Former Michigan tight end Jake Butt stirred the pot this week when he said the Wolverines’ 2023 national championship “has an asterisk on it” during an interview with The Film Guy Network’s Brooks Austin.
Butt, a Pickerington, Ohio native who played at Michigan from 2013-16, made the comment while discussing Jim Harbaugh’s run in Ann Arbor.
“(It) took two decades for Jim (Harbaugh) to get them to back to back-to-back Big Ten champs and a national title. But that has an asterisk on it,” Butt said.
The clip took off fast on social media, and Butt later jumped on X to explain what he meant. He said the asterisk remark reflected how “other teams discuss those years,” and added that he’s “never wavered that those championships were genuine and earned.”
In a longer post, Butt pushed back on the reaction to his comment and said the point was about “program perception and public discourse.” He wrote that Michigan’s recent success came with “historic expectations” and said the pressure is even greater now because of NIL spending. Butt also said the current state of the program is hard to watch after the standard Harbaugh set.
That framing lines up with the broader criticism that has followed Michigan’s 2023 title, which many Ohio State fans and others view through the lens of the Connor Stallions sign-stealing scandal that surfaced during that championship season.
The NCAA later found “overwhelming evidence” of an impermissible scouting scheme in 2025, but it did not vacate Michigan’s national championship or any of the team’s wins from 2021-23.
Harbaugh left after the title season for the NFL’s Los Angeles Chargers, and Michigan’s results have dropped off since then. The Wolverines were 17-9 across Sherrone Moore’s two seasons before his firing last December for an affair with a staffer. In Kyle Whittingham’s first year, Michigan is 3-2, which Butt said should really be 2-3 after the Western Michigan game.
Butt tied his asterisk comment to that decline, saying Michigan has fallen back into being “a punching bag” and calling the current product “very disappointing.”
“And then pretty much immediately (after Harbaugh left), Michigan is back to being a punching bag, and I think it's very disappointing for people,“ Butt said. “It's certainly disappointing for me as I talk about my alma mater here, because no way should a 50-million-dollar roster look like this on a field.”
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