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Jim Harbaugh NO LONGER coaches at Michigan


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1 hour ago, 'stache said:

I'm just now noticing that this is an actual story. Can someone cliffnotes how this is worse than Belichek, who is still coaching, and as far as I recall whose punishment was a few fines and an "Oh You" from the commissioner?

It’s trending towards that from the looks of things. Whether they deserve severe penalties or not it doesn’t look like Michigan is getting a ban hammer.

Report: NCAA findings don’t link Harbaugh to sign-stealing

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I wasn’t mad about this until Michigan threatened to bring in the lawyers.  God dang lawyers infecting my sports.  Screw that.

Michigan is a voluntary member of the B1G, and they signed on to the bylaw that gives the commish the authority to ban a coach for 2 games based entirely on his want to do so.  You’re gonna file lawsuit to try to get out of that, now, hope a judge gives you an immediate injunction AND open yourself up to discovery? 

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22 minutes ago, Zeus said:

They have headphones in the helmet in the pros, so advanced scouting (stealing signs in other games) isn't illegal like it is in the NCAA. 

 

This needs to finally happen in college. Ironic that many coaches have opposed it because they've been involved in trying to steal opponents' signs as well and depend on that. I wonder if they were as deep into this as Michigan is/was.

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1 hour ago, 'stache said:

It does piss me off, same with the Patriots and Astros, both of whom had no real repercussions. I'm more pissed about UNC and KU basketball getting away with total cheating while hammering Oklahoma State and others. Hell, just punish Indiana for this, or maybe Oklahoma State, because why not, that's seemingly how this works. 

Who Cares Larry David GIF by Curb Your Enthusiasm

Edited by Wilcox Cummingtonite
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24 minutes ago, Laxtonto said:

Which one of you degenerates want to post the full WSJ article...

Quote

As a 16-year old high-school student, Connor Stalions set an audacious goal: To become the head football coach at Michigan. A dozen years later, his dream had advanced much farther than he had any right to imagine.

Stalions, a lifelong Michigan superfan, was deeply embedded in the Wolverines football program. After he attended the U.S. Naval Academy and served a stint in the Marines, he landed a job as an analyst on the Michigan coaching staff. During the past two seasons, he was frequently seen on the sidelines in close proximity to the team’s offensive and defensive coordinators, and even head coach Jim Harbaugh.

Stalions was quick to remind people of how far he had come. When a homeowners association in Ann Arbor, Mich., accused him of operating a home business in violation of its bylaws, Stalions responded to a court summons bragging that he worked on behalf of Michigan football from early in the morning until late at night.

“Coach Harbaugh himself and the rest of the coaching staff can attest to that,” he said in a letter responding to the summons.

Then suddenly this fall, Stalions and the football powerhouse he worshiped have parted ways. Stalions resigned on Friday, about three weeks after he emerged at the center of a sign-stealing scandal that is roiling his beloved Wolverines during what could be a title-winning season. Stalions was initially suspended after ESPN reported he had purchased tickets to numerous games of Michigan’s future opponents—a violation of NCAA rules—for the alleged purpose of recording signals the teams used from the sidelines to communicate with players on the field.

Harbaugh has denied knowledge of illegal sign-stealing and said in a statement last month that he did not direct “any staff member or others to participate in an off-campus scouting assignment.”

“I do not want to be a distraction from what I hope to be a championship run for the team, and I will continue to cheer them on,” Stalions said in a statement through his attorney on Friday.

His resignation marked the latest jarring turn in Stalions’s brash attempt to crash into college football at the highest level. He grew up in a small town just north of Detroit and was quickly indoctrinated into Michigan fandom by his alumni parents. In a January 2022 interview for the blog of Soldiers to Sidelines, a nonprofit organization for veterans, he said that researched how to break into the coaching industry in high school.

He said that he decided there were two paths to his goal: play football at a high level and stick around as a graduate assistant; or hone leadership skills in a military setting, as Duke former basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, a West Point graduate and former Army officer, had done. Lacking the physical gifts to be a top player, he went all in on the latter, quitting his high school’s football team as a junior to coach middle schoolers alongside his father Brock Stalions, according to the blog. Brock Stalions didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

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Michigan defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, center right, watches against East Carolina as Connor Stalions, center left, stands next to him. PHOTO: PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stalions set his focus on attending the U.S. Naval Academy and successfully gained admission in 2013. One of the first things he did was offer his services to the football team, then coached by Ken Niumatalolo, as a student assistant. It was an unpaid role he held for five seasons, according to Scott Strasemeier, spokesman for the Navy football team.

According to a person involved with Navy football during this period, Stalions worked with the video and recruiting departments, primarily handling administrative tasks for director of player personnel Sean Magee. He also talked constantly of the Wolverines. “He only cared about one school and that was Michigan,” said the person. “He was an obsessive fan.”

Magee, now chief of staff for the Chicago Bears, declined to comment.

It was at Navy that Stalions seemingly started decoding opponents’ play-signals. According to a person who later worked with him at Michigan, Stalions “bragged and was proud of the fact that he could discern what was taking place from the offense in a relatively short period of time.”

Stalions offered his skills to the Navy coaches, but he was brushed aside, said the person familiar with the team. 

A few months before graduating in May 2017, things took a fortuitous turn for Stalions’s ambitions when Michigan hired Magee to be their new director of player personnel in February. At the time of his hiring, Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh praised Magee’s “military experience, leadership skills and organizational talents.”

Stalions wouldn’t be able to capitalize on this connection for several more years, however, due to his obligation to the U.S. Marine Corps. His official military personnel file provided by the Marines shows that he attended basic training in Quantico, Va., from March to September of 2018, then trained at Logistics Operations School at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune from October 2018 until January 2019. He eventually was stationed at Camp Pendleton in southern California.

He attended a handful of Michigan games as a fan while he was training, but appeared to take on a more visible presence during the 2019 season, even while he was serving in the Marines. Photos posted by Stalions’s relatives on Instagram and 

 show him on the sidelines in team apparel at three games: a road game at Wisconsin, homecoming against Iowa and the 2020 Citrus Bowl.dvertisement - Scroll to Continue

It is not known if Stalions attended games during the pandemic-modified 2020 season, but his role seemingly expanded again in 2021. Photos and videos place Stalions on the sidelines, often in prominent places, for at least five games. He stood behind Harbaugh at the end of a close road win over Nebraska and during the Big Ten championship game. After Michigan defeated Wisconsin, he celebrated with players in the visitor’s locker room.

It’s unclear what Stalions was doing for the program during this period. Stalions said in the blog post that he was an offensive analyst at Michigan during the 2021 season. A spokesman for Michigan said that “Connor was hired in May 2022 as a recruiting analyst, anything prior to that was done as a volunteer.”

Property records indicate that he purchased a $485,000 house near the Michigan campus in Ann Arbor in March 2022, shortly before his stint with the Marines ended. Not long after he moved in that spring, dozens of old vacuum cleaners appeared on his front porch. The unsightly stash peeved neighbors and sparked the interest of the homeowners association, which sued Stalions for allegedly operating an appliance refurbishing business out of his home in violation of its bylaws.

Stalions fought back and represented himself in Washtenaw County Trial Court. In a letter written in response to a summons in October 2022, he wrote: 

 

“I suspect that whoever has chosen to sue me either 1. doesn’t like the fact that I am a veteran; or 2. is a Michigan State fan and knows I am a Michigan football coach and wants to draw my attention away.” He had one Spartans fan in mind—“someone named Jeff” who lived down the street and had a son attending Michigan State.

“He uncomfortably questioned me about Michigan football and what goes on in our building, giving me a bad feeling about him. He definitely seemed like someone who wants to distract me with unnecessary time-consuming things like this,” Stalions wrote.

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Schembechler Hall on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Mich. PHOTO: PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stalions said that he continued keeping long hours through the summer and fall of 2022, often spending “all 24 hours in the day at Schembechler Hall.” Before the Penn State game in October, he wrote that he slept there for two straight weeks.

As for the lawsuit, Stalions admitted to starting a limited liability company to sell restored items on Amazon, but said that he kept his inventory in a nearby storage unit. A judge ruled against him and ordered him to stop whatever business he was apparently running.

And those vacuums? Stalions sold many on Amazon with underwhelming results—several buyers complained of defective units with missing parts—that earned him a seller rating of 2.8 out of five stars. 

—Ryan Felton, Ben Kesling and Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.

not $9.95 - but $4/month with a college email address (thanks to Wally Jr²)

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Stalions is clearly on the autism spectrum.  Can learn an entire “language” several of them, over the course of a football season, worked for free while serving the Marines, wrote a manifesto and fixed used appliances.  I sincerely feel bad for him.  He needed help and was instead exploited.  Sad.

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4 minutes ago, Helobious said:

Is anyone else kind of impressed by Stallions? Autistic dork teenager to Naval Academy to Marine Corps to developing a football sign stealing system that actually worked. While having an apparently successful vacuum cleaner repair business on the side. 

This is what's possible when you use 100% of your brain.

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10 minutes ago, Helobious said:

Is anyone else kind of impressed by Stallions? Autistic dork teenager to Naval Academy to Marine Corps to developing a football sign stealing system that actually worked. While having an apparently successful vacuum cleaner repair business on the side. 

Anyone ever seen Stallions and master of disguise George Santos in the same room? 

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14 minutes ago, Helobious said:

Is anyone else kind of impressed by Stallions? Autistic dork teenager to Naval Academy to Marine Corps to developing a football sign stealing system that actually worked. While having an apparently successful vacuum cleaner repair business on the side. 

Seems like a dick riding autist with too much time on his hands.  Also he fucking sucked at repairing vacuums.  Other than that, spot on.

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The B10 comissioner would like to go back to his old job. This gets uglier every day. This might be Michigan's best chance to win a national title, so they are going all in. An ugly legal battle between Michigan and the rest of the league would be more entertaining than any B10 football game.

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So the big ten wants to get the 2 game suspension on the books and over with before the ohio state game and the playoffs, UM wants to drag it out in hopes that they get their title and worry about any potential fallout next year after Jim is maybe gone to the nfl and they maybe end up with the next Brady hoke. 

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12 minutes ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

Why would suspensions not involve the OC and DC as they clearly knew based on the evidence so far?

Seriously, if UM is trying to claim that JH didn’t know, then make him coach without his OC and DC since it’s clear that they knew. 

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1 hour ago, Zeus said:

 

RG3 is trash

Fuck Saturday’s take on that. We can’t punish the kids playing g now because their coaches cheated? What about the kids on all of the other teams that were hurt by this cheating. Most of the kids on this current team were directly fucking befitting from the cheating. 

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2 hours ago, closetojumping said:

So unless MLB more or less just shut the fucking organization down, there were "no real repercussions". Had they taken the title, people would be bitching about the org still being around. 

It's obvious you don't know shit about program building in baseball if you don't think losing the 1st and 2nd round picks for 2 years is a very big deal to an org. 

Yeah, people care about draft picks. Tucker, Correa, Bregman, McCullers, and Justin Verlander are all former 1st round picks. Max Scherzer and Corey Seager are former first round picks who have also recently played a major role in winning multiple world series. 

People care about losing highly accomplished executives. Losing Luhnow fucking hurts to this day.

Strong take, though.

I still wake up sobbing at night screaming whyyyyyyyyyyyy at the top of my lungs sometimes.  My wife knows now I'm just thinking about Luhnow leaving.  Finally, for the first time since Bill Walsh coached the 49ers something I loved was being taken care of by someone worthy of taking care of it and then that happened. 

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4 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:

I still wake up sobbing at night screaming whyyyyyyyyyyyy at the top of my lungs sometimes.  My wife knows now I'm just thinking about Luhnow leaving.  Finally, for the first time since Bill Walsh coached the 49ers something I loved was being taken care of by someone worthy of taking care of it and then that happened. 

Losing Luhnow and losing Chris Beard were both like getting kicked in the balls to me.

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4 hours ago, 'stache said:

Still have the ring, banner, and trophy, right? Who cares about fucking money and draft picks.

The real impact of those picks is only starting to be felt The Astros got plenty of punishment. The Rangers got a midseason boost that carried them to a World Series because they were able to use prospects (which were acquired by using picks and $$$ the Astros were missing) to go get Montgomery and Scherzer. It's likely they don't even make the playoffs without those pickups. That is a completely different situation vs KU,UNC and to a lesser extent Arizona skating by for the most part in college hoops. 

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6 minutes ago, ITHorn said:

The real impact of those picks is only starting to be felt The Astros got plenty of punishment. The Rangers got a midseason boost that carried them to a World Series because they were able to use prospects (which were acquired by using picks and $$$ the Astros were missing) to go get Montgomery and Scherzer. It's likely they don't even make the playoffs without those pickups. That is a completely different situation vs KU,UNC and to a lesser extent Arizona skating by for the most part in college hoops. 

What? No one from 1st or 2nd rounds of the 2020 or 21 drafts helped the rangers win this year except Evan Carter, who was a 2nd round 2020 pick. The rangers were drafting far higher than the Astros anyway due to their worse record and it’s highly unlikely the Astros were picking that guy.

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8 minutes ago, ITHorn said:

The real impact of those picks is only starting to be felt The Astros got plenty of punishment. The Rangers got a midseason boost that carried them to a World Series because they were able to use prospects (which were acquired by using picks and $$$ the Astros were missing) to go get Montgomery and Scherzer. It's likely they don't even make the playoffs without those pickups. That is a completely different situation vs KU,UNC and to a lesser extent Arizona skating by for the most part in college hoops. 

Didn't the Astros get a pitcher too?

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Just now, Helobious said:

What? No one from 1st or 2nd rounds of the 2020 or 21 drafts helped the rangers win this year except Evan Carter, who was a 2nd round 2020 pick. The rangers were drafting far higher than the Astros anyway due to their worse record and it’s highly unlikely the Astros were picking that guy.

The Rangers were able to freely deal prospects because they were able to make those picks to reload the farm. 

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7 minutes ago, BurntOrange&White said:

What these teams are doing is what the dipshit talking heads on ESPN are trying to make it look like Michigan was doing. 


 

I don’t know. I have a hard time believing everyone else in the B10 was stealing signs and sharing them with other teams perfectly by the book and Michigan was the only one breaking any rules. I think Michigan was the most complex and brazen about it though. 

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14 minutes ago, ITHorn said:

The Rangers were able to freely deal prospects because they were able to make those picks to reload the farm. 

Your original point was fine. You are arguing with a simple idiot and there is no hope of enlightening him or resolving the difference of position.

He didn't understand your generality, then he got specific, then had the audacity to argue that that specific, an actual 2020 2nd round pick who hit 3rd for the Rangers in the WS, didn't matter. Then he constructed an alt universe where no 2nd rounder drafted by the Astros in that same draft would have possibly mattered in this past season because ... because. Ignore it from there.

Never wrestle with a pig. They're just going to enjoy it and you'll just wind up looking and feeling dirty.

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6 minutes ago, Helobious said:

I don’t know. I have a hard time believing everyone else in the B10 was stealing signs and sharing them with other teams perfectly by the book and Michigan was the only one breaking any rules. I think Michigan was the most complex and brazen about it though. 

Teams and colleagues share information on that front. You’ve heard from multiple players and former coaches about this. What Michigan did is nothing like that. 

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