Michigan Football’s Ridiculous, Dumb, and Unfortunately Altogether Perfect Scandal

The world of college football is charged with potentially fatal voltages of schadenfreude at the moment. The two-time defending Big Ten champion University of Michigan football team, the avatar of a school known for its arrogance about doing things the quote-unquote right way, is being investigated by the NCAA over allegations that a team staffer—a twentysomething Marine veteran and lifelong fan with the improbable name of Connor Stalions—arranged for other individuals to attend dozens of potential opponents’ games in order to film their coaches signaling play calls from the sideline. (Parsing another team’s signals is allowed in the NCAA if you get them off a TV recording or official “All-22” game tape, but “in-person scouting” is prohibited; Stalions seems to have tried to work around this by recruiting random people who lived in the area of other stadiums to do the job, then paying them back on Venmo—a gig economy, if you will, for football crimes.)

The ostensible benefit of the scheme was to make it easier for Stalions to match the signals to what happened on the field so that Michigan could decode opposing play calls in real time when the teams met. Some coaches for other teams have told reporters that they consider this an egregious violation of fair play standards. (Those who remember the New England Patriots “Spygate” scandal may recall that it also involved sideline-taping.) Others around the game have said sign-stealing is part of the sport’s rich history of gamesmanship or brushed the alleged activities off as not being meaningfully different from normal scouting. (One anonymous coach told ESPN that he feels like he can gain the edge Stalions was seeking just from compiling two or three TV broadcasts.) Michigan itself has stayed silent except to suspend Stalions while issuing a statement by head coach Jim Harbaugh in which he says he had no knowledge of off-campus intelligence-gathering.

As a Michigan native/fan who once went to the extreme of writing an entire book that is largely about Harbaugh, his program, and the question of whether supporting a successful college football team can legitimately be a life-affirming validation of one’s special snowflake status, I have been brooding darkly about these events, occasionally even groaning meaningfully at odd moments. (“What you thinking about over there?” my wife asks. But she knows.) It seems at this point—although some online lawyers might disagree—that Michigan broke an NCAA rule, and enjoyed at least some part of its recent success as a result. But what does that mean?

The news was celebrated in some quarters for delivering a blow to Michigan’s belief that its program stands apart from the rest of the sport because it has higher academic and disciplinary standards for its players (and got caught paying them relatively infrequently before name-image-and-likeness compensation was legalized). Harbaugh is an evangelist for this attitude; one of his many mottos is “Win with character, win with cruelty,” which implies playing with complete intensity, but within the restrictions of Bylaw 11.6.1 and other rules. He attributes team accomplishments to the will toward self-improvement (“Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today”) and an old-fashioned love of the game. He complained in 2018, vis à vis recruiting high school players, that it was “hard to beat the cheaters.”

In the Washington Post, college football media personality and known Michigan-troller Steven Godfrey wrote that, regardless of what the NCAA ends up doing, the scandal itself is a diabolically perfect punishment for the university’s fans and alumni because it proves so squarely that they really aren’t any better than anyone else. Godfrey once worked in pro wrestling promotion, and holds a noir worldview of college football in which many of its major players, regardless of what they claim to believe, are really just working angles in a cynical game of self-interest. While this may be a reductive attitude—I prefer to think that people are, like, majestically confounding and singular manifestations of contradictory impulses, ideals, and incentives—the initial facts seemed to support it.

Then again, no evidence has emerged indicating that Harbaugh, or other coaches or players, knew what Stalions was doing, which at the least confuses the question of whether the head coach was being a hypocrite or a fraud while celebrating the triumph of his principles over the past two seasons. Meanwhile, the reaction of many actual Michigan fans, contra stereotype, has been to express gratitude that the program is finally cheating with the big boys, to declare a hope that it will tell the NCAA to pound sand, and to gloat about being protected from serious punishment by the size of the team’s TV audience.

The whole thing is also very funny. According to a report by Sports Illustrated’s Richard Johnson, Stalions had written a 600-page manifesto that he planned to use as a blueprint to eventually take over the Michigan football program—bear in mind we’re talking about someone who earned ~$50,000 a year as, nominally, an assistant in the recruiting department—and once improperly obtained information about midshipman grades from the Naval Academy to pursue some sort of recruiting-related research project.* He appears to have bought the tickets he ostensibly gave to his sideline-taping crew under his own name and paid the tapers using a public Venmo account. One of the contractors who’d recorded video for Stalions told ESPN he’d quit his assignment at halftime of a game between Penn State and UMass because the game was boring and it was raining. Not exactly tradecraft at its highest levels. (Defector’s running Stalions-Le Carré riff has made this point.)

What’s more, it appears Michigan may have been done in by an equal and opposite foray into black ops by a competing football entity. According to the Washington Post, the NCAA learned about Stalions’ behavior from a private investigation firm (!) that had somehow gained access to his online hard drive and took photos of his scouts in action. (There were tails on our boys in the field!) Who hired the PI firm? That information hasn’t been revealed yet, but one has to ask—cui bono? Yahoo has reported that Michigan’s rivals at Ohio State asked the NCAA last year if in-person scouting is allowed during College Football Playoff semifinals, which suggests some sort of “sting” operation could have been in process. (Perplexingly, the NCAA told them that live scouting was OK during the postseason.) Several initial stories about Stalions, meanwhile, involved Ohio State game footage or quotes from their coaches—suggesting, to me at least, a program that was at the least quite suspiciously prepared to tell the world what it knew about its nemesis.

The possibility that a self-starting military strategist and Michigan Man had tried to launch a spy network by way of a loophole in NCAA rules that may not exist—and that Ohio State, a legendary and accomplished violator of NCAA rules itself, had been driven to such fury by losing its position of dominance over its rival that it hired a flatfoot to smoke him out under the flimsy justification that it was protecting the integrity of the game? Well, to me that suggests that, far from being no different than everyone else, both halves of this rivalry are, to an admirable degree, being ourselves. Who else could be this stupid?

As far as taking philosophical lessons from sporting events, you could also argue that L’Affaire du Cheval makes Michigan’s 2021 and 2022 victories over Ohio State even more resonant. A tidy story about uplifting perseverance now has an undercurrent of interpretative mystery—namely, to what extent Stalions’ extra tape contributed to the outcomes—and a lesson about the dangers of excessive self-congratulation. In other words, it now bears all the annoying ambiguities of real life. And it sets up this year’s edition of The Game, played as ever on the last week of the regular season, as a real doozy; Harbaugh and the team basically have the rest of the year to prove that they, and not a superfan looking at iPhone footage in the film room, are responsible for the program’s recent success. (Vegas still lists Michigan as co-favorite, along with Georgia, to win the national championship.) Ohio State, meanwhile, can make the case that the past two years were a sham, an illusion, a mirage. In other words? This time, a football game is going to settle things once and for all.