Well it’s official: the Los Angeles Chargers won the coaching lottery and are bringing in collegiate National Champion head coach Jim Harbaugh to become their new head coach. After eight seasons with the University of Michigan Wolverines that culminated with a national championship, he is abandoning the collegiate level for a high profile job in the NFL. While there is a ton of hype about how great of a coach Harbaugh is, should there be any concerns for the fans in Los Angeles over the circumstances of the hire?
Ethical Question Marks of New Chargers Hire
As a disclaimer, I cannot deny that Harbaugh is a tremendous football coach. He has won at every team he has coached at virtually every possible level of competition and hasn’t stopped. The big concern with Harbaugh is going to be the circumstances with which he left Michigan. After all, he ended up suspended for most of the season for two major scandals that will undoubtedly lead to an ugly investigation into the University for years to come. To start with, I’m going to summarize the scandal.
The first three-game suspension that was handed down to Harbaugh was delivered by the school for recruiting violations. Clearly, Los Angeles doesn’t have anything to worry about there as clearly recruiting is an animal that only exists in the collegiate game but lets look at specifically what he did. Reportedly, Harbaugh’s biggest violation was that he didn’t respect the dead period during the COVID-19 pandemic that rocked the country in 2020. A lot of people have laughed the allegations off but there may be a connection to the fact that he won a national championship exactly when that class would have come of age to be starters in their junior seasons.
While recruiting can be dismissed as irrelevant violation in the NFL game, his second crime of a connection to a major sign-stealing scandal caused the Big 10 Conference to issue him another three-game suspension. I have argued for years that the NCAA has dropped several tiers in the ethics department and the coverup of Harbaugh’s connection in the scandal was another sure sign. I mean, maybe I’m behaving like a conspiracy theorist but if he was completely exonerated, why did he suffer a three-game suspension? Something there just doesn’t add up and this is the violation that may follow him to the NFL.
After the Spygate Scandal that embarrassed the NFL Head Coach Bill Belichick back in 2007, the NFL has tried it’s best to distance itself from any sort of allegations of cheating and this will be arguably their biggest crisis since the incident. Obviously Harbaugh is running from any penalty that the NCAA might be preparing to drop on him but these are rule violations in the NFL as well. With the symbiotic relationship between the NCAA and the NFL, would it be a surprise if the NCAA requests that the NFL levy a major ban against Harbaugh?
The answer is who knows. This is obviously unprecedented territory where a head coach wins a championship and then bolts for the NFL to avoid scandal. The worst part is that Harbaugh could’ve planned this whole exodus for when he was finally caught. For example, what happens if he steals signs in the NFL while also living out a multi-year ban from college football with essentially no real penalty? Could you do the same thing to the NFL in another couple years? He may be one of the most talented coaches alive today but he has committed some major ethical faux pas that should make any sports fan cringe.
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