It's science. Raj has a set of dials you could run a nuclear powerplant on:

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A Sopwith update. Sopwith has privately shared the source of his information with us and has been spot-on so far, so here's the update if you aren't an obsessive message-boarder:

1. "Follow the Money" won't lead anywhere. The money indeed came from Stalions' personal funds. Stop biting your fingernails off.

2. No coaches/staff knew anything other than he appeared to be a Ray Babbitt-level savant at deciphering signals from the normal raw materials. This isn't escalating.

3. Only the Vast Network (TM) had the shared Google drive pw, but the drive link was installed on his work computer. Not clear if anyone in Schembechler could potentially have accessed but WaPo took this and spun it in the most click-maximizing, heartburn-inducing way.

As I said in response to the Post article, it simply did not seem possible that Stalions would be physically able to give anyone from the outside access to an internal Michigan drive that other coaches regularly used. That is not how IT works in large organizations.

If the above is true—and it should be according to Occam's Razor—it is likely that Stalions successfully quarantined his illicit data from the rest of the organization. Probably by accident. Now we have to hope that Stalions didn't have a post-it note on his desk that read "PASSWORD FOR GOOGLE DRIVE I SET UP FOR VAST NETWORK OF OFF-CAMPUS SPIES: 12345." I got that 60-40 in favor of the good guys.

[After THE JUMP: Jim Stapleton speaks, unwisely]

Also. I asked Richard Hoeg for a Virtual Legality on the sign stealing and he provided:

I remain unconvinced that the NCAA is going to go over its own bylaws with that sort of lens; it is not a court of law and is clearly making stuff up as it goes a long. It would be nice, though.

Never respond to the haters. Well, Jim Stapleton, you've just convinced everyone you did exactly what John U Bacon said you did:

My initial tweet was causing confusion (my mistake!) so just tweeting it again.

Jim Stapleton, a U-M alum who is involved with the NCAA's COI, has released a statement responding to @Johnubacon's claims he is leaking information.

He does not technically deny Bacon's claims. pic.twitter.com/evX9Vwb9rJ

— Zach Shaw (@_ZachShaw) October 26, 2023

This reads like a 13-year-old cosplaying as a lawyer. Love the empty threat of defamation at the end, and the air quotes around "writer." Hey! John U Bacon has written many books. If you want to insult someone with an air-quoted "writer," you insult me like that.

This statement feels kind of disqualifying for a guy who's on the NCAA infractions committee? This committee is supposed to generate the impression of an elaborately sane group of people committed to enforcing NCAA rules in the most even-handed manner possible. A dude who listens to one radio segment and releases the above statement does not seem like the kind of person you want anywhere near an infractions case—any infractions case.

FWIW, Sam Webb points out that if Stapleton had much sway around the athletic department Jim Harbaugh would have been out the door after the COVID year.

A varied slate of opinions. An anonymous survey of coaches would be interesting, because the both-sides nature of newspaper-ish reporting continually leads to consecutive paragraphs like this:

ESPN surveyed coaches in the aftermath of the news out of Michigan to see what they thought. Some were aghast at what Michigan is accused of doing. Others shrugged their shoulders. A Big Ten coach said, "If they were sending people to live-scout and film, that's bulls---, then they should catch hell."

But another coach with Big Ten and SEC experience asked what the big deal was in practical terms. Between the TV broadcast, coaches' tape and what fans film with their phones and post online, the coach said there's more than enough footage that's accessible without ever leaving the office. "Anything that happens in the public eye hasn't gone too far," the coach said. "To be honest, I can watch TV copy [of] two to three games and get everything I need."

There's a distinct correlation between how many pearls you're clutching and the proximity of a game against Michigan. Also this emphasizes how incredibly stupid the whole scheme was. You're attempting to optimize 2% of your program when it's already 85% of the way there.

How serious can this be if no one wanted to fix it for cheap? I'm having a hard time reconciling the idea that what Stalions was doing was absolutely beyond the pale with the NCAA's incredibly blasé approach to ending sign stealing for good:

"It's 10:56 right now," an industry source said. "They could call CoachComm [which produces headsets for nearly all of the FBS] and have this fixed by 11. They could overnight helmet speakers to every school by the end of the day."

Berry's frustration built slowly over the course of a half-hour conversation, starting with mild annoyance over coaches' shenanigans and ending with outright anger over the NCAA's inability to take up the solution staring them in the face.

"This is too easy a problem to solve," he said.

I'm also baffled by what looks like an outright refusal by Michigan opponents to wear wristbands and turn all of Michigan's effort in this department into a zero. Stalions pushed the envelope, yes. How are you going to tell me this is an egregious violation of competitive spirit when the whole sport could have erased the whole enterprise of sign stealing for the equivalent of a couple pennies?

The arguments against this are such transparent garbage…

SEC coaches discussed utilizing in-helmet communication this spring, but it ultimately went nowhere, sources said, after two main points of contention were brought up: possibly voiding the warranty of helmets and not being able to use them in nonconference games. Big Ten coaches have discussed installing helmet communication, which several support. They were told cost, reissuing warranty and liability language on the helmets could be a stumbling block.

In recent conversations with Bill Carollo, the Big Ten's longtime coordinator of football officials, he has strongly advocated for the use of helmet technology to limit signal stealing.

"We were able to play a COVID year, but we aren't able to put transmitters in headsets?" a Power 5 coach said. "C'mon."

…that it's clear the reason this hasn't happened is coaches don't want it to.

A mixture of annoyance and grim delight. Dellenger has another article at Yahoo about the TCU game, and how their brilliant gambit of leaving in some fake dummy signals led to many touchdown, hooray:

They mixed in new play-call signals with old ones, using what one TCU staff member described as “dummy signals” in an effort to trick the UM staff. The dummy signals were old play-calls that had since been changed. Players were told to ignore the dummy signals and run the original play as called with the new signals.

“Sometimes we froze a play before the snap,” said one TCU coach. “We’d call a play and then we’d signal in another play with an old signal but we told players to run the original play.”

Dellenger attempts to demonstrate that this was fatal to the Michigan defense:

Dykes and staff crafted a game plan that, at least in part, used the dummy signals to fool coach Harbaugh and signaler Stalions. TCU scored first-half touchdowns on drives of 10 plays for 83 yards and 12 plays for 76 yards. The Frogs scored more points on Michigan than any team that season (51), eclipsing the next highest scoring opponent by 24 points.

Guh. This is an especially egregious version of Lying For Clicks since it leaves out the following facts:

1. Michigan threw two pick-sixes.
2. TCU's other four first-half drives netted a total of 43 yards.
3. TCU had 15 drives to score those points in.

Also, we chart these games. Seth's review of the defense against TCU has just one RPS –2 in those two first half touchdown drives, and that was a clear bust on Michigan's part—a corner blitz on which nobody covered the WR set free. At no point in the first half did Michigan completely dorf something in a way that seemed associated with a TCU playcall. The two RPS –1s on those drives are a rub route that picked up six and a QB draw against a light box that picked up four.

Meanwhile, TCU's EPA/play in that game? 0.04, 54th percentile, with a large portion of the EPA on plays where Michigan just screwed up. The sad fact about that game is that Michigan bottled it.

This quote is just… do you know what probability is?

“There are some times in the game that they still got us,” a TCU staff member said, “especially on short-yardage.”

A team with absolutely no knowledge of the oppositions signals will still "get" the opposition fairly frequently if they are making their defensive calls with a basic knowledge of opposition strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. You have not been betrayed every time an opponent blitz gets through. FFS.

So let me make sure I understand:

Everyone in the Big Ten knew Michigan was stealing signs. They told TCU. TCU made one simple change, and they scored a billion points and won.

I am compelled to ask: why did those Big Ten teams still get stomped? https://t.co/JFSfwP4HTm

— Bryan Mac (@Bry_Mac) October 26, 2023

OTOH, at least the article probably makes one guy on the OSU message boards wonder why Ryan Day couldn't have managed something similar given that OSU prepares for Michigan every single day.

The hammer thinks everything's a nail. One thing this whole situation makes clear is that there are a whole lot of people out there who have Main Character syndrome. Stalions, obviously, but also the always-anonymous coach talking about how his sign gambit changed everything. There is of course the TCU coach above who would like to take credit for TCU beating Michigan, thankyouverymuch, despite there being essentially no evidence that sign subterfuge was even a minor factor. So too this anonymous sign-stealer guy hit up for an Athletic article:

Let’s start with the Ohio State video. To the uninitiated, it looks bad. But Michigan’s coaches were not breaking the rules. Our signal stealer thinks he knows exactly what happened on the play.

Michigan holds up a white sign with a Nike swoosh. That tells the defense to not jump offsides on the hard count because Ohio State is about to check to the sideline. The sign goes down. C.J. Stroud and the Buckeyes offense look to their sideline for a call. Michigan’s staff reads it and points to the sky. A new sign with an image of Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young goes up.

“That’s probably their pass board when they think a pass is coming,” the signal stealer said. “By the way, everybody’s pointing to the sky now. That’s their sign for pass, another hand signal to alert people.

“If I’m at Ohio State, I see that right away and immediately I’m saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to go to wristbands right now. They know it. I don’t know how they know it, but they know it.’”

Again I must emphasize that this was third and goal from the four against a team that was ~120th in power success rate. Michigan could have picked this up by formation tendencies, personnel tendencies, or watching any Ohio State game under Ryan Day. All of these articles are interviewing people with a huge incentive to overstate the importance of stealing signs, because it makes them seem cool and important.

And finally: why? A second take from that Athletic article:

He does not believe Michigan’s alleged scheme is commonplace, calling it “next-level s—” that crosses the line.

“I hope I’m not naïve in thinking he’s the only one to do it,” he said. “I don’t know.”

In his experience, there’s no need to cross that line. If you spend enough time studying your opponents with a combination of TV broadcast tape and game tape, you’ll find patterns. The process of carefully watching signalers and logging everything he sees is time- and labor-intensive. It’s not easy to watch tape without sound and crack these codes. But it does tend to pay off. …

“I promise you, within a day, I could take the average fan and watch three TV copies with them and they’ll know signals by the end of it,” he said. “We’re trying to signal in a play that a college kid has to comprehend. This isn’t rocket science. The signals are not ridiculously tough to figure out.”

Just the dumbest way to get in trouble with the NCAA. Paying 15k for one recruit would have been far more efficacious.

Etc.: Apparently Michigan's dummy signals were busted in 2010 because it was always RichRod. Brady Quinn is like nah.