Series two years ago.

02:02 So it was like, teams use that as motivation.

02:05 And for the organization, that's all that really matters.

02:07 No matter what the truth is,

02:09 if the team internalizes it

02:10 and they are actually successful in doing so,

02:14 that's, you win, who cares?

02:16 - Yeah, and all these teams, you know,

02:18 one thing they have in common is they're very good.

02:20 If the Big Ten is saying it's a competitive advantage,

02:23 even a slight competitive advantage

02:25 could be the difference in competing

02:27 for a championship or not,

02:28 which is why I don't believe Michigan belongs

02:30 in the college football playoff.

02:32 (explosion)

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