The Athletic- NCAA only got this last Tuesday
Pretty amazing stuff, this outside law firm presented this to the NCAA and the next day they tell the Big Ten
No more information who is paying this law firm
The timing also seems to confirm the leaks initially were from the Big Ten not the NCAA, the leaks today do seem to be from the NCAA IMO
“The firm presented its information to the NCAA last Tuesday, according to the newspaper, and the NCAA informed both the Big Ten and Michigan that it had opened an investigation into the matter Wednesday. The investigation became public knowledge Thursday.”
https://theathletic.com/4999767/2023/10/25/michigan-sign-stealing-inves…
October 26th, 2023 at 6:01 AM ^
My guess?
It was never on the Michigan network or computers. It was a personal shared drive, and he left it open or shared it with the wrong person.
October 25th, 2023 at 8:54 PM ^
This is just a retread of the wapo piece.
And the article just says “firm” not “law firm.”
October 26th, 2023 at 8:19 AM ^
Right. OP, why did you summarize it as a law firm? Neither the WaPo article or this called them a law firm. Both called it an investigative firm.
October 25th, 2023 at 8:57 PM ^
If Michigan gets hammered for this, are we going to see an arms race of boosters funding private eyes to dig up dirt on rival institutions? It's f-ing assinine.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:38 PM ^
Bama and Auburn spent decades doing this to each other
October 25th, 2023 at 9:57 PM ^
Now it works.
October 25th, 2023 at 8:58 PM ^
This is going to end badly. Be prepared.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:00 PM ^
For whoever leaked this to the third party.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:01 PM ^
THIS ISNT ILLEGAL.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:02 PM ^
Yes, it is! You can’t disseminate proprietary information without expressed authorization from organization that owns it.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:19 PM ^
How is film of opponents sidelines that people non-consensually obtained considered “proprietary property?”
Especially if this film was leaked by someone who had access to it willingly on the drive it was shared on?
October 25th, 2023 at 9:21 PM ^
How do you know that is the only thing leaked? How do you know it was illegally obtained? The firm has to share everything they have to determine what was legally and illegally obtained. Without that, it is everyone's guess.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:34 PM ^
The St. Louis Cardinals employee who hacked the Houston Astros network claimed he was looking for information the Astros had taken from the Cardinals. He got a four year prison sentence.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:53 PM ^
It isn't illegal to film inside a stadium on your cellphone a sideline. NCAA rules and guidelines are not government laws.
If you record a video in your cellphone inside of Michigan Stadium during a game, does Michigan own it? No.
You realize every high school football team does this all the time as high school doesn't prohibit it.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:06 PM ^
So if the argument is that the recordings are somewhat considered “public domain/access,” then can it legally still be “proprietary property?”
October 25th, 2023 at 11:41 PM ^
The data/film wouldn't "necessarily" be considered proprietary, but the server it's housed on would be. Whether that's some rando's phone or a university's server, you can't just hack into it and then consider it public domain and legally obtained. Look at the Fappening from 2014 as to what happens when you access someone else's personal digital documentation/info without authorization. Usually multi month prison sentences and fines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak#Guilty_pleas
October 25th, 2023 at 10:21 PM ^
Going out on a limb here, but I would guess, and an underlying assumption to SQ’s argument, is that there are acceptable use and/or data classification & security policies which would prohibit such information sharing by otherwise authorized users if the particular use/sharing is deemed outside the scope of what is acceptable or authorized in the policies. In certain cases it can be criminal, but it can likely open the door for potential civil litigation unless the acts were protected under some sort of whistleblower protection.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:37 PM ^
Exactly and Michigan is really protective of it’s information. Like zealously so. I fully expect civil litigation if not criminal charges.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:34 PM ^
This involved budgets and other information. That is mostly definitely proprietary information especially if they are on Michigan owned hard drives.
October 25th, 2023 at 11:39 PM ^
Seems like a slippery defense to claim that all budgets found are legitimate, university-approved expense reports. Unless it is an end-game, petty revenge for after a guilty verdict is given.
October 26th, 2023 at 12:15 AM ^
This entire charade is petty.
Anyways, the punishment is for the action, not the details contained within said action.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:03 PM ^
Everyone said the same thing about Kansas Basketball
October 25th, 2023 at 8:58 PM ^
Who is paying the firm? What is the name of the firm? How did the firm come into the information? Is this information/data the same as that describe in the Washington Post article?
October 25th, 2023 at 8:58 PM ^
I know you gotta write something but this is literally just repeating/rehashing what has been written already, including the various vague statements made in WaPo.
At this point UM is going to be punished to some degree but these leaks also feel like photocopies of photocopies in terms of new information, with maybe a note or two scribbled on the ends. I do suspect that all the places trying to get info will lead to some stuff that is incorrect to be published, which will be a whole other thing.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:01 PM ^
Agreed. To me what is new is that they got access to UM hard drives(!). That…uh, is not legal.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:04 PM ^
Unless the university itself (or someone on behalf of the university) commissioned the investigation...
October 25th, 2023 at 9:07 PM ^
True, but why would they do that?
If this came from someone presuming to act for the university that still is deeply unethical and worthy of punishment from the university. I doubt Ono or Regents approved of such actions which leads us back to legal/institutional repercussions.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:11 PM ^
Yeah you'd think they'd keep it in house if it's the case. Unless there was someone high up so adamantly against the Harbaugh extension and thought this was the best way to force the university's hand against it.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:08 PM ^
Even if they did, you'd have a contract limiting the scope of the investigation and what could be reported outside. At a minimum, someone is in breach of an employment or business engagement contract. At maximum, a felony was committed.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:14 PM ^
Again, there's a lot of moving parts here and we have incomplete information. If there's a shared drive that can only be accessed by certain accounts and someone with access pulls information from that account that's not illegal, though it can get the sharer in trouble if that info is shared with third parties. The firms are usually protected unless they directly encouraged the data to be downloaded illegally (e.g. they paid person X with access to pull down the info), but not sure if that's the case here.
None of this is a legal proceeding but the chain of custody with this data would be key, as you'd need to do analysis of the files themselves to see if they were altered, which isn't always possible.
The bigger issue to me is who funded this report - if it's a biased source that will matter. It just does, even if the underlying information turns out to be true. I do have a sense that if there was more salacious info we'd have gotten it by now regarding the coaches; if I pulled a drive down and had specific files on it I'd sure as shit want to know who opened it, when, etc. The fact we haven't heard that leads me to believe either it isn't there or the access patterns aren't relevant.
But we'll see, I'm sure.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:39 PM ^
Another thing in the WaPo that had me rolling my eyes is that after it insinuated that everyone the coaching staff had access to these files, they did add a statement that said there was nothing yet tying it to Harbaugh.
Lol, there's nothing yet tying it to anyone, including Stalions! (Although obviously they were Stalions's files.)
October 25th, 2023 at 10:23 PM ^
I mean, you can sort of tell everyone's reading from the same report here and trying to find some new angle but there's only so much on the page. I assume that this firm did a digital analysis on the metadata for these files and drives and tried to determine who had access. That's not foolproof by any means, and unless you've got much higher access than I assume they did in terms of overall folder ownership you aren't going to get a complete picture.
But reading these reports plus the texts from the SI piece this mostly matches my assumption that Stalions is a really "passionate guy"/"weirdo" (depending on your outlook) who's an obsessive individual and he also really wanted to break into coaching and this was a way he saw to do it. The "manifesto" thing drives me crazy because that's basically what the fucking Secret shit is about - manifesting your future by planning for it. It's rise-and-grind bullshit and it preys on people like him, but it's not a crime and I promise you a lot of people on staffs, as well as trying to get on staffs, are like this. But there's little evidence anyone else higher up the food chain really knew what was going on, and a lot of the "reporting" around that has been willfully obtuse about what, say, a colleague giving you some money via Venmo actually means.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:40 PM ^
Amid a lot of wild conjecture and paranoia here, this seems reasonable to me, that if some strong connection to people at the top had been uncovered, at this stage, someone would have played gotcha with it by now. I'm not a huge Warde critic because I assume his public stances are, for the most part, weighed by a lot of people--consensus moves. But I do hope he's going in loaded for bear tomorrow.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:17 PM ^
Yeah, maybe there is info out there connecting Harbaugh but that would have been the lede if it was the case - you don't sit on a story like that. Maybe it gets leaked to someone somewhere, maybe you tease it out with a "there's evidence high-up people knew", and frankly UM would be more vocal about it if it had evidence the rot went to the top.
Again, we're ultimately worried about what is a speeding ticket in terms of NCAA violations - it's not good but even if the worst case happened we're still talking about someone using iPhones to video tape games that are being broadcast to millions and being seen in the stands by tens of thousands. What happened at NW involving Pat Fitzgerald, for example, is significantly worse, as is what Tennesse, KU, and LSU were doing in terms of bright-line rule violations. That isn't intended to make light of it but at some point there's only so much of an advantage you could conceivably get in this situation.
October 26th, 2023 at 12:19 PM ^
I said it elsewhere, but I hope to see some independent-minded reporter, here or elsewhere, really dig into the implications: When does a smart D coordinator know that only two or three things can happen in x situation anyway? In what places is any real advantage possibly reaped? And then look at the games we've been in. My hunch--though I'm not an xs and os person--is that the places where any serious advantage may be obtained are vanishingly few, and that most of those can be understood with a look at available personnel, past practice, how well drilled teams are, etc.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:02 PM ^
except this article didn't bury the lede like the WaPo one did. The fact that this came from an outside firm is much more worthy of the headline than the fact that coaches had access to Stalions' shared Google drive.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:18 PM ^
Oh yeah, but I thought the general rumor was that it had been from an outside investigation - the joke had been that Day had hired a PI firm to look into it. That's probably not it, but somebody paid for this report and then released it without telling UM or the Big 10, it seems, so that narrows down the list a bit. And the fact a lot of OSU-friendly sources got early info is telling.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:37 PM ^
the joke had been that Day had hired a PI firm to look into it. That's probably not it
That's probably not it? Why do you say that? Who the heck else would it be?
Seth had a comment somewhere that Sam Webb already said that was the case (well, that is was OSU), although Seth didn't elaborate on what Sam said or when he said it or where he said it.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:11 PM ^
I don't think Day personally hired a PI firm to look into it, but I absolutely believe it's coming from an OSU partisan given the general tenor as well as who initially got leaks about it.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:21 PM ^
Okay, sure, I guess who literally hired whom, I don't know. There was also something out there about Ryan Day having an ex-FBI friend or connection that headed up the investigation. But regardless, if it came from OSU, one or more of the coaches would surely have been involved. Who else would know to key in on Stalions?
October 25th, 2023 at 10:26 PM ^
They'll likely be smarter about hiding the source but sure, it'll probably be someone in an OSU orbit who financed this endeavor. Honestly, it could well be OSU's version of Stalions, some "superfan" who saw an opportunity to get something out there on a rival, likely encouraged by some OSU people.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:19 PM ^
Yeah, I wondered why that was glossed over. That's a much bigger story than whatever Stalions may have done, even worst case scenario.
October 25th, 2023 at 10:25 PM ^
With junk rehashing articles like this and the outrageous sensationalism from Mandel on Twitter, I’ve lost basically all respect for The Athletic
October 25th, 2023 at 9:00 PM ^
I doubt this third party firm would admit that they obtained this information via illegal hacking. They must have obtained the information through an authorized source, right?
October 25th, 2023 at 9:03 PM ^
Source would need authorization from UM. That seems unlikely.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:04 PM ^
And I don't think they are at liberty to freely pass on information to the NCAA if the university hired said entity.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:05 PM ^
That firm would risk it's own legal trouble disclosing the information, then. I guess that's possible, but it's a risky way of doing business.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:00 PM ^
Stupidest times in MgoBoard history:
RR Years- Stretchgate, stuffed beavers and defense is optional.
Hoke Years- 27 for 27, Dave Brandon and concussion gate
Covid- Your mask sucks. No you suck.
Right now.
It's a toss up.
October 25th, 2023 at 9:04 PM ^
What’s wrong with a stuffed beaver?