Bruce Feldman believes there is angst among Michigan program

Michigan is currently 8-0 and ranked No. 2 in the country heading into its bye this weekend.

However, that doesn’t mean that everything is going well in Ann Arbor. The NCAA is currently investigating the Wolverines for sign stealing, and there is plenty of uncertainty about what potential penalties could be handed down to Michigan.

College football insider Bruce Feldman spoke on The Rich Eisen Show this week about where things stand with the Michigan program.

“I think there’s a lot of angst right now inside Michigan, because you have this team that is a great team, with all these veteran leaders that have come back. They have dominated everybody they have played,” Feldman said. “And yet, this is now going to hang over the rest of the season, because there’s a lot of, what seems to be damning evidence, that is mounting about signal stealing, that goes into the category of advance scouting.”

Stealing signs commonly takes place in college football. However, what doesn’t typically happen is advance scouting, which the NCAA prohibits.

There is a lot of evidence that suggests that Michigan staff member Connor Stalions and the Wolverines were taking part in advance scouting by buying tickets to watch future opponents play games. There are also reports that they videotaped the sidelines of future opponents, which is also illegal.

“Connor Stalions, who is a 28-year-old Naval Academy grad, who was on staff, he wasn’t a position coach. He has since been suspended, but this was a guy who had a reputation inside the program as being very, very good at cracking another team’s signals. And it’s something he took pride in. As somebody who knows him a little bit, that wasn’t a secret,” Feldman said. “Now the part that’s different here is that there seems to be documentation that has piled up showing him buying tickets to, it seems like have people, or himself, film a team’s signals ahead of time. And that is definitely against the rules, especially if he’s doing it.”

Just how much it helped Michigan is up for discussion, but it seems that the Wolverines were gaining an advantage from doing it or they wouldn’t have put so many resources and so much time into sign-stealing.

Feldman shared that he has heard mixed opinions about how much it benefited the Wolverines.

“How much of an advantage does it give Michigan? I think it depends on who you talk to among the coaching world, because there’s a lot of coaches who feel like, ‘OK, this is wrong. But also, some of this has gone on in pockets, we’ve just never seen as high profile of a situation where it seems to have come to light,'” Feldman said.