Greg McElroy, Desmond Howard debate significance of Michigan's sign-stealing investigation
The sign-stealing investigation at Michigan has taken multiple turns since the news broke last week. Multiple coaches are speaking out about sign-stealing and its prevalence in the game, but the breadth of the operation came out Monday when ESPN reported Connor Stalions bought tickets to more than 30 opposing teams’ games over the last three years.
According to ESPN analyst Greg McElroy, the situation is “significant.”
While sign-stealing is part of the gamesmanship of college football, McElroy said the bigger issue is breaking the NCAA rule about in-person scouting and using video to pick up the signs. That’s where things take another turn and become “really problematic” in McElroy’s eyes.
“It’s significant,” McElroy said Tuesday on College Football Live. “Part of the reason why is this is a scheme that just feels as if it’s years in the process of kind of [figuring] out the intricate details of how they want to go about figuring out other teams’ signals. Now, this is not new in college football. People steal signals every single week. This is something we see in every nook and cranny of the college football landscape.
“But when you’re going to an extreme like this in which you have a coach or an assistant or a staff member that’s going to other places and surveying what’s going on on the opposing sideline and using video-recorded evidence to process some of that sign-stealing, that’s where it becomes really problematic.”
McElroy brought up a solution, though. He said the NCAA should adopt the NFL’s protocol and have a speaker in the helmet. That could be on the way, though.
“All this could go away very quickly, though, if they would just implement what the NFL implements by getting rid of signs altogether and going with radios in every team’s helmet,” McElroy said. “I wish they’d do that and accelerate that process now. We’re already starting to get some momentum that direction, Des. But this is clearly a very avoidable issue moving forward, but it does look really bad on the Michigan program.”
Desmond Howard: ‘We’re gonna see’ what happens at Michigan after actions of a ‘rogue indiviual’
Howard — who won the Heisman Trophy at Michigan — also pointed out simply stealing signs isn’t the issue. It all comes down to breaking the rule, which states “off-campus, in-person scouting of future opponents (in the same season) is prohibited,” according to Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger and Dan Wetzel.
Howard said he didn’t realize there was a rule in place preventing in-person scouting. That said, he wondered if it was a “rogue individual” who tried to gain an edge on opponents, and now it’s about what lies ahead for Michigan and the investigation.
“This is something that a lot of programs, they try to do,” Howard said. “I mean, why would you not? You have some three quarterbacks on the sideline signaling plays. It’s almost as if the offensive coordinator dares you to try to decode their system. I was actually surprised. I didn’t even know there was a rule against scouting because we’ve always scouted teams from high school to college to the NFL. So I didn’t even know there was a rule.
“But with that being said, it seems as though something has happened with this rogue individual who went to stadiums and looked at the other team’s signals. We’re gonna see. Jim Harbaugh said he’s going to cooperate fully. The athletic director, Warde Manuel, he pretty much said the same thing. So we’ll see where it goes from here.”