Connor Stalions emphatically denies meeting with South Carolina to 'screw over Tennessee' in 2022

Infamous former Michigan staffer Connor Stalions has been quiet candid — at least when he’s not speaking with the NCAA — about his notorious sign-stealing enterprise that resulted in significant fines and penalties levied by the NCAA last month. Those punishments included an unprecendented 8-year show-cause order that effectively bans Stalions from working in college football until at least 2034.

Despite those penalties, which also included a 10-year show-cause for former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh and a three-game suspension for current Wolverines coach Sherrone Moore, Stalions has continued to defend his reputation in a series of podcast interviews over the past few months.

That included a recent appearance on The Athletic‘s Bunch Formation podcast with co-hosts Chris Vannini and David Ubben, where the ex-Michigan analyst denied any involvement in a popular conspiracy theory among Tennessee fans that Stalions provided South Carolina sign-stealing intel that helped the Gamecocks upset fourth-ranked Volunteers, 63-38, in late 2022. The lost derailed Tennessee’s College Football Playoff hopes that season and a potential semifinal date with Michigan.

“Oh my gosh, (that’s) one of the dozens of conspiracies that are out there,” Stalions said on the Bunch Formation podcast released Thursday morning, according to the Knoxville News’ Adam Sparks. “I’ve never met anyone at South Carolina. … There was no trying to screw over Tennessee.”

The theory, as Sparks details, involves South Carolina defensive coordinator Clayton White, who once worked under Harbaugh at Stanford in the late 2000s, and the fact that Stalions purchased a ticket to the 2022 Kentucky-Tennessee game in Knoxville, which was first reported by Yahoo! Sports and confirmed by Knox News. The ticket, which was for a seat in viewing range of the Vols’ sideline according to Sparks, was then transferred to another person, who used it on Oct. 29, 2022.

For his part, Stalions denies ever scouting Tennessee to decipher their offensive and defensive signals, and made it clear that if he had done so, he would’ve used that knowledge to help Michigan, not South Carolina.

“I’ve never watched any Tennessee film to try to decipher signals,” Stalions said on the podcast, per Sparks.

“Let’s us just say that if I had everything on a team. Why would I not want to play them in the playoffs?” Stalions added. “If I had everything on Tennessee … in theory, it could be Tennessee or anyone, if I had the team’s signals and felt confident that it’s this competitive advantage that’s going to cause an advantage like in that South Carolina game, why would I want another team to do it rather than us?”