Jim Harbaugh vs. Mark Dantonio: Internet detectives are all over pregame dustup

Michigan and Michigan State got a little chippy before the 2018 iteration of their rivalry game, won by the Wolverines.

Michigan State took its pregame walk — a show of unity that plenty of teams do — while a few Michigan players were on the field warming up.

Neither side wanted to back down, so things came to a head near the 35-yard line.

There was some further chippiness with linebacker Devin Bush scuffing the Spartan midfield logo, but the crux of this investigation will focus on the walk.

This is the building block of the spat.

There is indisputable photographic evidence that the Spartans did indeed make the walk ... but when did they do it?

Apparently the pregame schedule is in the eye of the beholder, because it could tell us who’s in the wrong ... but only if both sides agreed on it.

Per Michigan spokesman Dave Ablauf, Michigan thought MSU was going to make its pregame walk — something the Spartans do every game — at 9:50 a.m., and believed they were able to take the field at 10 a.m. for pre-warmups. MSU was, per U-M, 10 minutes behind schedule.

According to a tweet by MSU’s football account, the Spartans left Kellogg Center hotel at 9:45 a.m., which is their usual departure time for the team walk to the stadium. Michigan players were on the field warming up before 10 a.m., and the Spartans’ walk began at 10:02 a.m.

The Kellogg Center hotel is a .5 mile walk from Spartan Stadium per Google Maps. It appears, per MSU, that they took the 12-minute route.

“Apparently they clotheslined two of our guys. Came out in their helmets, Lawrence Marshall — they just went up and clotheslined him. Old-fashioned clothesline.

“One of the guys ripped off Lavert [Hill’s] headphones. You know, total bush league. Apparently Coach Dantonio was five yards behind it all, smiling. So, yeah i think it’s bush league, that’s my impression of it.”

The picture Harbaugh paints is something like a professional wrestling move done to one of his players. Contact of some sort was kinda inevitable, given that one of his players was stuck trying to break through a chain of linked arms and given that these teams hate each other.

Picture yourself on the playground trying to play Red Rover and break through. As the linked people try to hold firm, they may end up with their elbow pocket in your general neck area. It’s unclear how forcefully this actually happened to Marshall.

This is the best angle of the walk, albeit not one zoomed in.

On one end, Michigan State politely broke its line around Michigan linebacker Khaleke Hudson.

But that’s not the controversial line break. It’s hard to see here, but on the right below, you can see that Marshall may or may not have been “clotheslined.” We can identify both Bush (not pictured, but wearing yellow) and Hudson.

The before angle:

It’s pretty hard to tell, but you can see the three main Michigan players impeding the wall of Sparty players, and something does fall off Marshall at the end of the altercation, if you look closely.

Marshall made it through ok, though. His Beats were perfectly intact on his head, which indicates “clotheslined” might be a slight exaggeration, given that if a Spartan’s arm plowed directly into his neck, his headphones probably wouldn’t have stayed put.

So perhaps it is Harbaugh who is overstating a claim, based on the information given to him?

He’s a few yards behind the line. But what he’s doing there, and particularly his facial expressions at the time, are the most contentious part of the whole deal.

A reporter asked Dantonio after the game directly what happened here, using part of Harbaugh’s postgame quote about Sparty’s head man smiling.

Dantonio’s response was blunt.

“That’s BS,” the coach said. Then he repeated himself after the reporter said he didn’t hear him.

“You heard me. That’s BS.” (and you’d better believe Harbaugh had his own response to this too).

If you remember, UM fans had a field day with misleading screenshots about a certain spot against a certain other rival in a certain loss two years ago.

The bulk of the Zaprudering this time around has to do with what Dantonio was or wasn’t doing behind his players as they traversed the field. Dantonio is typically stoic, so finding evidence of him smiling is noteworthy in and of itself. Here, Michigan fans are ready to point out what they perceive to be Dantonio’s hypocrisy as well.

They’re pointing out he was indeed right behind the altercation, as Harbaugh said.

And he was indeed smiling during the pregame incident, as Harbaugh said.

But that’s not all.

There was further conspiratorial tweeting about the merits of the walk itself, as to which team was showing #class during the entire pregame incident. Because, I dunno, I guess you’re not allowed to take a walk at your own stadium? And on the flip side, what are you supposed to do when you’re warming up at midfield and a wall of humanity is bearing down on top of you?

However, the Wolverines won this time.