Joel Klatt reveals first reaction to Jim Harbaugh suspension

Michigan announced a three-game suspension for head coach Jim Harbaugh to start the 2023 football season, a self-imposed sanction as a result of an ongoing NCAA infractions case. It was a decision that sparked many thoughts for Fox Sports college football analyst Joel Klatt.

Mostly, though, Klatt found the decision bemusing. It’s just the latest volley in the odd ongoing saga.

“And the first thing that I remember thinking to myself is like, ‘Oh my gosh, who cares. What are we doing?’ I don’t know if you had that thought like I did. But that’s immediately what I thought. And then it made me sit there and I think to myself, like, ‘Well, who would care?'” Klatt said.

Klatt, amid an impassioned diatribe against NCAA ineptitude, explained that this whole Harbaugh-NCAA saga is a crystallization of what ails the governing body of college sports.

As such, he doesn’t think looking at it through the lens of Michigan and Harbaugh trying to juke a more severe punishment from the NCAA or the NCAA trying to come down hard is the right order of magnitude to consider the issue.

“And I’m thinking about all this and I come to the conclusion that, if you’re worried about this particular infraction, if you’re worried about the fairness of the number of games or who imposes the suspension or whether the NCAA will take into account this suspension in the first place, I think that your eyes are in the wrong direction. I don’t think — that’s a diversion. It’s a diversion,” Klatt said. “And you’re probably a Michigan fan or an Ohio State fan. If you’re sitting there like, ‘No, Harbaugh, he should have more games, he lied!’ Or you’re a Michigan fan and you’re like, ‘It was a cheeseburger.’ Somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in the middle.

“But that’s not what this is all about, for me. Let’s talk about what this is all about. To me, this is a symptom of a completely broken institution, and that institution is obviously the NCAA. The NCAA is archaic. They are slow. They are inept. And they’re inconsistent. Not good descriptors for an organization that’s the so-called governing body of intercollegiate athletics.”

With infractions from 2020 getting adjudicated in 2023 over issues that Klatt didn’t seem to think were particularly serious, he thinks this back-and-forth between Michigan and the NCAA is a microcosm of how the NCAA keeps making missteps.

“If you actually take a step back and you start to view this Harbaugh situation in that vein, then you start to kind of see the bigger picture,” Klatt said.