2024-08-27 04:00:25
RJ Young
Fox Sports National College Football Analyst
Connor Stallings has been put on record as having no regrets.
Stallion stars in a Netflix series called “Unknown: Sign Stealers“, which was launched on Tuesday.
Stallion, of course, has been at the center of an NCAA investigation into his alleged live scouting and sign-stealing operation at Michigan.
The NCAA has sent the school a notice of the allegations. Sanctions may follow. Fans are clamoring for Stallions and Michigan to plead guilty, but they will receive no response.
What was supposed to be a story about the best team in Michigan history became a story about Stallings. His story is not only fascinating, but is mostly told through secondary and tertiary sources.
Stallings was raised as a Michigan fan by a Michigan superfan.
“We were crazy Michigan fans,” Stallion’s mother, Kelly, said in the documentary.
The documentary includes footage of Stalions crying after Michigan won the 1997 national championship. As a kid, he dressed up as Michigan State coach Bo Schembechler for Halloween. Later, he decided to join the U.S. Armed Forces because he had read that 15 of the top 20 coaches in history had served in the military.
That was why he chose to be appointed and selected to the Naval Academy.
On August 30, 2014, Stallings played his first game as the Midshipmen coach against Ohio State and began deciphering opponent signals for the first time. Four years later, he graduated, joined the U.S. Marine Corps and achieved the rank of captain. He still has high ambitions to coach at Michigan.
“This kid has so much motivation,” Detroit News reporter Tony Paul says in the film, “maybe too much motivation.”
Stallings first connected with the Michigan coaching staff at a large clinic. He began interning with the team after meeting with former Michigan assistant Chris Partridge and offered to contribute as their sign-stealer.
He calls his job an “intelligence operations guy,” and he believes Michigan is at the bottom of the mature intelligence community. Importantly, he served in the Marine Corps for three years while volunteering for the team for three years.
While he was stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, he would travel to Michigan games at his own expense to meet with teams and stand on the sidelines deciphering signals.
Over time, he created game-day scrambling sheets against Michigan opponents. In total, he used 2,000 to 3,000 signals as references. To achieve this, he recorded his own video. He cut out his own images, organized them and memorized them. The Stallions’ innovation coincides with Michigan’s historic three-year winning streak, culminating in a national championship in 2023 with a 15-0 record.
In 2022, his contributions to the team earned him the game ball given to him by Jim Harbaugh after Michigan’s 2022 win over Iowa State.
He wrote a manifesto—thousands of pages long—that he saw as a competitive advantage. But he claimed he learned other teams’ signals through the same tactics others used in the segregated, secretive world of college football signal-stealing.
“I’ve never been a high-level scout,” he says in the film. “I get signals the same way as other teams. What sets me apart is the way I organize information and process it on game day.”
However, Stallings became scarce and distanced himself from the program after Michigan was caught cheating in 2023.
Stallion’s attorney, Brad Beckworth, claimed in the documentary that Michigan leaked the news that Stallion was fired only after he notified the school in writing that he had resigned.
What shocked me most was that Michigan native Dave Portnoy was the most lovable, honest, and real person in the entire documentary. He knew Michigan was being lied to. He knew Stallings cheated. He loves it. He liked what a Michigan analyst did to not only beat Ohio State three years in a row but win a national championship.
Portnoy said Stallion told him he was the man in disguise in a now-infamous photo taken before the 2023 Michigan State-Central Michigan game.
But when Stallion was asked about the same photo and whether it was him, he responded, “I don’t even think this guy looks like me.” He didn’t look serious when he said this.
Michigan HC Sherron Moore accused of off-campus scouting
Even after publicly distancing himself from the Michigan State football program, Stallings still attended last year’s Ohio State-Michigan game.
At the center of the scandal investigation is the Stalions’ unusual purchase of tickets to 30 games over the past three years, including 11 games at Big Ten stadiums. He claimed he bought tickets to so many games because he loved watching college football.
An investigation by an outside law firm uncovered files of the scouted games and that the people hired to scout the games had ties to Stalions. Stallion claimed that his personal computer was stolen by hackers. On April 24, 2024, he was interviewed by the NCAA regarding the ongoing investigation.
He denies the accusations.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst and podcast host for Fox Sports.”The #1 college football show.“Follow him in @RJ_Young and Subscribe to “The RJ Young Show” on YouTube.
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