The 2023-24 Michigan Wolverines season was a campaign of maximalism. Not only because they went 15-0 and won the National Championship, but because they did so while packing a decade's worth of scandals into one year. If you wanted to learn everything about the sport, in all its contradictions and glory, you couldn't do better than focusing on that very season.
The off-field (and, well, sort of on-field) highlight of course was the Connor Stalions spying scandal. Stalions was an attaché for the program who worked as a codebreaker, attending games of future Michigan opponents, filming their sidelines, then decoding their hand signals to figure out which plays they were calling. The Stalions affair had a rich texture: Stalions regarded his work for Michigan football as something of a holy crusade, he had a side hustle selling used vacuums, and he even wormed his way onto rival sidelines. It inspired some of the finest literary fiction and blogging this site has published.
The story was also quickly contextualized as one rotten apple within a stinky barrel, thanks in part to coach Jim Harbaugh beginning the season suspended for recruiting violations. Zoom out, and you'd see a program that was winning because of cheating. Zoom in, and you'd see the specifics of Michigan neatly fitting alongside every other scandal and landmark season in the history of college football, the only conclusion being that this school was no different from any other elite Division I program. You'd see the real enemy: the NCAA.
In this episode, I am excited to have Spencer Hall as our guest. If you are reading this blog post, there is a 100 percent chance you are familiar with Hall's work, which defines the modern college football-writing scene (the good parts of it anyway).
Listen to Only If You Get Caught wherever you enjoy podcasts. The show is produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin and hosted by me. You can find the show's transcript here.
