A few years ago, I sat down with a former NCAA enforcement officer to compare notes now that their career in Indianapolis was over.
Exhausted by years of feckless bureaucracy, they summarized the job of enforcement in a way I’ve never forgotten: “We don’t catch the good cheaters. That’s basically impossible with the way it’s all set up. And most of them are pretty good at cheating. We catch the bad ones, the dumb ones, and it’s really hard to even do that.”
Michigan is going to get caught for stealing signs because it is incredibly, hilariously bad at cheating.
As of this writing, evidence of Michigan football’s overly telegraphed and woefully concealed national sign-stealing campaign is still trickling out: Connor Stalions, the Wolverines staffer accused of running the operation, apparently used the public setting on his Venmo account to pay a network of sideline recorders, a move rank-and-file drug dealers would scoff at. Stalions also reportedly purchased tickets to at least 12 other Big Ten schools on his own accounts, including Ohio State’s win over Penn State last weekend. Then there’s the video that appears to show Stalions standing next to Michigan’s defensive coordinator during the Ohio State game last year. Weird! My personal favorite anecdote (so far) is that a Tennessee message board captured the entire plot in action 10 months ago, but no one noticed or believed or cared.
Before we revel too much in college athletics’ most pretentious brand suffering this slapstick indignity, understand how silly and how widespread the actual crime is: Everyone — and I literally mean everyone in college football — steals signs. This is why it’s almost certain we won’t see an opposing coach condemn Michigan publicly.
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Sign-stealing happens among players in live game action. It happens across the sideline between coaching staffs during games. And, yes, it happens during game-planning when opposing teams review game tape. Schools send each other their game footage as a sort of forced courtesy.
One time I bumped into a staffer in an elevator during a game, and he explained he was rushing from the press box to the sideline after charting the opposing team’s signs for a quarter. “Been stealin’ signals” was his actual quote. Then he asked how my kids were doing.
Despite the ubiquity of the practice (or maybe because of it), sign-stealing in football doesn’t create the kind of advantage it does in a sport such as baseball, as Colorado Coach Deion Sanders explained this week when he told reporters: “You could have someone’s whole game plan. They could mail it to you. You still got to stop it.” Sanders might be the most overexposed individual in the sport right now, but the former two-sport star is also the most qualified for this analysis.
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It’s also important to note that college football could fix this tomorrow and catch up with the rest of the sport. The NCAA doesn’t allow certain in-game technology (such as helmet radios) that is commonplace at the high school and NFL levels.
Then there’s the matter of “getting caught” and what those ramifications will be, if any. At present, NCAA enforcement is a hapless shell. Since its amateurism business model suffered a death blow in the Supreme Court two years ago, enforcement has devolved from its already low bar into something even less. This is the same NCAA that actively avoided even trying to punish Baylor for covering up and obstructing investigations of systemic sexual assaults. Expecting some kind of takedown of this year’s Michigan team, which is on a path toward another College Football Playoff appearance at the least, is foolish. (One caveat: If more information surfaces pushing the scandal past the videotaping of sidelines, there’s potential for the Big Ten Conference office to get involved and levy its own immediate penalties.)
There’s a chance Coach Jim Harbaugh will face a charge of failing the Head Coach Responsibility Act, a blanket policy wherein the NCAA says anything that happens within a football program can be tied to the head coach as supervisor, but it’s common knowledge in the industry that Harbaugh is well-lawyered and perpetually on the cusp of an NFL return. Even if this “sticks,” it won’t significantly dent, let alone punish, anyone involved, except maybe Stalions, who has been suspended as the NCAA investigates.
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So if the crime in question is commonplace and the cops sent to punish it are entirely Keystone, why is this a big deal? Why have so many in the industry, myself included, met this particular NCAA transgression with such mirth?
Because it’s Michigan. Because it’s Harbaugh. Because this is the single entity that has sworn, screamed and evangelized that everyone is cheating but them, that Michigan is not only the only one doing it the right way but the only one capable of it.
“It’s hard to beat the cheaters,” Harbaugh famously told Michigan hagiographer John U. Bacon. Bacon used the quote, in reference to Harbaugh’s opinion on recruiting in the SEC, as a chapter header in his hilariously titled “Overtime: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football.” I guess we figured out which way they crossed.
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For decades, Michigan positioned itself against the cultural and economic changes in the sport, no matter how obvious or uncomfortable, as better-than. If Michigan was successful, it was setting the impossible model of competing with the Alabamas on the field and the Ivies in the classroom. But as the Bowl Championship Series era dawned in the late 1990s, the Wolverines became also-rans after making bad coaching hires both too outsider and too insider.
Rather than self-examine, Michigan’s sizable, moneyed fandom maintained that the success of programs such as archrival Ohio State and the heathen SEC was tainted by compromised morality and NCAA rule-breaking. While those programs hoisted trophies, Michigan boasted merit badges for a morality it alone defined. When you can stare directly at the widespread practice of millionaire coaching staffs breaking rules by dropping thousands of dollars to athletes living below the poverty line and cry foul because of the letter of the NCAA law, it’s evident your excess privilege has choked off the morality centers of your brain.
Then came Harbaugh, another native son but one with an unimpeachable résumé of elevating Stanford, a brutally tough academic school, into a dominant Power Five program. Like any master politician, Harbaugh knew where his base was starving and amped up the “cheaters” rhetoric both to explain away his early struggles and to justify the excessively slow pace the Wolverines took to returning to national prominence.
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The problem is now that Michigan has been made great again — the Wolverines are arguably the best team in the nation entering this weekend — it can’t do the one thing Michigan has staked its entire identity on: claiming the moral high ground.
The exposure of Stalions’s hilariously overorganized sign-stealing campaign comes on the heels of Harbaugh serving a three-game suspension for NCAA violations during the coronavirus pandemic recruiting “dead period,” as well as refusing to cooperate with the NCAA during that investigation. During his absence, Michigan players held up four fingers on the field to … honor (?) Harbaugh in a gesture that made it seem as if their coach had died and not simply been pinched for run-of-the-mill recruiting no-nos. Following his return, Harbaugh publicly promised a new “gold standard” for Michigan compliance with NCAA bylaws, a public attempt to reinstate his piousness.
Well, that lasted a month.
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The real and unavoidable punishment for the Wolverines is in progress and will play out in the coming weeks: the asterisk rivals and media alike will attempt to pin on a potential national title season. As of now, Michigan is in a frantic race between now and January to undo the morality value prop it has foisted on the sport for decades and, at least right now, it feels impossible it will escape the dreaded “Yeah, but” response that could haunt this team’s potential title forever.
If that happens, Michigan will serve out a worst-case scenario it itself defined: another big-time winner who did it the wrong way. That the Wolverines could experience the pinnacle of success without telling you how different or refined or apart from the chattel of this sport they are is a fate worse than losing to Ohio State.
It’s just sign-stealing, though. All the cheaters do it.
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