Jake Butt played tight end at Michigan from 2013 to 2016, won the Mackey Award, made All-American twice and currently works as a broadcaster for Fox Sports and Big Ten Network. On The Film Guy Network this week he put an asterisk on his own school’s national championship.
Talking about Jim Harbaugh’s run of consecutive Big Ten titles and the title itself, Butt said “even that has an asterisk on it.” He followed it with this: “Then pretty much immediately Michigan is back to being a punching bag.”
The Sanctions He Is Referring To
The NCAA found that Michigan ran an impermissible sign-stealing scheme during the 2021, 2022 and 2023 seasons. The program avoided vacated wins and future bowl bans. The penalties landed mostly on coaches: Sherrone Moore received a three-game suspension spanning 2025 and 2026 and was fired before the 2026 season, and Harbaugh received a 10-year show-cause order beginning August 7, 2028, after an existing four-year order from an earlier case expires.
Butt is not making a legal argument. The NCAA did not strip the title. He is making the fan’s argument, which is that a championship won during the seasons in question will always carry a footnote in the conversation regardless of what the record book says.
The Line That Actually Stings
His sharpest point had nothing to do with sanctions. “No way should a $50 million roster look like this on the field,” he said, calling the state of the program “very disappointing” both for fans and for him as an alum.
That $50 million figure is Butt’s own characterization and not a sourced number, so take it as a description of scale rather than an accounting. The complaint behind it is precise: in the revenue-share era, a program can spend like a title contender and still look bad, and nobody has figured out who answers for that.
What Michigan Looks Like Right Now
The Wolverines are 3-2 in Kyle Whittingham’s first season. CBS Sports ranks them 13th of 18 in its Big Ten power rankings, calls Whittingham “a late hire, a stopgap,” and says the team “looks sloppy and undisciplined through five weeks.” That includes a loss at Minnesota, which was Minnesota’s first home win over Michigan since 1977.
The Awkward Part of the Messenger
Butt works for Big Ten Network. A paid broadcaster for the conference’s own network adjudicating his alma mater’s only modern national title is going to draw pushback, and the pushback is not unreasonable.
The counterpoint is that a Michigan letterman saying this out loud carries weight that no neutral analyst can match. Butt has nothing to gain in Ann Arbor by saying it, which is usually a sign that someone means it.
Sourcing Caveats
The episode date of Butt’s appearance has not been confirmed, and the NCAA sanction details here come from a single secondary report. No current Michigan player, coach or staff member has been accused of anything.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.