The more The Washington Post investigates the Michigan Wolverines, the better it is for the historical record—regardless of what the NCAA chooses to do or not do about the blatant cheating scandal. Here is the juiciest bit of evidence to emerge this week: ” … Michigan football has been using a sign-stealing operation involving both in-person scouting as well as video-recording coaches …”—explicitly against the rules.

This reminds us of the SpyGate controversy with the New England Patriots, who cheated to win multiple Super Bowls with very little punishment from the NFL, as well as the Houston Astros, who have won multiple World Series with very little punishment from MLB. It’s no surprise that some desperate university down on its luck was bound to try the same in order to reverse its fortunes—on and off the field.

Here’s another tidbit from a different WaPo piece, this one an opinion column: “We don’t catch the good cheaters. That’s basically impossible with the way it’s all set up. And most of them are pretty good at cheating. We catch the bad ones, the dumb ones, and it’s really hard to even do that.” That is a quote from a former NCAA enforcement officer, and it explains a lot about just how dumb the Wolverines have been.

From 2004 to 2020, the Ohio State Buckeyes beat the Michigan football team 15 times in 16 games—with the Wolverines begging off in 2020 at the last second, allegedly due to some Covid outbreak. Likewise, from 2008 to 2020, Michigan lost to in-state rival Michigan State 9 times in 13 games, a terrible embarrassment to the university that likes to claim it’s the best college football program ever. Desperation always starts it.

Compare to the Patriots or the Astros, for example—but really, any cheating team like Boston Red Sox or the San Francisco Giants, too: there’s a huge fan base that wants to spend money to support a winner, but you can’t put a winner on the field honestly, and you haven’t won shit in decades. The Patriots had never won a Super Bowl, and the Astros had never won a World Series; both had huge TV markets to serve fans.

The Red Sox and the Giants fit this formula, too, of course. So, the Wolverines haven’t won a Rose Bowl since the 1997 season, and even that was controversial. Michigan hasn’t won a consensus national championship since 1948, which makes a team irrelevant on the national scene. You can’t beat your two biggest rivals anymore. Your fans are getting tired of the coaching changes and the excuses. Enter cheating.

Michigan posted just a 2-4 record in 2020, and while Covid may have had something to do with that, the Wolverines still ducked the Buckeyes at the end of the year to avoid losing again. Suddenly, though, the Michigan program turned it around—to extreme levels, posting a 33-3 record since the start of the 2021 season and qualifying twice for the College Football Playoff, which it had never done before then. Hmmm.

The formula is as old as it is stale; the results are often too obvious to ignore, despite mediot mythmakers trying to sell it to the public with feel-good stories of overcoming adversity, working really hard, and triumphing in the face of unrelenting odds, etc.—the same shit America has sold to the world for more than two centuries, of course, despite multiple genocides, endless corruption, and massive social inequity. Sad.

But we digress: everything about this scandal is exactly the way the cheating always unfolds. The formula is there, even with Nick Saban going to Alabama to resurrect that football program—only the Crimson Tide were much smarter about it than the Wolverines. Other schools have not been so smart, of course, even if they’ve been let off the hook for one reason or another by the NCAA. Time will tell what happens here.

Michigan Head Coach Jim Harbaugh already has been caught cheating in other ways, and he’s already been caught in his lies by the NCAA. This reeks of a loss of institutional control over an athletic program, and in the past, this might have earned the famed Death Penalty from the NCAA. But Michigan football is too potentially lucrative to punish that way, yet something has to be done to send a message here. Right?!