NCAA says Michigan's sign-stealing violations 'required' a postseason ban. So why didn't the Wolverines get one?

For whatever hardship the NCAA’s penalty for the Conor Stalions saga will cause the University of Michigan — a few new t-shirt slogans in Columbus, some slightly postponed redecorations to a couple stadium luxury suites — the larger truth is this: the Michigan case has revealed how fragile the NCAA’s authority is now.

The NCAA handed down its penalties in the Stalions sign-stealing controversy on Friday, and they ran pretty much as expected: a few years’ probation, a substantial financial hit, plus heavy penalties for the coaches involved. But as the NCAA itself admitted, the landscape of college football has changed more rapidly than the regulations designed to oversee it, rendering ineffective or inappropriate many of the weapons it once used to enforce compliance.

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In its report released Friday, the NCAA indicated specifically that due to the severity of the violations and Michigan’s status as a repeat offender, “a postseason ban is required in this case.” However, just a few lines later, the report notes that “a postseason ban would unfairly penalize student-athletes for the actions of coaches and staff who are no longer associated with the Michigan football program. Thus, a more appropriate penalty is an offsetting financial penalty.”

That’s it right there. The NCAA isn’t hammering schools with program-wrecking postseason bans, it’s just serving them with bills. And given the vast resources pouring into the game now, that’s not a punishment that will leave a mark.

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There’s no love lost between the NCAA and Michigan, and the NCAA swung as hard as it realistically could at the Wolverines. But the penalties will hit with all the force of a well-swung pillow. There’s no better indication than this of how the NCAA’s enforcement authority has dwindled in the face of mega-programs and the era of NIL.

Not so long ago, even an accusation of impropriety was the equivalent of a guilty verdict for a program in the NCAA’s sights. Guilty until proven innocent ran the mantra, and almost no program ever proved itself innocent. Nowhere was this more evident than in the case of SMU, which the NCAA literally blew off the college football map in 1987, hammering the Mustangs with a two-year “death penalty” for constant and repeated recruiting violations.

SMU remains the only school ever to receive the death penalty, in large part because the NCAA realized just how much power such a verdict held. The Mustangs needed decades to recover from the effects of the penalty, not returning to national relevance until just last season. (More on this in a moment.)

Schools from Alabama to Penn State have stared down the barrel of the death penalty, but the NCAA held off from exercising that power. Instead, the NCAA has employed a combination of financial penalties, vacated wins and titles, scholarship reductions and postseason bans to discourage illegal activity.

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It’s impossible to prove a negative, so it’s impossible to know how well the NCAA’s threats have discouraged illegal activity, but what’s absolutely crystal-clear is this: What was once illegal is now very much legal, encouraged and celebrated.

So many of the recruiting violations that hobbled, crippled or devastated programs in the past are now completely legal under the banner of NIL. Players don’t need to meet bag men with suitcases full of cash in a Waffle House parking lot anymore; they sign a couple documents in boardrooms and arrange for perfectly legal direct deposits.

Not only that, the revenue sharing model created in recent months under the House settlement protects that revenue from NCAA fines. In other words, the NCAA can’t use fines to cut into the revenue designated for current and future student-athletes — meaning the $20-plus-million pool Michigan has set aside for the Classes of 2025, 2026 and beyond won’t lose a drop to the multimillion-dollar fines levied against the university.

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Now, about those fines. Some are direct, like the $50,000 fine plus the equivalent of 10 percent of the school’s budget for the football program, and the equivalent of 10 percent of the football scholarships in 2025-26. Others are based on future anticipations — specifically, the loss of all postseason competition revenue from the 2025 and 2026 seasons.

Given the vast sums of cash flowing into college football now, all that combined makes for a substantial hit. Each Big Ten school will receive a $6 million CFP share in 2025, and that number will grow to $21 million in 2026. For an athletic department with a total budget projected at $266 million — including $15 million in assistance from the university at large — that’s a significant hit.

However, here’s where SMU re-enters the picture. The Mustangs joined the ACC two years ago by, in part, forfeiting nine years’ worth of ACC media revenue. But thanks to a remarkable outpouring of support from donors, surpassing $125 million in fundraising and reporting $65 million in donations for the 2025 fiscal year alone, SMU is back in business. The Mustangs reached the CFP last year, and kept the $4 million they received from that berth.

So Michigan will still have the opportunity to play in the postseason; the Wolverines enter the season ranked 14th in the AP poll. And like SMU, Michigan’s alumni possess extraordinarily deep pockets. There will be some more pointed donation letters going out to alumni this year, but there will be some larger checks headed Ann Arbor’s way, too. (Worth noting: Michigan also counts more than a few lawyers among its alumni. Any attempt to alter the program’s record book or future schedules would be met with an absolutely overwhelming blizzard of legal action.)

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The coaches served with show-cause penalties could suffer on an individual level. Thanks to a prior show-cause order and a mandatory one-year suspension, Jim Harbaugh will effectively be barred from coaching in the college ranks until 2039 — not that the current Chargers coach is likely to ever return to the college ranks. Conor Stalions, the centerpiece of this entire scandal, until 2033, unless he and whatever university hires him make an effective case for his employment. The days of coaches setting fire to a program and then walking away appear to be over.

But so too are the days of the NCAA carpet-bombing an athletic department into submission with penalties, scholarship reductions and bowl bans. There’s no better indication of the new era of college sports than this. The game has grown too large for its regulators to regulate.