There was a time in college football when it was not uncommon to see a coach attend a game involving a future opponent, take notes and gather information.
“When I worked for Jimmy Johnson at Oklahoma State, when they played a game on Saturday, I was at the next (opponent). I was scouting the next game,” recalled Houston Nutt, the former coach of the Arkansas and Mississippi native who worked under Johnson with the Cowboys in the early 1980s.
The NCAA banned in-person advanced screening in 1994, in part because not all schools could afford it. NOW Michigan is under investigation by the NCAA for a sign-stealing scheme that allegedly involved secretly sending people to record opponents’ games.
No. 2 Michigan suspended Friday a low level football staff member which is at the center of NCAA investigation. The Big Ten has notified all of Michigan’s upcoming opponents. Unfazed, the Wolverines continued to romp through their schedule Saturday night, defeating rival Michigan State 49-0.
NCAA rules do not directly prohibit sign stealing. There are rules prohibiting the use of electronic equipment to record an opponent’s signals, but the main issue in Michigan is NCAA rule 11.6.1: “In-person, off-campus screening of future opponents ( during the same season) is prohibited.”
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Wolverines coach Jim Harbaughwho served a school-imposed three-game suspension earlier this season for a separate and still-active NCAA recruiting-related infractions case, has denied any knowledge of or involvement in prohibited advanced scouting.
“There’s a goal, yes. Everyone’s been pointing it out since the beginning of the season, but our guys are very focused,” Harbaugh said after Saturday night’s game.
As with many NCAA rules, the association attempts to eliminate advantages one school might have over another based on budget size. Programs such as Michigan, Ohio State, Texas and Alabama have annual athletic budgets that exceed $200 million, nearly double those of their own Power Five conferences.
Step outside the Power Five and even the biggest spending big college football schools have budgets closer to $50 million than $100 million.
David Ridpath, a professor at Ohio University and former director of compliance at Colorado State and Marshall, said he remembers former Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer from his days as an assistant , attending a CSU game in Fort Collins to scout the Rams in the late 1980s. a week off for volunteers.
A few years later, responding to complaints from coaches and administrators, the NCAA decided to put an end to it.
“And it was really a financial thing because there were all these coaches leaving, and honestly, the coaches didn’t even want to do it anymore. Plus, technology was changing at that time too,” Ridpath said.
Every game is recorded for self-spotting purposes by the home team, but a lot of time has passed since actual film was exchanged between the opposing teams. Access to digital game records is readily available through online exchange programs.
The way the game is played now also places more emphasis on signs and, therefore, sign stealing.
For most of Nutt’s career, which began as a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State in 1981, teams typically huddled methodically between snaps, with plays sent via player substitution.
As offenses began to abandon the huddle for a quicker approach in the 2000s, signaling offensive and defensive plays from the sideline became more and more of a necessity. And with that, the teams began trying to decipher each other’s signs.
Many teams use hand signals and will have multiple signalmen on the sidelines to try to confuse opponents. Some teams use elaborate playing cards: Beyoncé, Kermit the Frog, Scott Van Pelt and many other images have been used over the years.
Nowadays, a large sheet, tarp, or poster board is commonly seen used to prevent signs from ending up on reconnaissance film.
Still, someone in a stadium could potentially monitor or record signals that could then be compared to reconnaissance film for decoding.
In the NFL, where advanced scouting is allowed, the New England Patriots were caught recording opponent signals during a game in 2007 and were punished with fines and the loss of a draft pick.
Hand signals have largely disappeared in the NFL over the past decade, replaced by radio technology in helmets that allows coaches to communicate verbally with certain players on the field.
Communication between player and coach is a recurring topic in college football, where rules must cover hundreds of schools with vastly different resources. As with in-person testing, concerns about creating a resource-based competitive advantage and lack of consistency in implementation have been a stumbling block.
Yet this year, during bowl season, the NCAA will allow teams to use coach-player communication technology during postseason games if both parties agree.
Steve Shaw, national coordinator of football officials and NCAA rules-writing secretary, said that instead of trying to standardize technology and force every team to use the same setup, teams will be allowed to use what ‘they want.
Shaw said he hopes this is a step toward coach-player technology becoming the norm in college football.
“If we can achieve a world without signals,” Shaw said, “it will just be one less thing to worry about.”
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