The suspension of Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore leads to wild conspiracy theory about the Tennessee Vols going viral again
According to a report from ESPN, Michigan Wolverines head coach Sherrone Moore is expected to be suspended for two games in 2025 as part of self-imposed sanctions stemming from the Connor Stalions sign stealing scandal. Stalions was accused of scouting various games to steal (and decode) signals from opposing sidelines. The report about Moore's looming suspension led […]
According to a report from ESPN, Michigan Wolverines head coach Sherrone Moore is expected to be suspended for two games in 2025 as part of self-imposed sanctions stemming from the Connor Stalions sign stealing scandal.
Stalions was accused of scouting various games to steal (and decode) signals from opposing sidelines.
The report about Moore's looming suspension led to a conspiracy theory about the Tennessee Vols' loss to the South Carolina Gamecocks in 2022 going viral again.
Tennessee lost to South Carolina 63-38 in a shocking upset in late 2022. The loss kept Tennessee out of the four-team College Football Playoff.
The Gamecocks weren't playing well in 2022 before scoring surprising upset wins in back-to-back weeks against Tennessee and Clemson (both of which were ranked in the top 10 at the time).
Essentially, the theory is that Stalions decoded Tennessee's signals (specifically the Vols' defensive signals) and shared them with South Carolina in an effort to knock the Vols out of the College Football Playoff (Michigan was vying for a spot in the playoff, which they eventually secured).
The conspiracy theory may sound crazy, but there are some clues that suggest it could be legitimate.
For starters, Stalions scouted a Tennessee game in 2022 just a few weeks before the Vols' game against South Carolina.
There was a connection between the Michigan coaching staff and the South Carolina coaching staff in 2022 via Gamecocks defensive coordinator Clayton White, who previously worked under then Wolverines head coach Jim Harbaugh at Stanford.
Football Scoop reported in 2023 that Stalions may have shared information with another program in an effort to disrupt a top contender's path to the playoff.
South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer was fined in 2016 (when he was an assistant coach at Virginia Tech) for accepting information from a rogue Wake Forest assistant coach in 2014 about plays that Wake Forest was potentially going to run in a matchup against Virginia Tech.
Not only does Beamer has a history of accepting information about other programs from shady characters, but he basically bragged about sharing information with other teams just a couple of weeks before playing Tennessee in 2022.
"When we play opponents that we don't play again, you usually try and connect with those coaches," said Beamer in 2022. "See what you had on us and what we had on you. Non conference teams, things like that. We have done that often. We dove into a self-scout during the off week and saw some tendencies that we had. Some of the communication that we had with some coaches from some other schools alerted us to some tendencies also. We are no different than any other team. We have tendencies that we are going to attack with Vanderbilt this week. There were tendencies that we tried to attack with Missouri run/pass. Every team has those tendencies. Certainly, a couple of them were a little concerning. I think there was a third-and-two that we had and we were in a bunch set which they were signaling pass. There are some things that we have tried to combat the last couple of weeks."
Beamer's comments about sharing information aren't necessarily damning, but it's evidence that he speaks often with other programs about tendencies in order to gain an advantage.
Additionally, Stalions told Bussin with the Boys last year that he shared signals with Ohio State in 2021 because Michigan needed Michigan State to lose the Buckeyes. Stalions clearly had a history of sharing information to help certain programs lose when it benefited Michigan.
We will probably never know if South Carolina really had Tennessee's signals in 2022. And it ultimately doesn't matter — what's done is done. But anyone suggesting it's implausible is ignorant because there's plenty of evidence that suggests it could be true.
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