Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Untold: Sign Stealer’ on Netflix, Where the Connor Stalions Sign-Stealing Saga Threatens to Derail Michigan’s College Football Championship Season

In 2023, the Michigan Wolverines were seemingly unbeatable, storming toward their first national championship in a generation. Then, eight games into the season, a sign-stealing scandal threatened to upend it all. Now, on the cusp of a new college football season, we meet the man behind it all, former Michigan staffer Connor Stalions, as he tells his side of the story in Netflix’s UNTOLD: Sign Stealer .

Connor Stalions Netflix Documentary: What We Know About ‘Untold’s University Of Michigan Sign-Stealing Scandal Episode

The Gist: UNTOLD: Sign Stealer isn’t designed to be the definitive story of Michigan’s championship season. It’s Connor Stalions’ chance to tell his story. We’ve got context provided by a handful of prominent college football reporters and various people around Stalions’ life and the Michigan football program, but they’re all structured around Stalions’ first hand retelling of what he believes happened.

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What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The UNTOLD brand of Netflix sports documentaries is pretty familiar by now — it’s the streaming giant’s version of ESPN’s 30 For 30 brand. Subject-matter-wise, this one comes closest to UNTOLD: Operation Flagrant Foul , the 2022 look at game-fixing NBA referee Tim Donaghy.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s only one performance that matters here. The man was the focus of headlines through the end of the 2023 season and through the offseason, but we haven’t heard from Connor Stalions himself until now. Here, he’s front and center.

Memorable Dialogue: “When you really learn what goes on in college football, and what went on with us in Michigan,” Stalions reflects, sitting in a car in a darkened parking lot like a Mafia witness ready to turn state’s evidence, “I think a lot of people are gonna have some explaining to do.”

Sex and Skin: Only the extremely sensual manner in which Jim Harbaugh rocks a pair of Dockers khakis.

Our Take: To understand the story of Connor Stalions, you need to understand this: ever since he was a child, he dreamed of becoming the head football coach at Michigan. Born into a Wolverine-loving family, he lived and breathed football, so much so that he chose to attend the United States Naval Academy not to pursue a military career, but because he saw military training as an important step toward his eventual goal. “I went into the military knowing that I was going to come out and coach football,” he notes.

While at the Naval Academy, he asked for and received a student coaching position from Navy head coach Ken Niumatalolo, and his first assignment was to decipher signals in a game against his lifetime nemesis, Ohio State–something he showed an immediate aptitude for, supposedly assisting the Midshipmen in a narrow loss to the Buckeyes.

“Every team has a guy that’s in charge of sign-stealing, and it’s a subculture of college football,” college football reporter Dan Wetzel explains. “It’s worth remembering–you’re allowed to steal signs. A team is allowed to watch a TV broadcast and see the offensive coordinator move his arms one way and see that’s the corresponding play… they can call their friend who played that team two weeks ago and say ‘what signs did you pick up while you were watching?’”

There’s a line where it becomes impermissible, though, and Stalions’ early success may have blurred that line for him. “Clearly there’s a lot of impressive traits and drive with this kid,” Detroit News reporter Tony Paul reflects, “but there’s so much drive… I mean, maybe too much drive.”

In 2018, he talked his way into a gig with his beloved Wolverines, offering to utilize the sign-deciphering skills he developed at Navy. In his telling, he’d only worked on signs from live observation or television broadcasts to this point, but soon plugged in to “an underground community of college football analysts” trading schemes, playbooks, gameplans and signals.

“Based on my experience, 80 to 90% of teams have one of those intel operations staff members,” Stalions recalls, “so when I started to learn this culture of college football intelligence operations, well here I am, a captain in the Marine Corps, figuring out ‘well… they can’t be better than I can be at this, right?”

At this point in their history, Michigan was struggling. Jim Harbaugh had come in with great fanfare, the prodigal-son coach meant to return the Wolverines to glory, but he couldn’t beat rivals Michigan State and Ohio State. In this telling of the story, Michigan was being outgunned in the sign-stealing race, falling behind lesser programs that has cracked their schemes, and Stalions was the savior. As a baseball fan, it gives a little echo of the notion that Barry Bonds allegedly saw Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa get lauded for their steroid-fueled home run records, and had no choice but to show them how to do it even better.

“Michigan got very, very good in 2021,” Wetzel notes, “Connor Stalions was operating, so it’s fair to ask what impact he had.” Stalions, for his part, doesn’t deny this. “I’m rarely wrong.” He proudly shows off a game ball he was awarded for his efforts in a 2022 win over Iowa, then shows off the countless Google Docs, maps and spreadsheets he’s assembled–parts of his famed manifesto–that demonstrate a monomaniacal focus on the game, the kind that’s often lauded in coaches like Harbaugh.

Of course, the bubble burst late in 2023. Stalions’ sign-stealing was discovered, and he was quickly shuttled out of the program. To hear it from Stalions, he offered to fall on his sword to exonerate Harbaugh and the team, so great was his love for Michigan. The Wolverines continued to succeed without him–“at the end of the season, there’s no Connor Stalions, no sign-stealing, and they’re still winning,” Wetzel notes. But when video emerged of Stalions in disguise on Central Michigan’s sidelines during a game against Michigan State, the simmering scandal swelled to the kind of five-alarm farce only college football can provide.

We get a masked Ohio State fan, “Brohio”, explaining the message-board culture that broke the Stalions scandal open. “As a college football reporter, I am aware of message boards, and sometimes you scroll them and see what’s on there,” reporter Nicole Auerbach explains, “but this was the first time that everything I was seeing on message boards ended up being true.”

Following the money, it’s clear that Stalions–or people using tickets he purchased–attended dozens of other college football games over the previous years, and stadium security footage confirmed someone filming from the corresponding seats. We see an operation of such scale that it’s tough to believe Stalions did it of his own volition–and at his own significant personal expense. There’s also compelling evidence presented that Ohio State might’ve had a hand in delivering a fully-formed investigation over to the NCAA, incriminating their archrival.

What’s never established–and what’s been one of the biggest questions hanging over this story from the beginning–is the degree to which Stalions had institutional support for his efforts. Or, to put it in Watergate-era terms: What did Jim Harbaugh know, and when did he know it? As the masked Brohio notes regarding Harbaugh’s immediate departure for an NFL job, “We’ve never seen a coach win a national championship and bolt and take his whole staff with him.” The NCAA’s investigation is ongoing, and whatever sanctions Michigan may receive are yet to be seen.

Stalions seems to relish his place in history; his name is forever linked with the Wolverines’ title, and even with the infamy that suggests, it seems it’s an association he’s proud to have made. “Do I wish that I’d been able to be with them? Yeah. But as long as Michigan football won the national championship, as long as my brothers go to experience that, that’s all I care about.”

“And I would do the same thing over again.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Connor Stalions saga was the story of the 2023 college football season, and while Sign Stealer won’t settle the arguments raging around Michigan’s championship, it’s an important piece in advancing our understanding of the story.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter , is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.

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