It's a bye week and I had sort of marked this in my mind as a week to just relax and enjoy college football and the nice fall weather, but then *gestures wildly at screen* happened and so here we are.  There’s still a lot of unknowns and a fair bit of disinformation going on, so I reserve the right to be proven wrong with anything said here and acknowledge that in advance.  I’m willing to take lumps on this but also feel like we’ve got the general contours and shape of the incident fleshed out.

Worst:  The Stupidity is the Stupidest Part

So a brief look behind the curtain – I started writing this on Saturday, which in terms of this whole situation might as well been during the Cretaceous period.  At that time the big, new development was some random former DIII player talking about skipping out a halftime of the UMass-PSU game.  Since then we’ve heard a ton of new rumors and reporting, and then Monday Stalions purportedly went undercover at the CMU-MSU game earlier this year, standing on the sidelines like a mix of Ed Norton and Corey Hart.  Now, I know Brian has claimed it was Stalions but I also think “random white dude with a goatee” standing on the sidelines for a MAC game describes approximately 80% of the men I expect to see populating that strip of terra firma, but if this is true then please consider everything said below as just preamble to what is the magnum opus of stupidity, the Triple Crown of absurdity, the 4-minute mile of “seriously, he did what?”

But since I’m not going to re-write this entire section, please just recognize that context and scope has switched quite a bit in the intervening 72 hours.

******

Of all the individual components comprising this scandal – the “vast network” of easily-flippable randos looking for a quick buck, the delusions of grandeur and influence by Connor Stalions, the easily-traceable ticket purchasing, the shared spreadsheet and the “manifesto” – the common theme has been just how dumb the plan had been from conception to execution.  I don’t know if that makes Stalions himself an idiot – he seems like a passionate fan obsessed with Michigan football, which describes a LOT of people who root for any team in any sport, who was trying to carve out a role for himself within the Michigan football ecosystem – but if you asked Chat GPT “what’s the dumbest way to try to figure out another football team’s signs” the first and third results are basically what Stalions landed on:

And that’s what you sort of expect in a situation like this that comes to light – you don’t catch someone who hides his tracks well, works clandestinely with a group of trusted co-operators, and who mitigates risks as much as possible.  You get the guy who’s sloppy/misguided enough to buy a bunch of tickets with his own credit card, under his own name, at basically the same spot in every stadium of upcoming opponents.  He keeps a spreadsheet of his endeavors, violating Stringer Bell’s cardinal rule.   He shares a drive with a bunch of people, some affiliated with the University and some apparently not, and asks them to share what they have seemingly with minimal oversight or security.  The NCAA only catches people if they make it blindingly obvious, and as more details of this scandal have emerged one consistent theme is that Stalions was always the guy in the hot dog suit.

While I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a “genius criminal”, there are ones who evade exposure by being calculated and risk-averse and then you’ve got ones who buy sports cars, fancy boats, and mountains of booger sugar, feeding on the attention they receive.  The texts from Stalions point to a guy who desperately wanted to be part of Michigan football and the minute he thought he figured out a loophole, a gray area to work in he not only tried to exploit it but he talked about it to basically anyone who would listen.   He talked about how “I’m close with the whole staff” and how he “became close with CP and Jay Harbs”, though there’s little public evidence of this closeness beyond a Venmo transaction 6 years ago from Jay to Stalions with no purpose nor amount noted.  Like a lot of people who take LinkedIn far too seriously, he described his duties as a low-level staffer with a mixture of hyperbole and repetition that reads as much like someone trying to hit the word count minimum for an assignment as an accurate summation of what his job entailed.

“I focus on using my experience to employ Marine Corps philosophies and tactics into the sport of football regarding strategies in staffing, recruiting, scouting, intelligence, planning and more,” the LinkedIn profile read. “I emphasize identifying the opponent’s most likely course of action and most dangerous course of action; identifying and exploiting critical vulnerabilities and centers of gravity in the opponent’s scouting process.”

I have no idea what “Marine Corps philosophies and tactics” are specific to football compared to, I don’t know, “Air Force tactics”, but I do know that scouting, intelligence, and planning as it pertains to football are pretty darn close in meaning, as is the most likely and most dangerous (I presume to Michigan) courses of action.  Distilled to its essence, and yes I know this can be applied to a lot of jobs, Stalions was supposed to contribute to the slight statistical advantages teams need in order to maximize their chances to win; in other words, he needed to “moneyball” his little part of the Michigan football machine, playing in the margins by identifying those signs, those tendencies that maybe helps you recognize if a run or pass is coming on 2nd-and-6 from the opponent’s 38 yard line.  It’s incremental, with the amplitude of the value tied to myriad of additional factors such as ability to adjust quickly, correctly aligning yourself given the players on the field, and then actually executing the play.  In other words, you could give UNLV every offensive play on a silver platter and they aren’t keeping up with Colston Loveland or Roman Wilson.  There’s an upper limit to what this level of intelligence nets you, and it can be thwarted as simply as changing your signals.

And so for this incremental benefit, this broken-in-spirit-at-least rule that the NCAA was going to repeal a couple years ago, Stalions wound up spending $15k to send a bunch of dudes to games, plopped them around midfield and asked them to hold up iPhones all day to capture signals.  We’ve not seen the quality of these videos but if you told me they were blurry and largely useless I wouldn’t be shocked given the quality of video I’ve seen from, say, certain popular streaming outfits pretty recently. 

And that’s assuming guys even stick around for the whole game, which in at least one instance wasn’t the case.

So this never sounded like a particularly sophisticated operation by Stalions, and his actions read as someone who knew he was butting up against a prohibition and was trying to cleverly side-step it.  Now, you can argue that it was a gray area in the rulebook, and that inconsistent interpretations of the rule by the sport’s chief entities highlighted the antiquated context for a rule created well before the proliferation of high-quality cell phone video technology and billion-dollar TV deals.  But the operation itself was so slapdash that in hindsight it’s practically inevitable it would come to light, and then he was at the mercy of an organization that has seemingly taken it personally that Jim Harbaugh does not hold them in the highest of esteem.  So when Michigan gets punished for this operation it’ll be less because they broke some archaic rule of dubious value and more they did so in such a dumb, obvious way that the NCAA has to make an example of them as a warning to others to at least not make it so obvious.

 

Best: Ball Knowers Assemble

Colin/Manuel Excel is one of the better X’s and O’s guys on X/Twitter in my experience, and he highlighted one of the silver linings around this whole sign stealing scandal: it’s helped to identify who understands how football teams are run today versus those who don’t.

I’ll get into the specific reporters/journalists who have fully exposed themselves as basically access merchant and stenographers, but what really surprised me especially early on when this scandal broke was how many people were seemingly caught off-guard by the notion that “sign stealing” was, in fact, legal and quite common in football.  Now, some coaches and individuals have argued that scouting future opponents in person is a bridge too far, and while others have argued that’s basically just “scouting” and people arguing about the mechanism by which this information is gleaned are missing the forest for the trees.  But to virtually every person connected to football from high school and college, the idea that one side is trying to decode what is the next play coming up is just part of the game, like studying the color of a player’s knuckles to determine if he’s rushing or not* or an offensive lineman’s spacing relative to his teammates.  It’s all about eking out the tiniest bit of advantage possible against your opponent. 

And yet, to read rival fans’ responses to these revelations you’d believe this was unique to Michigan and had sullied the good name of collegiate football.  It had seemingly never crossed their minds that the reason teams throw up nonsensical arrays of images or have multiple backup QBs flopping around during games is to hide what plays they’re calling in because they’re concerned the other side might deduce what they are.  Or the simple fact that you can’t claim proprietary knowledge of your playcalls when you’re broadcasting them in front of 100k people a week.  Again, we can argue about whether or not such advanced scouting by Stalions exceeds the rules as written but it was sort of crazy to see people somehow read the word “steal” and not just mentally replace it with “recognize” or “pay attention at all during a game”. 

And as for the notion of advanced scouting vs. in-game deduction, I’d argue that the line between the two is pretty blurry.  Nate Tice, who played at Wisconsin toward the end of the Rich Rod era, noted that the Badgers rather quickly deduced what plays were being called and then booted UM off the field on successive 3-and-out drives in the first half of a blowout.  The flow of that game somewhat supports that characterization because after starting reasonably well (7-play and 11-play drives to start the game), Michigan scuttled on 2 drives, and then after halftime reeled off 3 successive TD drives after (I presume) changing up the playcalls.  At the same time, we’re talking about a total of 6-9 plays as evidence of this subterfuge, which is barely a relevant sample size.  Michigan’s 2010 offense was very boom-or-bust and turnover-prone, and considering Michigan was already behind by 2 scores when that sequence started and those two drives featured 4 Denard Robinson pass attempts vs. 1 run, which is decidedly not optimal 2010 deployment of Shoelace especially against an elite defense like Wisconsin’s, I’m not sure how much this information helped them, if at all.

What sticks out to me about the story, though, is how quickly Wisconsin seemed to deduce these signals, pointing to perhaps prior knowledge of them gleaned from a number of sources.  Yes, by 2010 Rich Rod had been at UM for a while and the Wolverines had played the Badgers twice during his regime up to that point so there was likely some familiarity, but per the article Tice said that once they figured out it was RR making the calls and not one of the decoys they knew the plays almost immediately.  Considering they had seen about 15-20 plays up to that point, about half of which were on the scripted first drive and likely designed to break tendencies, that’s some incredibly quick in-game pattern recognition.  Far more likely, as has been mentioned around UM specifically and other teams more generally, there was a general practice of sharing information with other teams about upcoming opponents, a “professional courtesy”, so to speak, likely borne out of staff members changing teams semi-regularly as they move up the coaching ranks and maintaining relationships.  Because unlike the die-hards and fans, coaching is a job for most guys and those connections tend to last longer than whatever convenient loyalty one may have with his current employer. 

Nothing about that is illegal but points to the difference-without-a-distinction nature of this whole proceeding.  As long as this data acquisition was done in public, we’re talking about someone looking at an iPhone upload vs. getting an email from a former colleague, or combing through 4k recordings of broadcasts in the hope of seeing a pattern.  And as Kirby Smart alluded to in what I definitely don’t think was a “savage reaction” but rock on Georgia beat writer, even if it “worked” and you knew the play it won’t matter if the other team just beats you to the spot or makes the play anyway.  This isn’t binary, where there’s either a win or a loss on a play.  It can help if it all works out but certainly not dispositive, and is seemingly so ubiquitous that most teams have easily-deployable counter-measures.  The methods have evolved as technology has become more ubiquitous but we’ve got stories of ball boys stealing signs since the early 2000s and coaches leaving false playbooks around, and my guess is the longer this goes on we’ll discover even more interesting and unique methods by which teams have tried to gain an edge.  I just hope by that point the pearl clutchers and the obtuse will have wisened up a bit.

* yes it’s a movie but picking up cues from posture is quite common

Worst:  So Many Pearls and Fainting Couches

If it isn’t clear thus far I want make it so here: what Stalions and his crew did was a competitive advantage for Michigan to some undefinable degree that is greater than 0%.  We can debate how much of an advantage it is (I shockingly agree with Brian Kelly that it’s probably not much) compared to, say, knowing the tendencies of a team given certain downs and distances, field position, etc., but in the information arms race that is football having some inkling of what might come next from your opponent is going to help.  If it wasn’t teams wouldn’t be trying to shield their signals from the sideline or trying to decode other teams’ ones before, during, and even after games.  It’s also clear that there was, at the very least, an attempt by the NCAA to limit in-person scouting of opponents by staff members and recording said games using stadium equipment.  Now, there’s a fair bit of ambiguity about what constituted in-person scouting vis-a-vis what Stalions did and how that differs from myriad of other ways teams obtain information about future opponents, but again Stalions wouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to obtain this information if it was common practice.

All that said and as noted above, the idea this practice is somehow beyond the pale and an affront to competition in the year of our lord 2023 is absolutely insane to me.  We just finished learning that a bunch of college basketball teams broke dozens upon dozens of bright-line NCAA rules against paying players, family members, random-ass friends, and a host of other people.  It involved multi-national corporations and a veritable who’s-who of basketball programs.   Tennessee handed out bags of cash to recruits, some of whom wound up signing with rival programs despite (*cough* in addition to *cough*) receiving these outlays.  Getting players to come to your school via (at the time) illegal bags of cash certainly feels far more an affront to competitiveness.  WakeyLeaks involved the theft of confidential gameplan information by a Wake Forest announcer and giving it to opponents.  At least 3 teams admitted to receiving that information and Louisville clearly used it, and yet nothing really came of it outside of the ACC fining Louisville and Virginia Tech $25k.  And those are just violations I could think of off the top of my head that happened since Harbaugh has been at UM.  I’m sure I’m missing others, including the hundreds of lower-level violations that are reported every year by member schools.

So when I read people like Stewart Mandel opine about how the NCAA needs to speed this investigation up so that it can punish Michigan this year, or unnamed assistant coaches trying to act like big shots ragging on the practice, or various OSU talking/Twitter heads talk about how the Big 10 should block UM from competing for the conference crown, I can’t help but laugh at the performative nature of their wailing.  They ask anonymous coaches in surveys (which I’m sure were selected in no small part because they wanted to comment on this situation and thus were perhaps not the most representative sample of the hundreds of coaches who work at FBS programs) who then trip over themselves talking about how stupid, how brazen a violation this was, how “[t]hat’s one of the few rules that nobody is brave or stupid enough to just step over” according to one SEC staffer who I can only assume was standing in what is a Versailles-sized glass house.  Of course, when guys put their names to the comment they’re way more neutral and coherent, arguing that this whole situation is being overblown and could be fixed by the NCAA spending a sliver of its billions of dollars to install the same technology currently found in the NFL and a lot of HS teams in helmets or some other equally-accessible mitigation practice.  Now, if they really believed this went to the sanctity of the sport they’d absolutely be able to lay into Michigan and enjoy broad public support, one assumes, and yet they don’t because they are likely doing similar practices on their own and fear being called out as hypocrites.  But tell them they’re on background and won’t be named-checked and suddenly they are flailing about and rending garments.

So yeah, what Stalions did isn’t good, but it’s also not this affront to the sanctity of the gridiron that some people want it to be.  The sport’s been pretty dirty for quite a while, and such chicanery is part of it’s DNA at this point.  Hell, Michigan fights Minnesota over a jug Fielding Yost bought 120 years ago because he feared the Gophers might mess with his team’s water supply.  Teams have been trying to gain advantages over each other since the games started to count for anything.  That doesn’t mean it should be a free-for-all but when people are claiming lines have been crossed I wonder if they’ve just started to look down and pay attention for once because it serves their purposes and gives the faux moral high ground they claim Michigan has staked itself to for decades.  Oh, and speaking of this morality.

 

Best:  Everyone Thinks They’re the Exception

One of the consistent framings around this whole situation from media, fans, and other teams is that Michigan’s heightened moral posturing around their place in college football makes what happened here so deliciously ironic.  I’ll name-check Steven Godfrey here mostly because he spent half a podcast acting like he was orgasming because the nearly decade-long grudge he’s been carrying around because Brian told him he was a purposefully obtuse hack finally turned in his favor, but he’s emblematic of a narrative that Michigan’s sense of moral superiority, of “doing it the right way” compared to other programs, was unique to the Wolverines and not true across most of big-name college football.  The argument used to be, at times widely held by this very site, that Michigan trailed their rivals because their athletes actually cared about the “student” part of “student-athlete”, as compared to programs like Alabama, OSU, Georgia, etc.  While yes, UM’s admissions department has trailed some other programs when it comes to guys at the margin, it’s been largely bullshit for a while this notion that Michigan athletics expects demonstrably more out of football and basketball players compared to their non-revenue brethren both at the university and outside. 

But you may be thinking, isn’t the issue that Michigan projects this superiority more than other programs and doth protests more than others when discussions of purity ensue?  I mean, I guess if you want to ignore gobs of other teams, their fanbases, and their most prominent figures that would be true.  Dabo Swinney has been playing the Bible-thumping preacher role for years at Clemson and the media has largely played along because he won, somehow believing his insular environment and limited attrition was because he led his team with a higher purpose than, you know, winning football games and making $11M a year while saying players shouldn’t be paid even while reports come out about his program offering money to recruits.  Notre Dame had the “Catholics vs. Convicts” dog-whistling even while they were caught handing out steroids in the locker room, and Brian Kelly’s very serious academic fraud incident along with a student’s death at practice hasn’t stopped Notre Dame fans, boosters, etc. acting like they aren’t this bastion of morality in a sea of heathens.  Seemingly every third decommit from Notre Dame is due to “academic concerns” per the ND insiders, which coincidentally is never an issue when a guy flips to ND from somewhere else.  UM’s very own Jim Harbaugh took shots at Michigan in comparison to Stanford’s football team and their academic and athletic prowess, even though he had pushed for lowered SAT and GPA standards at the Farm to better match those held by programs like Michigan and Notre Dame.  I’ve met a number of Duke graduates and fans in my life and seemingly all of them assume Coach K’s anodyne mantras and totally non-punchable face were the reasons he just kept attracting the best and brightest basketball stars around, such as Kyrie Irving.  Unlike “dirty” programs like Kentucky, Kansas, UNC, and others Duke was just able to convince these superstar freshmen to eschew $100 handshakes and fringe benefits to play in front of the Cameron Crazies because they just love Duke so darn much.  Oh, and Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher got into a multi-day public squabble over who paid for players in recruiting while the other got those signatures the honest way.  Yes, THAT Nick Saban and Jimbo Fisher.

My point is that Michigan isn’t particularly more or less elitist than a bunch of programs.  Everyone believes their school does it the “right” way, even if they’ll admit to having bent the rules.  Hell, I’m doing it here a bit.  But talk to a USC fan, a Notre Dame fan, an Alabama fan, a Georgia fan, etc. and they’ll all talk about how their program does it best and that even if they are caught breaking the rules it’s just because they need to keep up with everyone else.  Notre Dame won’t join another conference because, in large part, they have been treated as “special” by NBC and college football more generally and feel like stooping down to being a “common” member of the ACC or Big 10 is beneath them.  Texas created their own TV network because they didn’t want to share content revenue with teams that had actually won the conference over the past decade, then nearly destroyed the Big 12 when they bolted to the SEC because they thought they deserved more money and were deluded into thinking that was the missing ingredient for them to be “back”.  MSU fans venerated Mark Dantonio as an “old school” disciplinarian who held his team accountable even while his players were being plucked from jail to play snaps against Michigan or beating up students in dorm rooms.  The less said about OSU fans and their sense of “we’re the only ones keeping this conference afloat” during the UM and PSU struggles in the early 2010s the better.  Michigan isn’t unique in its sense of moral superiority, and so it’s exhausting to see this framing device used by lazy writers because “weirdo bent some rules that marginally helped Michigan” isn’t getting them the clicks they need to remain relevant. 

 

Worst:  The Sources

I’ll save you a longer diatribe about the reporting around this situation – at this point if you see an article written by Pete Thamel or Ross Dellenger you can safely assume it’s just a press release from whichever firm authored the report – but what’s gotten me is that we’ve had weeks now of the worst types of sports journalists signal boosting the most hair-brained conspiracy theories along with a coordinated slow drip of excerpts from a report of (as of now) unknown provenance and intent.  There were a number of blue check and blue check-adjacent accounts that, for example, retweeted a video where Greg Schiano talked about some undefined “issues” Rutgers needs to look into at halftime of their game.  Anyone who had watched the game knew his most likely complaint was about some penalties as well as a missed FG, but that didn’t stop people who really should know better from running with it to such an extent that Rutgers had to release a statement where Schiano clarified he was talking about the officiating.  I hope people understand how bugnuts wrong you have to be to get a college coach to release a statement publicly criticizing officials, and yet there was little visible humility or awareness displayed by a lot of these reporters and writers; they just removed the retweet and moved along.  We saw similar broo-has around images of Stalions on the sideline of Michigan games with a laminated sheet, as if Michigan was denying the existence of Stalions (they weren’t) and Ross Dellenger had unearthed him crashing some kid’s birthday party, and the rumors around Matt Weiss and his termination somehow being connected to this situation despite that making no real sense especially when some of the darker insinuations kicked in.

Similarly, the initial stories around this situation were suspiciously all coming from a couple of writers (mainly Thamel and Dellenger) who displayed what I can only describe as a shocking lack of journalistic and intellectual curiosity about what was being claimed and the scale of it.  The typical article took on a Mad Libs-style format along the lines of:

• Rehash the general framework of the story which is that Stalions used some people to scout future opponents.
• Talk about sign stealing and note, almost begrudgingly, that it’s not against the rules.
• Print a hyperbolic statement from an anonymous coach that calls this a mix of the Black Sox, the Mitchell Report, Spygate and the Houston Astros, and the time Nancy Kerrigan got her knee bashed in by some trailer-park assassin, but worse.
• Talk about Michigan is “embroiled in controversy due to recruiting infractions” because Harbaugh took two commits out for breakfast burgers.
• Speculate about just how badly the NCAA can and should punish Michigan preemptively.

Rinse and repeat.  And once it got out via the Washington Post that the report underpinning this entire investigation was generated by a private investigator firm with unclear motives, one would have expected there to be more digging by these journalists and, perhaps, a bit more caution in just blindly reporting what they’re hearing.  But no, and if anything the efforts were doubled in order to mine whatever remaining nuggets of faux outrage could be extracted.  And that’s the thing – I know that the “why” here matters far less to the NCAA than the “what” in terms of the report’s findings.  Stalions did what was claimed, and it would be foolish to deny it now.  But there are some important elements involved that good journalists would have at least explored. 

For one, the reason we’re hearing about this practice is because somebody went out and hired a third-party firm to dig into Michigan’s football team.  Michigan is a massive football program competing at the upper levels of the sport, so it’s foolish to believe that if you turned over a bunch of rocks you wouldn’t find some bugs.  But it’s also foolish to believe that if you trained that same spotlight on any other program you wouldn’t find similar, if not worse, violations of both spiritual and textual rules.  I understand that this is whataboutism to an extent, but if you’re going to pull-quote a bunch of anonymous coaches standing on their soap boxes and demanding we think of the children, maybe we should spend a bit of time investigating just how deep and broad the rot goes.  Similarly, as more information comes out about how members of teams share scouting information, including signs, with each other it brings further into question if this practice truly was unique to Michigan or if other programs simply hid it better.  For example, OSU had previously charged Clemson and Georgia with sign stealing, and there appeared to be an understanding amongst teams of which guy(s) on each sideline were the “signs” guys and a truce of sorts existed where you didn’t call out my guy and I don’t call out yours. 

Beyond that, the fact the report was clearly being leaked out in pieces to friendly media sources should have initiated some level of introspection by guys like Thamel, or at least his editors, to wonder why they’re getting these exclusives and if there might be ulterior motives involved.  As far as I know, we still don’t know what led to this external probe or who funded it, but context clues point to it being more likely than not someone attached to a prominent rival.  That doesn’t invalidate the findings provided they are factually correct but motives does matter in terms of framing and the amorphous “spirit of the game” that has taken hold around the sign stealing.  Trying to beat your rival off the field because you’ve struggled to do so on it means something, because while fans don’t like cheaters they also don’t like people who cry foul because they can’t win the game themselves.  At some point the origin of this report will come out, and maybe it will be some benign reason it was generated.  But right now it definitely feels far more coordinated than you’d expect from an organic story, and its weird to see the media whitewash what sure looks like a planned operation by a biased party.

And my final issue with the media coverage around this situation has to do with outing Stalions the way they did.  There’s no reason Stalions, especially early on, needed to be named publicly.  “Unnamed Michigan staffer” conveys the same information you need for this story, and has the added benefit of not exposing someone who’s greatest “crime” is breaking an NCAA rule about scouting to the internet mobs.  When I saw Thamel post Stalions name and backstory I was a bit shocked because I knew the inevitable result, which was him basically scrubbing his entire online presence and, by all accounts, disappearing from public life.  Since then we’ve got pieces about his texts with others, his “Manifesto”, everything.  Yes, he seems obsessive and a loose cannon, a guy who wanted to be a big shot and was willing to bend some rules to get that recognition.  But college football is full of these obsessive guys, and while some of them are like D.J. Durkin and Hugh Freeze and keep getting rehired even though they seem like absolutely assholes guilty of far worse transgressions, this is going to be Stalions’s legacy online for the foreseeable future.  Again, there remains no reason his name needed to be leaked except to further embarrass him, and regardless of how you feel about what he did it has to suck to be dragged through the mud like this so early in the investigation.

 

Quick Hits:

• I’m interested to determine just how much of an advantage what Stalions did added to this team’s success.  There are obviously those goober coaches who say stuff like “[i]t’s easy to call plays when you know what the defense is”, seemingly forgetting (a) that sign stealing itself is 100% legal and quite common, and (b) a successful play call on defense doesn’t remotely assure you of actually stopping the play.  For example, everyone in the stadium knows that Marvin Harrison Jr. is going to be read #1 on almost any pass play run by OSU, and yet he still gets open because 22 college kids aren’t robots.  I suspect that most times knowing the signals doesn’t help a team much because plays tend to be more nuanced than they once were (e.g. passing plays often have reads the receivers do before the snap to refine routes that wouldn’t be captured in a signal), but maybe ID’ing a tendency breaker play has real value.  Also, I like to think the Pac-12 coach who made that dumb quote above is Lincoln Riley, who may honestly not understand how defenses work given his track record on that front at Oklahoma and USC.
• I don’t expect everyone to be particularly tech savvy, and I’m probably more technologically literate than your average sports fan given my background and job in software development, but reading all the discourse around shared drives and iCloud accounts you got a sense these writers didn’t remotely understand how modern IT departments at major institutions are run.  There was a technical illiteracy there that was covered up with hedging words intimating a vast conspiracy of wrong doing when the end result was mostly “he had a shared folder for iPhone videos and a spreadsheet".  Similarly, the reporting around the FBI’s involvement with Weiss led to some extremely distressing OSU message board accusations when the far more likely reason is that the FBI gets involved when crimes cross state lines and “internet crimes”, by their very nature, lend themselves to cross-jurisdictional investigations that the FBI is better equipped to handle than your local state organizations.
• I know the general consensus seems to be that Warde Manuel and the athletic department is failing to defend Harbaugh here but they’re in a spot where public, double-birds-and-a-stunner doesn’t help your case especially when the NCAA brazenly violates their own rules around public discourse around pending investigations.  Michigan had one of those AD’s once (Dave Brandon, who once had a tag on the site about his pimp hand), and we all know how that ended.  Michigan’s best public recourse is to speak very little about the matter, comply with normal requests by the NCAA, and generally act like they have nothing to hide.  The longer the NCAA fights this out in the court of public opinion the weaker they’ll look if the details we keep hearing are unremarkable.  It’s why Michigan talking about Harbaugh getting a healthy extension after their own internal investigation speaks volumes about their sense of this case even if they retain the ability to cut bait if things go sideways.  I also assume they’re getting their own framing out via friendly media, which makes sense.  I just don’t think you can win the public discourse right now given the timing and original framing but you can definitely lose it by being cavalier and Michigan seems to be careful on that front.
• I understand that Harbaugh is assumed responsible for what Stalions did, though the actual switch in the rule more creates a presumption of knowledge on the coach that can be refuted versus the previous standard that basically required the NCAA to show a coach was involved.  In effect, the burden of proof just shifted to the schools to clear their coach’s name.  And in general I think that’s part of the deal when you’re paid millions of dollars and are, by nature, massive control freaks.  But I also understand that when you have a staff of dozens, if not hundreds, at some point you can just accept that the guy you hired to do a job does it right without assuming the worse.  He was undoubtedly handed a rulebook and told what was deemed acceptable and what wasn’t, and that’s sort of it.  Again, Harbaugh will bear the brunt of his actions under this guideline but I also don’t really think it went above Stalions based on all we’ve seen because, for lack of a better term, you don’t always check how the gears are turning if the clock is giving you the right time. 
• There are bad takes, there are dumb takes, and then there’s the College Football Nerds saying Michigan’s sign stealing led to Hendon Hooker’s ACL tear.  I mean, up to this point I had mostly pegged them as just mediocre prognosticators of college football teams but this was a different level.  Now, there’s still a lot of time left for takes to challenge for the throne but this one feels like the leader in the clubhouse in terms of the dumbest thing said in reference to this whole scandal.

Next Week:  Who Knows?

Like I said, I’m not going to be writing a column after the Purdue game because of family commitments.  But while I fully expect UM to steamroll the Boilermakers I have absolutely no idea what to expect going forward with the curious case of Connor Stalions. Like I said at the top I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if half the stuff I wrote above turns out to be wrong within 24 hours, but I hope we’ve crossed the line in terms of major reveals and we’re now just dealing with this whole situation as a low-hum annoyance until after the conference title game at least.  I do suspect that the team itself will remain focused on this year’s goals regardless of what swirls outside, and if there was ever a “Us vs. Them” and “Nobody Believes In Us” storyline for a football team it’s this one.