INDIANAPOLIS — Prior to the skirmishing that will take place in a conference room here Friday morning, muffins will be served. And fruit. And coffee. Rules were broken, but bread will be broken before the misdeeds are discussed.
“The breakfast is the most enjoyable part,” says college sports attorney Stu Brown.
What follows will be up to two days of high-stakes, high-profile college sports jurisprudence, as the Michigan Wolverines and NCAA Enforcement staff meet for a hearing before the Division I Committee on Infractions at NCAA headquarters. This is the penultimate act in the Connor Stalions affair, a bizarre impermissible scouting scandal that broke new ground in the well-plowed landscape of college football cheating. The final act will be the ruling that comes out of this hearing, probably toward the end of the summer (although, this being the NCAA, delays are always possible).
And then we’ll see if this case is the NCAA’s last stand as the sovereign judge and jury of college sports misbehavior. This Michigan vs. NCAA hearing feels like one of the final compelling showdowns in the form we’ve come to know. Massive changes are coming in every facet of the industry, including the eternally controversial rules that govern fair play and who enforces them.
“I’m not sure what will be left in the rules manual,” says Josephine Potuto, a Nebraska law professor emerita and former chair of the Committee on Infractions. “There will not be as many rules, including many that were often broken.”
To be clear, the rules broken by Michigan football staffer Stalions and his cohort of spies who recorded future opponents’ play signals will still be on the books, and still be subject to NCAA oversight going forward. But in a post-House v. NCAA settlement world—which may or may not come any day—a new investigative and adjudicative entity will handle NIL-related infractions for all conferences that opted into the settlement. That’s expected to be a large chunk of what the NCAA used to do.
That development comes as the traditional, in-person, Committee on Infractions hearings already are dwindling. In a largely successful effort to accelerate the infamously dawdling infractions process, COI hearings often are being replaced by negotiated resolutions between the enforcement staff and offending schools. It takes some serious disagreement to bring everyone to the table nowadays.
“Unless a school wants to go Full Metal Jacket on something, most of the time there doesn’t need to be a hearing,” says one former COI chair.
Hoo-rah. Michigan is that school, and this is that case.
After multiple suspensions, firings and resignations within the football program, the parties will meet to discuss and debate 11 alleged NCAA violations. Six of them are Level 1 allegations, the most severe, and could be subject to the greatest sanctions. The most pertinent issues are expected to be these:
- Any additional penalties for current Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore, who was the offensive coordinator at the time Stalions was playing spymaster and has been suspended by the school for two games this upcoming season.
- Program penalties as a “repeat violator” of NCAA rules that has been charged with “failing to monitor” its football program. Those penalties could include recruiting restrictions, monetary fines and whether a postseason ban could be in play. The latter sanction has fallen out of favor in recent years, mostly because affected athletes often were not even enrolled at the school at the time violations occurred.
- Any vacation of records from Michigan’s undefeated 2023 national championship season. In the future, NCAA record books may not say the Wolverines went 15–0.
How did we get here? It began in October 2023, when news broke that Stalions—a program staffer with a flair for espionage and an excessive love for Michigan football—had taken his assignment of stealing opponents’ play signals a bit too far. An NCAA investigation was underway into Stalions’s use of several associates as in-person scouts who recorded video of upcoming Michigan opponents’ plays being signaled in from the bench.
Stalions purchased tickets to games of many Big Ten opponents and a select few nonconference foes, and the Wolverines began to gain a reputation around the conference for having opponents’ signals. He is believed to have orchestrated the gathering of signs from more than 50 games over a three-year span.
While it’s legal to gather and decode signals from game film or during a game, the work obtaining signals via attending games on other campuses violated NCAA bylaw 11.6.1 regarding advance scouting.
Then there was Stalions’s ultimate spy game: showing up on the Central Michigan Chippewas’ sideline in disguise as one of the staff members for their Sept. 1, 2023, season opener against the Michigan State Spartans, a major rival of the Wolverines. An NCAA investigation of Central Michigan’s role in the Stalions affair ensued and remains ongoing. Assistant coach Jake Kostner, a friend of Stalions’s and a former Michigan staffer himself, was ultimately let go by CMU. Head coach Jim McElwain, who also spent the ’18 season at Michigan as an assistant, announced his retirement after the ’24 campaign.
The backdrop for all of this was a preexisting NCAA investigation into impermissible contact with recruits and the use of impermissible staff members in coaching roles during offseason workouts. That case had become very public and very contentious, with some Michigan partisans assailing the NCAA for investigating head coach Jim Harbaugh “for a cheeseburger” with a recruit. (The case was, in fact, never about a cheeseburger; it primarily was about meeting with recruits during the COVID-19 dead period. Harbaugh was suspended the first three games of the 2023 season, and Moore was suspended for a game as well.)
With most of the Big Ten whipped into a fury by the Stalions revelations, new commissioner Tony Petitti took controversial action. With legal action being threatened, Petitti nevertheless proceeded with a three-game benching of Harbaugh to end the regular season. Even with Harbaugh missing exactly half of the 2023 regular season, the Wolverines rolled through undefeated. Harbaugh left for the NFL afterward, getting out ahead of the NCAA posse, but the investigation continued.
Last August, the enforcement staff delivered its notice of allegations to Michigan. The full document still has not been made public. In January of this year, the school filed its response, a portion of which was publicized. The response reportedly accuses the NCAA of “grossly overreaching” and “wildly overcharging” Michigan. The NCAA subsequently filed a response of its own—which has remained private—and the rules of engagement were thus set for this week’s showdown in Indy.
The involved parties will likely walk into a conference room with a U-shaped seating arrangement—COI members seated at the bottom of the U, with one side reserved for NCAA Enforcement staff and the other reserved for Michigan staff. A stenographer will sit in the middle of the room. And yes, there will be lawyers.
“There has been an escalation of arms over the years,” says the former COI chair. “Where it used to be that a school would show up with its general counsel and maybe one lawyer, now there are five lawyers with the general counsel. The stakes got higher, with the money and careers at stake.”
The hearings tend to follow a formal script. The groundwork has already been laid by the notice of allegations and subsequent responses, and the notion of 11th-hour surprise revelations is left to TV law dramas.
“There is no new information,” says a former longtime NCAA Enforcement rep. “But there may be disputes about the veracity of the previously gathered information.”
After a brief introduction by the COI chair, there are opening statements from the school and enforcement. Then most of the hearing consists of an allegation-by-allegation back-and-forth about what happened and why.
“It’s never comfortable for an institution’s president or chancellor to have to sit there and hear about how their institution had substantial problems, or improper oversight,” Brown says. “It’s embarrassing. There’s also not a lot of time to push back on everything. This is a two-day hearing, not an eight-week trial.”
Sometimes, there is little dispute over the facts. Sometimes, there is considerable dispute—not just over the facts, but how violations may have been characterized and charged.
“The school can expect the enforcement staff to mischaracterize things from A to Z,” says one lawyer who has defended coaches and others charged with NCAA violations. “I’m not saying they make stuff up out of whole cloth, but if people could reasonably agree that a violation is a three on a scale of one to 10, the enforcement staff will say it’s a nine. You’ve got to be prepared to knock down these exaggerations.”
(In Michigan’s case, one of those key points of contention will be Moore’s deleted text messages from Stalions. NCAA Enforcement charged Moore with a major violation for erasing 52 texts on the day the Stalions revelations first broke. The school has argued that the texts, once they were recovered, revealed no smoking-gun knowledge of Stalions’s scheme. Michigan has suspended Moore for two games—the third and fourth of the season, in an unconventional twist. The NCAA might seek a longer suspension.)
Former Notre Dame Fighting Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick sat through a hearing years ago that ultimately led to the football program vacating 21 victories from the 2012 and ’13 seasons due to academic fraud, when a student trainer did classwork for players. The school discovered the violations on its own and suspended the players, but that didn’t spare it from sanctions.
Today, Swarbrick does not remember the hearing process fondly.
“The process was so short of expectations,” he says. “When we wanted a transcript of the hearing, the initial response was, ‘You can’t have it.’ When we finally prevailed and got it, it was so riddled with errors that you couldn’t make heads or tails of it. A member of our hearing panel fell sound asleep, and nobody woke him up.
“But the most disappointing part for me was the prosecutorial nature of the NCAA. They’re making their case, I get it, but we’re also members of the association. I expected a level of professionalism that was evident nowhere.”
That said, almost all of the six people interviewed for this story said the process is not very contentious. There are disagreements, and sometimes those accused of violations will become heated by a line of questioning.
“Coaches, especially head coaches, are averse to being questioned on occasion,” Potuto says. “Sometimes they don’t think they should be pushed.”
One person who consistently receives high marks for his comportment in hearings and throughout the investigative process is NCAA vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan. He is as close to unflappable as a person can be in a controversial job.
“You can’t find a better human being, with more integrity, than Jon Duncan,” says one lawyer who has crossed swords with the NCAA.
“Jon Duncan is the steadiest leader I’ve ever been around,” says the former enforcement rep. “He truly sees himself as the umpire, there to call balls and strikes.”
After all the allegations have been discussed and debated, the next phase of the hearing is of crucial importance when it comes to weighing sanctions: aggravating circumstances and mitigating circumstances. If the COI decides there were “aggravators,” in NCAA parlance, it can lead to increased penalties. “Mitigators” can have the opposite effect, leading to reduced penalties. Those interpretations are often where the most significant debates occur.
What is unknown is how much the contentious nature of the successive Michigan infractions cases will factor into the committee’s deliberations. The school chose on several occasions to take the fight public, which runs counter to standard NCAA operations, and Harbaugh was difficult for investigators to deal with during the impermissible contact case. The COI’s refusal to accept Michigan’s proposed sanctions on Harbaugh as sufficient in 2023 was telling.
“I think the Harbaugh hatred was palpable,” says one attorney with familiarity of the Michigan case.
Michigan’s decision to suspend Moore for the third and fourth games of the season, instead of the customary first and second, seemed like another indication that the school was not going to accept responsibility without offering its own flippant spin on it.
“How did you conduct yourself during the investigation?” asks the former enforcement rep. “For this case, that could weigh heavily. Airing your grievances in a case that becomes this public, that traditionally is not a good thing.”
Ultimately, the committee’s interpretation of the violations and attendant factors likely won’t be known for months. But with appeals of COI rulings virtually wiped out, those decisions should be final.
“This is a big program and a big case, so there is an imperative to properly adjudicate it,” the former enforcement rep says. “The pressure comes from the outside, but it’s probably more on the committee than the school. You lay the case at the feet of a committee that is human.”
Then we’ll see if the NCAA ever handles a case of this magnitude again.
In a post-House world, much of the crime-and-punishment work is expected to be outsourced to Deloitte via a Collegiate Sports Commission. A CEO who could make $1 million, according to ESPN, would be in charge of doling out penalties in that model. The CEO would answer to the Power 4 conference commissioners, a potentially glaring conflict of interest.
But even with a stripped-down rulebook and narrower focus, there would be a need for the NCAA as a compliance organization. There still is a panoply of potential misdeeds to police.
“More than 200 bylaws will cease to exist the minute House goes into effect,” says the former COI chair. “But the rulebook is still going to exist, and there are a lot of conferences that didn’t opt into House.”
College sports leaders have to hope the new enforcement entity functions more effectively than the last time they tried to build a better mousetrap. The Independent Accountability Review Process, which came out of the FBI investigation of college basketball in the late 2010s, was shut down after just a few years of seemingly nonsensical rulings.
“I thought that [the IARP] was going to be a disaster,” Potuto says. “I don’t want to say I was right, but they did eliminate it.”
Whether college sports can function smoothly with two different investigative entities for two different sets of rules and two different sets of universities remains to be seen. There is hope, but also well-earned cynicism from industry leaders.
“In a big-picture way, I still believe in the NCAA,” says the former COI chair. “I do believe in self-governance, and I wish it would work better. But seemingly every time a rule is put in place in college athletics, the first act is for schools to figure out a way around it.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as What’s at Stake in Michigan’s NCAA Committee on Infractions Hearing Over Connor Stalions .