The 2024 college season has officially begun with Week 0 now in the books but before we get to Week 1, there is a new reminder of the season that just was.
Netflix released ‘Sign Stealer’ on Tuesday, an 87-minute documentary that not only details the allegedly illegal sign-stealing operation by former Michigan football staffer Connor Stalions. And for the first time, we get to hear Stalions’ side of the story.
Breaking the fourth wall, perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘we,’ because I am in the documentary as a talking head – and I reveal there that I’ve been speaking to Stalions since the allegations first surfaced.
Statements from Stalions (through either news publications or his lawyers) and Michigan aside, this is the first time we’re really hearing the other side of the story. Up until this point, any details about Stalions and his involvement with the Wolverines have come by the way of scoops from the media or via the NCAA.
Having gotten an early look at ‘Sign Stealer’ I’ve come up with 10 takeaways or questions that come out of it – whether it’s about the details of the story, new revelations and bombshells (at least to the average college football fan), the documentary itself, or the NCAA investigation.
Before we move on, it should be noted that there are massive spoilers for ‘Sign Stealer’ below.
1. No evidence anyone above Connor Stalions knew
This is the biggest thing, and the draft notice of allegations from the NCAA confirms that it doesn’t have anything connecting anyone above Stalions to his alleged operation.
That’s been the proverbial ‘white whale’ for rival fans and national media, with an expectation that at some point it would be learned that Stalions was directed to go outside of the lines. Based on my conversations with Stalions (which are numerous) and what is portrayed in the documentary, there’s no evidence that anyone above him was aware of his alleged scheme.
2. Who investigated Michigan independently and how did they get the info they provided the NCAA?
This has been one of the hotly-contested sideshows since near the beginning of the NCAA investigation into Stalions and the documentary definitely gives it more than lip service.
I, myself, chimed in, based on conversations I’ve had with Stalions and multiple others close to the program. “I have theories. There’s certainly a rival school out there that appears to have done some things to try to get ahold of Connor’s personal materials. I believe that’s what happened.” It should be reiterated here that it’s a belief, though I don’t have any hard evidence of such.
The documentary goes to great lengths to intimate that Ohio State is behind the private investigator or the third-party law firm that turned in the evidence it had against Michigan to the NCAA. The whole framing of ‘Sign Stealer’ starts and ends with Ohio State – first as Stalions’ and Michigan’s seasonal motivation, and then later by interspersing shots of Ohio Stadium or Ryan Day throughout the later segment on the investigative firm. It even plays a clip of Day when he arrived at a hotel the night before a game and was asked about if he had any involvement in the investigation prior the NCAA. “No, no comments right now,” he said instead of flatly denying it. Some took that at the time as proof of wrongdoing, but that’s clearly inconclusive.
Regardless, with multiple shots of The Horseshoe, the conceptualizing at the outset of the film of the rivalry between the Wolverines and Buckeyes, and even later outright positing from Stalions’ lawyer that OSU had some involvement in the investigation before the investigation, the documentary certainly wants you to believe that there was some complicity in Columbus. And part of that is based on what we’ll talk about next.
3. The NCAA hasn’t provided ample evidence for chain of custody with its purported ‘evidence’
One of the biggest bombshells in the documentary is the revelation that some of what the NCAA is using as evidence may be the result of a ‘hack.’
Will Hobson of The Washington Post spoke about his Oct. 25, 2023 article which detailed the aforementioned outside investigative firm and that the evidence obtained was a meticulously kept schedule of Stalions’ purported exploits.
“My understanding is there was an investigative firm that through the fall of 2023 was basically investigating Michigan’s sign-stealing operation,” Hobson elaborated. “The firm had developed at least one source on the inside of Michigan football and they had documents from inside the Michigan football program that showed the schedule of games and identified the names of people that were going to be filming.”
According to Stalions’ lawyer, Brad Beckworth, the materials the NCAA is referencing may not have been obtained legally.
“All of the NCAA’s process has been based upon a spreadsheet that Connor had,” Beckworth said. “That spreadsheet was never shared with anyone. The Washington Post got it. We think his e-mail was hacked.”
The NCAA was questioned directly about it at the end of Stalions’ April 2024 deposition and it raised more questions than it answered.
“We believe that Connor’s personal, private data was breached by someone who did not have permission to do that,” Beckworth said in the hearing. “If that’s true, that’s certainly a violation of civil law and it’s maybe a bigger crime. If it’s true that came from somebody associated or tied to the Ohio State University, and we think it was, if I was going to try to do right, I might be focused on that. OK? Do you know if someone took this without Connor’s consent?”
“I – (stutter, pause) – we’re not sharing anything more at this time from our investigation,” the NCAA administrator responded. “I don’t think that’s information we’re able to share at this point.”
Could there have been an ‘inside man’ with Michigan football who offered up something to the NCAA or the investigative firm as evidence? It’s possible. But according to Stalions’ attorneys, the NCAA has not shared this evidence with them to verify whether or not it came from him or via his computer. So first, there’s no way of knowing if it was his spreadsheet and if it was, if it was legally obtained.
“I have no indication that any laws were broken in the way this firm did their job,” Hobson said. “I would think if there were anything untoward about the way this firm collected this evidence they collected then the NCAA wouldn’t have responded the way they did.”
Stalions’ lawyer certainly suggests that the chain of custody was broken somewhere along the way and that should raise some red flags. Hobson’s stance is that there was something worth investigating and that the NCAA wouldn’t investigate if the evidence was obtained by illegal means, but that’s speculation. Because it hasn’t revealed the document in question, particularly to the person it supposedly authored by, and it hasn’t exposited the chain of custody – how it supposedly got from Stalions, allegedly, to Indianapolis.
4. Have other schools been doing what Stalions was allegedly doing?
Besides the eventual insinuation that Ohio State was behind the private investigation firm that handed its ‘evidence’ to the NCAA, there was another bombshell: other schools are reportedly doing the same thing Stalions is accused of.
Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel claims that through his journalistic investigation he had uncovered five other schools that had purchased tickets to games of future opponents.
“Connor Stalions clearly crossed the line but he isn’t the only one that has likely crossed that line,” Wetzel said. “While we were investigating this, we sent Freedom of Information Act requests for lots of coaches, particularly the known sign stealers on different staffs. Did they buy tickets at opposing stadiums? And plenty of them came back. You can talk to anyone in college football and they will point their fingers at five other schools that they think crossed the line, whatever that may be when it comes to sign stealing.
“If the NCAA wanted to look deeply into this culture, they would probably find some interesting things.”
This revelation is interspersed with images of news clippings that insinuate that Clemson (as accused by Ryan Day) and Utah (as accused by Lincoln Riley) could be culprits here. The documentary also shows another clip of Ohio Stadium, perhaps insinuating that the Buckeyes could also be guilty. But as for all of the aforementioned, it’s a show-not-tell. There’s no evidence provided beyond Wetzel’s spoken word.
5. Neither Michigan nor the NCAA seemed interested in talking to Stalions
To me, this has been interesting all along and makes you wonder.
Let’s start with Michigan. The documentary features just one line which could quickly be glossed over. It comes from Stalions discussing his suspension.
“Within minutes they took my took my work phone and laptop and computer,” Stalions said in the documentary. “And I even asked to answer any questions. ‘What do you guys want to know? What’s going on?’ And they said that wouldn’t be necessary. At the time I knew I was being investigated but no one told me exactly what for.”
If the Michigan athletic department let Stalions leave the premises without finding out his side of the story, that’s gross malpractice – especially if he was willing to share his side. As a result, Michigan was flying blind throughout the entire investigation, unable to fully pinpoint what the truth was – because it didn’t have all of it. The case has been widely litigated in the media as a result.
Moreover, Stalions was suspended on Oct. 20, 2023 and resigned shortly after he missed the hearing that Michigan had scheduled. His lawyer comments on the Michigan side of things:
“The university had asked Connor to come to a disciplinary review hearing,” Beckworth said. “I told Connor there’s no due process, there’s no fairness. It works completely different than anything you would see in a real legal proceeding. So I told Connor, I said, there’s no way you’re going to go into a hearing with the University of Michigan when you don’t even know what they’re going to talk to you about.”
Stalions resigned on Nov. 3, 2023, but the documentary shares that Michigan leaked around the same time that he was fired before The Athletic released its scoop that it was, in fact, a resignation.
Then, we move on to the NCAA. The NCAA, in the notice of allegations draft, claims a lack of cooperation from Stalions, but what does that mean? It’s made clear from the documentary that the NCAA did not reach out to Stalions until April 2024 and their meeting on April 25 was described by Stalions’ lawyer as ‘voluntary.’ In the same scene, Beckworth notes that the NCAA refused to meet in person, as requested, and instead questioned Stalions and his legal defense via Zoom video conferencing. There, we get the first-ever glimpse inside of an actual NCAA interrogation – dispelling the myth that Stalions refused to even meet with the NCAA.
This raises another big question: how was it that Stalions, the center of the entire investigation, did not hear from the NCAA until six months after news of the investigation leaked to the media? Stalions was named a person of interest by the NCAA on Oct. 20, 2023 by ESPN – the same day he was subsequently suspended by Michigan. And the NCAA didn’t reach out to its person of interest for six months, nearing the end of the investigation itself? In a typical legal proceeding, the person of interest in a crime would have been at least questioned by law enforcement early in the process – not near the end of it. And it certainly wouldn’t be a voluntary measure by the defendant.
In this case, both the Michigan athletic department and the NCAA appeared to have priorities that superseded that which was at the heart of the investigation. And it’s unthinkable that neither worked quickly to find out Stalions’ side of the story. So why didn’t they?
6. Stalions’ intel may have played a part, but certainly not the whole
One of the narratives from rival fanbases has centered around Michigan’s viability without Stalions, claiming that the Wolverines’ 2020 season was more akin to what U-M was capable of and that the quick turnaround was suspect. This quote won’t help the Wolverines’ defense:
“I’ve been asked how many times am I wrong?” Stalions said in the documentary. “Well, I’m rarely wrong.”
It’s worth clarifying. Stalions told WolverinesWire he had a threshold for himself that he had to be 95% certain of an opposing signal in order to even say anything to the coaches about what an opponent’s play might be. And about 20% of the time, he wouldn’t even chime in with presnap information. That is, of course, if a team didn’t huddle. There are some games where there wasn’t a single signal as teams huddled for the entirety of the game (and it isn’t uncommon in football).
The documentary delves into the post-Stalions Michigan team, starting with the Michigan State game, which was the first since Stalions was hired as a full-time employee that he wasn’t on the sideline. Former Michigan linebacker Michael Barrett points out that MSU still didn’t manage to put any points on the board in a 49-0 drubbing.
“OK, you still didn’t score any points,” Barrett said. “That was kind of that first game of what is Michigan going to do now that everybody knows they’ve been ‘cheating’ or whatever.” Stalions adds in the documentary that without him, MSU huddled every play, despite his absence.
There was a gravitas to the season that didn’t exist before the MSU game that extended to the rest of the season: every game was a litmus test as to whether or not Stalions was the reason why Michigan was a dominant team. Spoiler alert: Michigan won out in 2023, culminating in a national championship, and the closest Stalions was at any point was up in the stands as a regular fan.
“What makes this such a great Michigan story is the fact that they kept winning all post-scandal,” Barstool Sports president Dave Portnoy said. “When you know that if you slip up they’re going to try to invalidate not just this season, but the past few years.”
If anything, the media circus and accusations of impropriety lit a fire under the Wolverines. Without Stalions (or head coach Jim Harbaugh), Michigan beat Penn State, Maryland, and Ohio State – the three best teams the maize and blue saw up until that point. Then it went on to beat Iowa in the Big Ten Championship Game, Alabama in the Rose Bowl Game, and Washington in the national championship game.
“They messed with the wrong team,” Stalions said in the documentary. “They messed with the wrong guys. They messed with the wrong brothers.”
“In spite of everyone going crazy with this speculation, by the end of the season, there’s no Connor Stalions, there’s no signs stolen, and they’re still winning,” Wetzel said.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a mental toll – either during or after the season. Barrett laments that the Wolverines aren’t getting the credit they deserve, proven by the late-season wins, because of the speculation and narrative surrounding Stalions’ actions.
“It’s still frustrating,” Barrett said. “The kind of team that we had, the kind of players we were, I feel like was overlooked. Because I hear people say our natty has an asterisk on it or something and all of that.”
Sign stealing plays a part in football, but you still have to run or defend plays. Often, you see teams run the same play over and the axiom, ‘You have to stop it,’ applies. Even if Stalions was a wunderkind, or went beyond the scope of the rules in order to acquire signs, plays are made on the field.
7. The documentary does have balance
Many wondered before the Netflix release whether or not ‘Sign Stealer’ would follow in the footsteps of other ‘Untold’ releases, such as ‘Swamp Kings,’ and simply tell Stalions’ point of view unchecked. That’s not the case here.
There are many contributors who balance the scales. A Boston College graduate, Will Hobson was the author of the Washington Post piece that stated Stalions’ intelligence was stored on ‘computer drives maintained and accessed by multiple Michigan coaches’ — which has not been corroborated at this point. An Ohio State fan, titled ‘Brohio,’ appeared with a full-face covering and his voice deepened to render him unrecognizable. There were multiple national writers, such as Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel and current NBC Sports lead college football writer Nicole Auerbach (though she notably graduated from Michigan) to provide color.
There were multiple statements made that contradicted Stalions’ account – some factual, some speculative. But this was a documentary that worked to balance what Stalions had to say with differing opinions, alternative facts, and more context.
As a result, even if it throws some wrenches into Stalions’ version of events, it does make for a more balanced story.
8. You meet Connor the human, not just a name in the newspaper
Perhaps one of the most impactful things is we (the viewer, though not me the writer) hear Stalions voice for the first time.
Prior to the documentary, a vast majority of college football fans, Michigan fans included, had never heard a single word come from Stalions’ own mouth. Sure, there were statements – such as his resignation from Michigan – but never him speaking directly to a camera sharing his own story.
And it went beyond just the case and the investigation.
We see Stalions as a child, growing up rooting for Michigan – much like many of the viewers can relate to in their own childhoods. We see his drive, ‘maybe too much drive,’ as Tony Paul says, to work up the ladder in the coaching profession. We even learn that he joined the United States Naval Academy in order to pursue his dream of becoming a football coach at the University of Michigan.
“I went into the military knowing that I was going to come out and coach football,” Stalions said in the documentary. “My heart was always set on the future of coaching at Michigan.”
Stalions’ training in the U.S. Naval Academy, and subsequently as a Marine, trained him precisely for his role at Michigan stealing signals. As Dan Wetzel puts it, ‘they’re code crackers,’ referencing his Naval and Marine training.
His father puts it best when it comes to the drive and intelligence that Stalions portrays in his undertakings.
“Connor has a mind that is – nobody can understand,” his father said. “It’s almost like a Rain Man-ish sort of thing where he’s a hard worker, he’s got a brain that figures that stuff out. And you put those two together and look out – because he’s going places.”
But most importantly, more so than any training, rank, or position that Stalions has held, we see him as a human. A person with parents who love him, who has feelings and hopes and dreams. We understand his love for college football and, more specifically, Michigan football – deeply ingrained in him from childhood. To that end, we see Stalions shed a tear while in the stands at NRG Stadium after the Wolverines beat Washington to win the national championship.
So now, instead of him simply being a name in a story, sensationalized throughout this entire scandal, the world finally gets to meet Connor Stalions, an actual human person.
9. Some insinuations are either speculative or don’t hold merit
Back to some of the balance in the story. Because not all balance equals concrete truth.
The most obvious example comes by the way of ‘Brohio’ — whether it’s chasing the money, or Harbaugh’s departure from Michigan. The latter first: “We’ve never seen a coach win a national championship and immediately bolt and route the whole staff with him.” Perhaps not immediately after winning it all, but it’s not uncommon for college coaches to either accept an NFL job or to take many staff members with them. Nick Saban was one year removed from winning his first national championship, while at LSU, before he bolted for the Miami Dolphins. Other coaches had some modicum of success (Matt Rhule at Baylor, Chip Kelly at Oregon) and departed for the NFL – which is seen by many as a step up from college as it’s the professional ranks. What’s more, every year since Jim Harbaugh was hired before the 2015 season, with the exception of the abysmal 2020 2-4 campaign, Harbaugh was speculated to be entertaining NFL offers. It wasn’t true that he was entertaining them until 2022 when he interviewed with the Minnesota Vikings, and then in 2023 when he interviewed with the Denver Broncos. The timing of his departure is only suspect if you discount eight other years.
As far as Champions Circle firing Tim Smith, there has yet to be any evidence put forth that he funded Stalions’ operation – but the insinuation from the national media that he had led to his quick ouster from the board.
These instances certainly are speculative – though the same could be said of the Ohio State connection to the private investigation firm, which was mentioned earlier, as no official evidence has been released there, either.
10. Michigan was behind the 8-ball
Inserting myself into the story again here, I commented on some early conversations I had with Stalions back in 2019 when he detailed how far behind Michigan was in terms of its off-field intelligence. He shared with me then how other teams clearly had Michigan’s signs and Michigan failed to adjust. It became more evident to me in 2020, when I was up in the press box during the COVID year. While it wasn’t particularly unusual for Wisconsin to go toe-to-toe with Michigan, it was unusual to see Rutgers push the Wolverines to triple overtime – having plays perfectly snuffed out. Michigan won that game, but Stalions elaborated in the documentary where the maize and blue were prior to his full-time hiring.
“Here Michigan is at the bottom of this intelligence operations totem pole and you don’t know you’re at the bottom if you don’t have a guy who focuses on that,” Stalions said in the documentary. “Based on my experience, 80-90% of teams have one of those intel operations staff members. So when I started to learn this culture of college football intelligence operations, here I am, a captain in the Marine Corps going, well, they can’t be better than I am at this, right?”
Many ask, ‘What changed?’ other than Stalions’ hiring. Well, Stalions upping the intelligence operation at least put Michigan back in the competitive scales, but the Wolverines hired a new defensive coordinator in Mike Macdonald, who has since gone on to become the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. With his hiring, the defense, at least, was back on track.
“Signal deciphering is essentially a cat and mouse game,” Stalions notes in ‘Sign Stealer.’ “If you signal first, you are the mouse. How can we be the cat?”
Now able to work with Michigan on stealing signs as he had at Navy, Stalions detailed (in ‘Sign Stealer’) – as I called it, ‘hyperfocused’ – both establishing his own network of sign stealers at other teams. But what’s more, he showcased his meticulously kept database of signs with every sign imaginable. At the end of the documentary, the latter is what Stalions credits most for his success.
But if it’s true that 80-90% of other teams had a dedicated sign stealer – which Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel appears to confirm in the documentary – and Michigan was going without, that does seem to indicate that the Wolverines were at least at a competitive disadvantage prior to 2021. But did they go beyond that? We’ll address that in our final section.
11. Conclusion
The documentary doesn’t hammer this, but Stalions has been clear (in the documentary and with me) that doesn’t believe he broke the NCAA bylaw. First, let’s look at what it says:
The Central Michigan at Michigan State game aside, there is perhaps a legalistic argument to be made here that if Stalions was receiving video recorded from stands in games, there wasn’t in-person scouting being done – at least by him. That’s really getting at the definition of the bylaw, and clearly, the NCAA (which wrote the bylaw) interprets that differently. Certainly, within the documentary Stalions’ legal team is arguing that he did not do any in-person scouting here. (It is interesting, though, that a Barstool Sports video is included where it shows that a Michigan intern supposedly went to the 2022 College Football Playoff semifinal between Georgia and Ohio State. Given the 11.6.1.2 exception, that would have been perfectly within the rules without any speculation.)
Stalions contends at the end of ‘Sign Stealer’ that this was the exploitation of a ‘gray’ area, and that there was no rule-breaking.
“I don’t always break the rules — in fact, I’d argue I don’t break the rules,” Stalions said in the documentary. “I just walk a very fine line in the gray. I exploit the rules. I don’t break the rules, I exploit them.”
How you interpret that likely coincides with the team you root for – or root against. It’s an interesting case to make, but clearly, given the issuance of the notice of allegations to Michigan on Sunday, the NCAA doesn’t agree.
Still, the documentary at least shows the other side of the story – a story that has been one-sided in the national narrative until now. It’s unlikely to change many hearts and minds, but with some of the revelations and takeaways, it should at least get some people who weren’t doing so before to start asking some questions.
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: The 10 biggest bombshells and takeaways from Netflix’s Connor Stalions documentary ‘Sign Stealer’
