Mike Norvell offers thoughts on Michigan scandal, sign-stealing in football

The Michigan sign-stealing scandal has caused a lot of reflection in the sport about ways the rules could be modernized to avoid having the incentive for stealing signs in the first place.

Sign-stealing has always been a thing in football, but the lengths to which Michigan reportedly went to actually steal signs extended into the territory of illegal. But simply reading a sideline has never been off limits.

“I think when you sit there and you look at sign-stealing within games, that has been forever,” Florida State coach Mike Norvell said. “That is back, when people started going no-huddle, people started spreading out and communicating everything from the sideline, people look at the sideline. And if you consistently do this and you run the same play every time, someone’s going to pick up on it just like a normal tendency.”

Norvell said there’s an onus that’s put on coaches to come up with creative communication that is both effective and easy to understand for players, without easily lending to easy sign-stealing by opponents.

Perhaps easier than it sounds.

“It’s our job. We have a very elaborate way of how we communicate,” Norvell said. “Now accusations of people going and watching games, that’s an unethical thing. It’s against all parts of the rules of what’s stated, so I can’t defend if somebody chooses to come and watch our games. You can’t defend that. You do all the things that you can control within the game, but ultimately it’s the same deal when it comes to all of it. You can’t, I guess, keep somebody from doing that other than what the rules are in place.”

One suggestion that has been brought forth in light of the Michigan scandal is allowing college players to have some remote communications in their helmets. The NFL does that for quarterbacks and key defensive personnel.

Would that solve college’s sign-stealing issue?

“That’s still not going to fix when somebody says, well, they’re stealing signals,” Norvell said. “If that’s what you’re going to live in, then everybody’s going to have to huddle. It’s still your choice of what everyone’s going to have to do. If you want to play at tempo, if you want to play fast, because back in the day when I was in little league football they just grabbed one player, told him the play, and he ran out and told everyone else. There was no signal-stealing there. But that was a process of what was necessary. Now people realized you can go fast, you can communicate quicker. So that’s always going to be a part of it.”

Essentially there’s a trade-off between safer communication and speed the offense can operate. That’s a value trade-off that coaches will weigh heavily… and potentially differently, depending on the situation.

Norvell did issue one general caution in discussing Michigan’s sign-stealing operation.

He doesn’t want the solution to a problem to create more issues than it solves. And he definitely doesn’t want coaches to become a crutch for players.

“Technology is great and I’m all about if that’s what the people decide to do and if you want to huddle, nobody will steal your signals,” Norvell said. “But on the flip side of it I want to make sure that’s where we go, to where there’s enough restrictions to where coaching application growth within people that we’re not playing video games with kids that are out there, young men that are out there going through it, telling them everything that they need to do or what it is.

“That’s one of the best parts of my job is seeing the growth and development of somebody playing with confidence based on what they see from how they practiced and playing the right fundamentals.”