Sounds like Springfield’s got a discipline problem.

Maybe that’s why we beat them at football nearly half the time!

Earlier this week, Gerd asked Michigan fans what their biggest concerns were for Saturday’s game. A significant chunk of the respondents mentioned officiating. (You can hear that episode of Buckeye Weekly here.)

The Big Ten’s officiating has been a recurring fear for many Michigan fans in recent years. And this has been far beyond the usual “the other team is holding on every play/why would you call holding on us, we never hold!” gripes.

The 2016 game got Wolverine fans so worked up, they researched the hometowns of the various officials, had more than 10,000 people sign a petition to have the officiating reviewed, and assembled “Loose Change 2: Fire Can’t Melt The 15 Yard Line” YouTube videos.

The Big Ten ended up investigating and found that the there was not enough evidence to change the most hotly-disputed call – the 4th-and-1 run by J.T. Barrett in overtime.

Wolverine fans were right about the officiating in one respect; Michigan was called for significantly more yards in penalties in that game than the Buckeyes. And it happened the year before in Ann Arbor as well.

In 2016, the Buckeyes were flagged twice for just six yards, while Michigan was penalized seven times for 59 yards. There was also 2015, when OSU was flagged five times for 39 yards, Michigan seven times for 72 yards.

But there’s a reason those games seemed unusual. They are two of the just five times in the past 20 years when Michigan was called for more penalty yardage than the Buckeyes. And they’re the only two times that OSU has had an advantage of more than 10 yards in calls over those years.

The most lopsided games in yardage (1999 and 2004) both came in seasons where the Buckeyes had little to play for, but Michigan was ranked highly in the country.

In a 1999 game where a Michigan win would net the Big Ten a second lucrative BCS bowl berth, Ohio State was flagged for 115 yards in penalties to just 7 for the Wolverines.

In 2004, Michigan entered ranked 7th in the nation, and benefitted from 70 yards in penalties against the Buckeyes compared to just 5 against themselves.

It’s easy to chalk that up to bad, sloppy OSU teams playing bad, sloppy games. But the worst Michigan teams over that span – the 2008 team that finished 3-9, and the 2009 and 2014 teams that finished 5-7, all had fewer penalty yards than the Buckeyes.

In reality, any rational fan of either school can only come to one conclusion. The Big Ten spent the last two decades setting up plausible deniability so that it could pull off its big fix in 2016.

Need proof? What do you call a faked incident used to provoke a response? A false flag.

What do officials throw every time they wrongly penalize a Michigan player? A false flag.

Open your eyes, sheeple.

And there’s little doubt that now that they’ve gotten away with it once, they’ll do it again this week.

So tighten up that tinfoil and get ready to research some officials’ hometowns. The Game is just a day away.

The chart below lists the number of penalties and yardage enforced against each team over the past 20 years. The “Yds Gap” column shows which team benefited from being called for fewer yards in penalties in that season. If it’s red, the Buckeyes were flagged for fewer. If it’s yellow, Michigan had fewer penalty yards.