Michigan football hit with fines, suspensions for sign-stealing scandal

Washington Post

9 hours ago

The giant and storied Michigan football program received a hefty array of fines and penalties from the NCAA Committee on Infractions on Friday as a result of the signal-stealing operation that surfaced during its national championship season in 2023-24. It did not receive a postseason ban or any removal of victories from the record.
Michigan received a base fine of $50,000, plus 10 percent of the football program's budget, an additional fine equivalent to the loss of all postseason revenue sharing associated with the next two seasons, and an additional fine equivalent to the cost of 10 percent of its football scholarships awarded for this season. Coach Sherrone Moore was suspended three games, adding an additional game to the self-imposed two-game suspension Michigan handed Moore this year.
The NCAA's announcement Friday marked the conclusion of a nearly two-year process that began when news broke during the 2023 season that Connor Stalions, then a low-level member of then-coach Jim Harbaugh's staff, allegedly coordinated an in-person scouting and sign-stealing operation against future Michigan opponents that violated NCAA rules.
The penalties echoed at least somewhat the punishment doled to Tennessee in July 2023, when the NCAA Committee on Infractions refrained from imposing a postseason ban, upholding its recent-years trend in that sense, while fining the Volunteers $8 million for more than 200 rules violations committed under a former coach, Jeremy Pruitt.
The Michigan case crashed into a bustling midseason on Oct. 19, 2023, with Yahoo Sports's initial report, and percolated clear into the season's closing night in January (and beyond). It emerged when Michigan stood at 7-0 and loomed through Michigan's finish at 15-0 with a national championship, its first in 26 years. As it bloomed into a national discussion, it decorated that season with some of sports' timeless pastimes, from moralizing (from opposing fans) to rationalizing (from Michigan fans) to lampooning (from fans and memes).
Eventually the NCAA pinpointed 11 violations — including six of the uppermost Level I severity — from the evidence in a lavish scheme that brought notoriety to then-28-year-old Stalions, the native Michigander and staff member who was the alleged ringleader of skulduggery that included buying tickets to the games of a slew of future Michigan opponents. Stalions resigned quickly from his role as 'analyst,' a familiar college football job describing someone who helps a coaching staff but doesn't coach players, and had become a hushed subject of widespread curiosity who by 2024 appeared in a Netflix documentary titled 'Untold: Sign Stealer.' Stalions recently said he knew almost every signal opponents used in seven games over two seasons.
The games Michigan had scouted dated to 2021, the first of three consecutive seasons during which Michigan reached the four-team College Football Playoff, even as Michigan did play the most challenging portion of its historic 2023 season after the case surfaced. The NCAA alleged that Moore had broken rules while an assistant to head coach Jim Harbaugh, the former Michigan quarterback who departed for the Los Angeles Chargers about two weeks after the confetti rained in January 2024. Michigan had appeared before the Committee on Infractions during two days in June 2025. It had imposed its own two-game suspension on Moore, the offensive coordinator in 2023 and current head coach, in part for his deletion of 52 text messages with Stalions.
The spying violated an NCAA rule because it involved advance trips to decipher the signs of future opponents rather than just the traditional art of stealing signs from across the field or the stands during games. The Big Ten suspended then-coach Harbaugh for the closing three regular season games in 2023, wins at Penn State, at Maryland and against Ohio State. That suspension bookended the three-game sidelining Harbaugh had served to begin the season — home games with East Carolina, UNLV and Bowling Green — for his role in Michigan's violations of pandemic-era restrictions against contacting recruits.
The rule in question would be NCAA bylaw 11.6.1, a 31-year-old standard that passed quietly and emphatically — by a vote of 112-2 — at the NCAA convention of January 1994, well before the heyday of mobile phones and everyday videography. The bylaw fit the spirit of that convention — cost-cutting and economic balance among programs — because it aimed to shut off the edge the larger-budget programs might gain from scouting travel. It sought a level field by recommending that all programs scout by watching videotape.
This is a developing story and will be updated.