The university has accused the NCAA of “grossly overreaching” and “wildly overcharging” the Michigan football program, which was hit with 11 violations in a notice of allegations, many of which stemmed from the NCAA’s probe into an alleged sign-stealing operation led by former Wolverines staffer Connor Stalions.
Michigan’s response came in a 137-page document, a portion of which Yahoo Sports obtained and reported the details of on Tuesday.
Included in Michigan’s response are defenses of former coach Jim Harbaugh, current Wolverines coach Sherrone Moore and, interestingly, Stalions, the former recruiting assistant who resigned in 2023.
Michigan believes the NCAA’s notice of allegations, which it received last August, has “numerous factually unsupported infractions, exaggerates aggravating factors and ignores mitigating facts” and that the alleged sign-stealing operation offered the program “minimal relevance to competition.”
The university later requested that the NCAA apply “common sense and commitment to fairness” to the case, an approach that would require college sports’ governing body to treat it as a “Level II standard case.” Of the 11 alleged violations by the Wolverines, six are Level I infractions, the most serious charge the NCAA can assess to a member institution.
Michigan asserts that NCAA investigators have not proven “any coaches were aware of, much less participated in” Stallions’ sign-stealing scheme.
Perhaps the most notable coach included in the NCAA’s notice of allegations is Moore, who was the Wolverines’ offensive coordinator in 2023 and was elevated to head coach after Harbaugh left for the Los Angeles Chargers in January 2024, weeks after Michigan won the College Football Playoff championship.
Moore allegedly deleted 52 text messages between him and Stalions the day that news of the NCAA’s investigation into sign-stealing broke in October 2023. While Michigan acknowledges the deleted texts, it added that they were “innocuous and not material to the investigation” and noted that Moore cooperated fully with the investigation. In the school’s response, Moore said that he didn’t delete the messages to “hide anything,” attributing it instead to being “extremely angry” about the alleged misconduct and how it could harm the program.
Several texts between Moore and Stalions were about sign-stealing, which is a common practice among college programs, but none were about advance in-person scouting.
Michigan also refutes some of the NCAA’s findings on Stalions, who the university said attended only one game. Eight other games were attended by low-level Wolverines staffers and others were attended by Stalions’ friends and family, the latter of which Michigan believes does not violate NCAA rules.
While advance in-person scouting, the method the Wolverines allegedly used to record the signals of upcoming opponents, is against NCAA rules, Michigan asserts that “an enormous amount” of the signal decoding was “permissibly done” with television and other publicly available footage.
The response also touched on an allegation against Harbaugh, who the NCAA said failed to cooperate between Oct. 20, 2023 and Jan. 24, 2024 by not producing text and phone records from his personal cell phone. Michigan dismissed the claim as “without merit.”
The ongoing and intensifying saga between the NCAA and Michigan will soon head to a hearing before the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions, which is likely to happen over the next several weeks.