For­mer UM Staffer Talks Sign Steal­ing Con­tro­ver­sy, Reveals How He Cracked Biggest Rival’s Strat­e­gy

For­mer Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan defen­sive ana­lyst Con­nor Stal­ions, one of the most con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures in col­lege foot­ball in recent years, sat down with “Crain & Com­pa­ny” for an in-depth inter­view on the program’s sign-steal­ing scan­dal.

An NCAA inves­ti­ga­tion into Michi­gan and its for­mer head coach, Jim Har­baugh, alleged­ly cen­ters on claims that Stal­ions sent scouts to future oppo­nents’ games to record their play-call­ing sig­nals. The Big Ten Con­fer­ence sus­pend­ed Har­baugh for three games dur­ing the 2023 sea­son over the scan­dal, and Stal­ions stepped down from his posi­tion after he was also sus­pend­ed. The NCAA has not revealed any infor­ma­tion about how Stal­ions alleged­ly vio­lat­ed NCAA rules.

Dur­ing his inter­view with the hosts of “Crain & Com­pa­ny” released on Tues­day, Stal­ions gave view­ers a glimpse into how he cracked his oppo­nents’ sig­nals on the field, includ­ing those of Michigan’s biggest rival, Ohio State. While on offense, teams usu­al­ly task their back­up quar­ter­backs and grad­u­ate assis­tants with call­ing in plays by hand motions from the side­line. For most teams, a “live” sig­naler is call­ing the actu­al plays while two or three “dum­my” sig­nalers bluff to pre­vent the oppo­nents from eas­i­ly deci­pher­ing the call.

WATCH THE FULL CONNOR STALIONS INTERVIEW HERE

Stal­ions revealed that dur­ing the Michi­gan-Ohio State game in 2022, he quick­ly deci­phered the Buck­eyes’ live sig­naler.

“Ohio State didn’t change their live sig­naler in 2022 all sea­son. The whole year,” he said.

“Includ­ing the game against Michi­gan?” asked a stunned David Cone, for­mer Michi­gan quar­ter­back and co-host of “Crain and Com­pa­ny.”

Stal­ions said that he and fel­low staff mem­ber Denard Robin­son quick­ly real­ized that Ohio State didn’t switch out their live sig­naler for the big game.

“You can call any­one from any Big Ten team when you trade sig­nals dur­ing the week, and they all say the same thing: ‘Yeah, it’s the same guy,’” Stal­ions added. “Now, when you watch any game on TV, you can see … you can tell the whole time who’s live.”

Asked by host Jake Crain if Ohio State kept the same live sig­naler all sea­son “out of arro­gance or incom­pe­tence,” Stal­ions replied, “It might be a lit­tle bit of both. I don’t know.” The for­mer Michi­gan staffer then said that he cor­rect­ly pre­dict­ed that Ohio State would swap out their live sig­naler for the sec­ond half.

“I said, ‘Hey, if there’s any time all year they’re going to change, it’s going to be this first dri­ve or the sec­ond dri­ve. And sure enough, I said, ‘If they’re going to change, it’s going to be that guy, the tall [grad­u­ate assis­tant] or what­ev­er, and sure enough they switched,” he said.

Michi­gan went on to win that game 45–23, hold­ing Ohio State to just three points in the sec­ond half.

“They changed their like route con­cepts going into that game,” Stal­ions said of Ohio State. “I don’t care what your route con­cepts are, right? If I can tell you’re going to run the ball or pass the ball … all I care about is the for­ma­tion.”

Michi­gan won the nation­al cham­pi­onship in 2024, cap­ping off a per­fect sea­son. Between 2021 and 2023, Michi­gan had one of its best stretch­es in pro­gram his­to­ry. The team post­ed a 40–3 record, win­ning three straight Big Ten cham­pi­onships and mak­ing three straight Col­lege Foot­ball Play­off appear­ances. After Stal­ions left the Michi­gan staff in the mid­dle of the 2023 sea­son, he went on to coach Belleville High School in Michi­gan as an offen­sive coor­di­na­tor, help­ing the team win a state cham­pi­onship in 2024. At Belleville, Stal­ions also coached the num­ber-one recruit in the coun­try, quar­ter­back Bryce Under­wood, who switched his com­mit­ment from LSU to Michi­gan last year.

Some argue that the sign-steal­ing scan­dal sur­round­ing Michi­gan should result in the program’s wins from the past few sea­sons and its 2024 nation­al cham­pi­onship being vacat­ed. Stal­ions, who joined the Michi­gan staff as a vol­un­teer assis­tant in 2018, has main­tained that sign steal­ing isn’t unusu­al in col­lege foot­ball pro­grams and doesn’t vio­late NCAA rules.