As the Michigan sign-stealing scandal morphs into a battle of conflicting narratives being spun by highly-paid lawyers, there’s a growing notion within college sports that Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has gotten in over his head by considering an in-season punishment for head coach Jim Harbaugh.
This is an easy theory to put out into the world. Petitti has only been on the job for a few months, he’s never worked on a campus or in a conference office and he hasn’t yet been the kind of public presence we are accustomed to seeing from someone who holds one of the most powerful jobs in college sports.
We saw this phenomenon as well with Petitti’s predecessor, Kevin Warren, who had the misfortune of starting the job almost simultaneously with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Warren’s background was in the NFL, every decision he was involved in, from staffing changes to whether there would be a 2020 season at all, was laundered through the typical college athletics prism that only people who have worked in college athletics are capable of handling sensitive issues correctly.
I come at it from a different perspective. After a couple of decades observing the so-called leaders of college sports bungle pretty much every big, existential issue surrounding the enterprise while offering little in the way of solutions or vision, I’m more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to an outsider.
Sure, there’s something to be said for a lifer like SEC…
