By: Ava Marzolf
September 17, 2024
Photo Credit: Detroit Free Press
As Michigan football fans basked in the triumph of the Wolverines' 2024 National Championship victory, prior concerns over the highly publicized sign-stealing allegations against former football staff analyst Connor Stallions faded. However, the controversy has been brought back into the spotlight in the recently released Netflix documentary “Untold: Sign Stealer,” where Stallions reflected on his side of the story following nearly a year of silence.
Stallions’ role within the Michigan football program was intrinsically tied to the play calling discrepancies between college football and professional football. While NFL coaches have been able to communicate play-calls to the quarterback through in-helmet radio devices since 1994, the NCAA did not implement this technology into college football until 2024, which has long forced the sport's coaches to rely on the use of hand gestures and large poster boards with coded signals to be relayed from the sideline. This dynamic presented college football teams with the challenge of communicating these signals discreetly while being vulnerable to the public eye, and most crucially, their opponents.
There are no rules prohibiting team staff from watching signals from the opposing sideline in-game. Likewise, the detection of signals from TV broadcasts or coaching film is legal. The point at which in-person scouting oversteps its boundaries is defined in Bylaw 11.6.1 of NCAA Division I Legislation, which outlaws “off-campus, in-person scouting of future opponents (in the same season).”
Teams are prohibited, however, from sending a scout to obtain signals at a future opponent’s game against another team. They also cannot fund ticket expenses or direct the recording of a team’s sideline for this purpose, both of which constitute the violations Stallions has been accused of.
According to Stallions, during his time as an analyst on the Navy football staff earlier in his career, he was first introduced to “an underground community of college football analysts” who partake in weekly exchanges of various teams’ game strategies. This sign-stealing system is referred to by Sports Columnist Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports as a “subculture of college football.”
This perspective is expanded upon in the defense Stallions uses in the documentary. He claims that he doesn't “break the rules... [he] just walks a very fine line in the gray... [he] exploits the rules.” Interpretation of this rationale as outsmarting the system or as a deliberate violation of the rules is where the divide in opinion on the morality and legality of Stallions' alleged actions stem from.
Although Stallions admits to some of those individuals sending him game film, he denies directing them to do so. He also denies allegations claiming he was in disguise on the Central Michigan sidelines during Michigan State’s 2023 home opener against CMU.
Even so, Stallions asserts that Michigan once trailed behind other schools in sign-stealing operations. Sports Journalist Isaiah Hole expands on this attitude through his recollections of Michigan's struggles before the team’s turnaround during the 2021 season. He attests that from his press box view it was apparent that opponents were already scheming successfully against Michigan’s signals. Stallions’ depiction of this situation as a pressing issue for the team might be deemed as contradictory to his denial of any sort of rule violations.
Despite conflicting views on the extent to which advanced scouting rules were violated, Michigan continued to dominate even in Stallions’ absence. Regardless of Stallions' firm stance that he never broke the rules, only “exploited them,” the alarming possibility of a supposed loophole in the rules reinforces why the NCAA finally felt it was necessary to allow direct headset-to-helmet communication. This rule change is clearly aimed at preserving the integrity of the game, meaning that the allegations levied against Stallions were taken very seriously by the NCAA. It's worth noting that this investigation remains ongoing, and further potential consequences remain unknown. Furthermore, the majority of viewers share the stance that no new information was revealed in "Untold: Sign Stealer", and that the documentary ultimately raised more questions than it answered.
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