OSU slappy Kevin Schwarzel part of officiating crew tomorrow?

It doesn't take much. The Big Ten isn't a massive organization. There've been a lot of stories about Kevin Warren in the last few years where Michigan people notice he seems to have a strong anti-Michigan bias or "has a deaf ear" when Michigan needs something. The negotiations to move the MSU home/away thing back were really difficult, where Michigan felt they were asking for things that are completely fair and reasonable and Warren seemed to only care about what MSU wanted "since we all know what Michigan wants." People in the box during this year's MSU game reported that he agreed with the overturn on Hutchinson's TD and showed other signs of having a personal preference for MSU winning.

That's not an "OMG CONSPIRACY" thing. Everyone who works in sports has biases, and every college football fan knows who they're rooting for in any game. No matter who's in charge of the Big Ten, they're going to be sports fans, and since most of the Big Ten hates Michigan, odds are high that a lot of people with unconscious biases against Michigan are going to be in important roles at the Big Ten.

Their bigger problem has been Sabau, who was Ohio State de facto AD (officially 2nd in command) during the Urban Meyer years and is now Kevin Warren's #2. The head of officials reports to her, and when you get a quote about how the Big Ten believes these are their best refs, 10 to 1 "The Big Ten" means Sabau. She's very open about her Ohio State biases and very involved in decisions like this one.

She and the two directors of officiating, Tony Buyinski and Brenda Hilton, are big "People need to be nice to refs!" folks who often reference Schembechler (but not Woody) as the case example of coaches who normalized ref-hating. Hilton founded "Officially Human" (or "OH" for short), which is not controversial--you should treat refs as human, and the kind of abuse that the organization focuses on is the kind of stuff that nobody should consider appropriate. Unfortunately for Michigan, I think that these people associate the thing they hate most with Michigan, that these are old and deeply embedded associations that we can't really undo, and that this creates a feedback loop where they are less receptive to Michigan's concerns about officiating, which then increases how often Michigan gets boned by the officiating, which reinforces the Big Ten's sense that Michigan is awful to officials, etc.

I don't think it's outlandish or weird or even surprising that unevil biases in a small organization can create a systemic issue for one class. I think Michigan is in a bad spot because they can't really do anything about how the fans react to the consistently bad whistle that Michigan sports teams receive, and these people are not going to be turned around on how they think. It's not a simple matter of "FIRE SABAU!" or whatever--that sort of thing would only exacerbate the problem. What we should do is be the program advocating for professionalizing officiating and working to change this perception of Michigan among a few key people as an extension of Bo (like removing the statue of him that is literally taken from a photo of him about berate a ref). A simple thing like having their coaches shoot a PSA for Officially Human and playing it in-stadium could go a long way towards breaking the feedback loop we're in.