Frontmatter
The University of Michigan football program has been embroiled in sign-stealing allegations for the past couple of weeks. Before I begin, I will preface this by disclosing that I grew up, and remain, a Michigan football fan, though I did not attend the school. Fortunately, however, I have worked in college football for three seasons, and have a different perspective than most fans have to offer on the matter. I wanted to share my thoughts and perspective for this very reason; I think most people who have not been exposed to the day-to-day of working in college football do not have a full understanding of the complexities of this “case”. I want to address the story in a way that does not disclose too much about who I have worked with and that sort of thing. I do not have any relationship to anybody on the current Michigan staff, however.
I’ll get into more of the specifics of the allegations below, I just wanted to include this off of the top so you know where I am coming from.
Why Sign Stealing is an Inevitability
I attended high school in the era of Oregon’s dominance. Oregon was (and still is, though in a different way) a very exciting team to watch because they just did things a little bit differently. They had a bunch of really talented perimeter players, a quarterback that could reliably get them the ball, and some very dominant running backs. They also were known for operating very quickly on offense. They would signal in their plays from the sideline and execute with tempo, as they now say (I’m not purporting to say that Oregon was the first team to ever use sideline signals to call their plays). Their dominance was something to behold, but the way that they went about it was just at a different speed than the rest of the competition. I bring up that this happened when I was playing college football because my high school called plays the old school way: every play a running back, wide receiver, or tight end would substitute out, and their replacement coming from the sideline would receive the playcall from the coach. No hand signals, just old fashioned “incoming substitute has the playcall”.
There are clear pros and cons to each approach; you can move much quicker by using hand signals to call plays (instead of substituting every play; there is another reason this is important which I will discuss later), allowing you to play a different style of football (which Oregon did very succussfully). However, a clear advantage of the old school way of playcalling is that, unless you had a defensive player in the offensive huddle, the only player who knew the incoming playcall was the incoming substitute, who would then communicate that playcall to his offensive counterparts. The thing about using hand signals to call plays is that they are intentionally visible; all of the players on the field need to see the signals so they know what to do and can react accordingly.
As promised, the other reason why using hand signals has an advantage over the old school way of playcalling is that, in football, every time the offense substitutes any players, the defense is also given the right to react and substitute players (generally, the defense will, at least, try to “match” the personnel that the offense has put onto the field. Bunch of speedy receivers on the field for the offense? The defense is likely to put more speedy defensive backs onto the field.). This is one reason why the “tempo” offenses were so dominant; they could receive the next play very quickly, but they could do so in a way that resulted in not needing to substitute, leaving the defense (largely) unable to change their personnel.
You’ve probably seen how defenses have reacted. Defenses also now are largely called using hand signals. Players occasionally “go down” or fake injuries sometimes to initiate a timeout, allowing teammates to catch their breath and to allow new personnel to come onto the field (I’m not making the assumption that all injuries are for this reason). Defenses often take any substitution opportunity they are given and take a looooooong time to execute it, slowing down the offense as a result. All this is to say that football is an offense vs defense, cat and mouse game, and the defenses have reacted to this new form of playcalling in different ways.
Remember the con of calling offensive plays cited earlier, however: the signals aren’t private, they’re out in the wiiiiide open.
A Crash Course in How Signals are Done and Interpreted
I’m not purporting to be some sign stealer myself, but I’ve learned a thing or two about how it’s done through my time working in college football. I worked in college football video and technology, and most of the content in this section will have to do with that work.
First, members of a football staff make lots of preperations for upcoming games. One preparation is poring over literally every second of video that you can get on an upcoming opponent. Typically, this is done with two copies of the team’s past games: the coaches’ copy and the TV copy. The TV copy is exactly as it sounds: it’s the version you and I watch on our televisions on Saturdays. The coaches’ copy is what is called the “all 22” (because the shot is meant to have all 22 players on the field in the shot at all times) and is what is often seen on TV replays of big plays (the NFL also sells (sold?) a subscription to studious fans that allowed access to the all-22 for NFL games). The coaches’ copy is generally what the coaches will break down and do their film analysis: determining the tendencies of the other team, their formations, etc. If they have this copy of the game, then, why is the TV copy also important? Have you ever watched a game on TV and seen the boards with the crazy logos and pictures and assistant coaches furiously signaling from the sideline? This is why the coaches watch the TV copy. They want to get any indication they can of the upcoming opponent’s hand signals and which plays they could be indicating.
When I was a college football employee, my most important weekly duty was to film the game (the all 22 or “sideline” shot). Before I filmed any games, however, I was instructed: “when we are the away team, keep your shot tight”. Decoding some (thin) lingo, “keep your shot tight” means zoom in slightly more than normal. Also, for context, typically the away team is on the sideline facing the sideline camera bay. Any idea why the sideline filmer for an away team would want to keep their shot tight? If you didn’t, your offensive play signalers would be in the shot. That is gold for any team that is about to play you.
Second, since teams know all of the above, they will take different measures to obfuscate their play call signaling. Often, you will see different assistants in bright-and-not-at-all-team colors. The bright colors make it easy for the players on the field to identify a particular person. Different teams do different things with these assistants. Some will only have one “active” signaler. In this scheme, the “inactive” signalers are just making dummy signals to make it harder to interpret who is “active”. Other teams will split up the playcall among the assistants (i.e. the “blue” signaler will be calling the play for the receivers, and the “red” signaler will be calling the play for the offensive line). Sometimes the logo- and picture-designed boards will mean something, other times they too will be dummy signals. Sometimes who is “actively” signaling changes every quarter. Long story short, teams know that their signals are out in the open and that the other team (and future opponents) will be looking to interpret them, so they want to obfuscate as much as possible. Sometimes you will also see bigopaque screens behind the signalers. This is often employed by the home team in an effort to the sideline filmer or opposing coaches’ booth (more on this next) catching the signals from behind.
Third, on game day, there are assistants in the “booth” (typically next to the press box; each team will have a dedicated room that generally houses one of the offensive or defensive coordinators and a host of assistants) that will spend all game trying to ascertain the other team’s signals. They’ll track various different motions, compare them to what happened on the field, try to determine who is the “active” signaler, so on and so forth.
All of this is to say that teams know that the signals are out in the open and there is a game within the game about trying to decode the signals of the other team and obfuscate your team’s signals from being decoded by the other team.
How Other Leagues Have Dealt with Sign Stealing
I’ll call out two leagues specifically here: MLB and the NFL.
Baseball has a storied history with sign stealing that goes back a long time. I’m not going to get too deep into that. The most notable cheating scandal regarding signs in baseball was the Houston Astros saga, where they were using video technology to ascertain the signals that the opposing catcher (calling for the next pitch) was giving to the opposing pitcher. The video room, where this was taking place, was relaying the calls to someone sitting next to a trash can, which was then struck a specific number of times to inform the Astros batsman what the incoming pitch was. This scandal, especially considering the Astros won a contentious World Series whilst employing the cheating method, resulted in MLB’s adoption of the “PitchComm” system that allows for the catcher to relay signals to the pitcher electronically.
The NFL was an early adopter of technology to deal with sign stealing. Starting in the mid-1990s, the NFL began experimenting with one-way radios (coaches to player) within the helmets of players, something that is in full use now. It’s important to note that this is generally only in one player’s helmet (when on the field) at a time. Generally, the radio is in the helmet of the quarterback on offense and a linebacker or safety on defense. You can tell who has the radio in their helmet during an NFL game by checking the back of the players’ helmets for a green dot (the green dot even has the NFL shield and “radio” on it). The player with the radio then relays the play call to his teammates. Interestingly, this has not completely obsolesced the use of signals, see the New England Patriots “Spygate” scandal for more here.
College football has not implemented such technology to prevent sign stealing. Different conferences have had discussions about potentially implementing it, but the confederated nature of college football and its conferences makes this difficult to fully implement (what if team x plays team y and one is in a conference that allows the tech but the other one isn’t, that sort of thing). I think it’s likely we’ll see a push for this sort of technology, especially as the NCAA learns more about the extent that teams will go in order to ascertain each other’s signals.
Now More Specifically About Michigan
One of the allegations levied against Michigan is that they had a paid assistant coach who was either attending, or paying for others to attend, games against upcoming and potentially upcoming opponents. At these games, this coach or his mercenaries have been alleged to be filming signals, just attending, taking pictures. Really the allegations run the whole gamut and it’s hard to say what’s true without personally knowing. Regardless, it’s against the NCAA rules to send scouts to off-campus games that the team is not directly involved in, so if this portion of the allegations is true (especially if the staff knew about and/or orchestrated it), then they should get in trouble.
As for the act of “stealing” signals, I think I have established here that it’s a very common practice. Obviously, if Michigan had/has access to data that they should not have access to (see the previous paragraph), they should face punishment for that. If they were just better than the rest at interpreting the widely held data, however, I’m not sure that necessitates punishment.
Where to Go from Here
I alluded to this in the section about how other leagues have handled this, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the NCAA find a technological answer for this. Honestly, despite my disagreements with how the NCAA handles most things, I think that is probably (directionally) the correct way to go.