Say this for Connor Stalions: he was one motivated dude.
A story by Sports Illustrated's Richard Johnson on Wednesday detailed the motivations that drove Stalions to now inadvertently become the most infamous man in college football.
Those familiar with the 28-year-old, who in a matter of days went from total anonymity to a household name in college football circles, are aware he attended the Naval Academy and later became a Marine Corps captain. But SI found a 2022 story on the website for From Soliders to Sidelines where it named Stalions its January '22 Coach of the Month. There, Stalions claimed he declined admission to Michigan to attend the Naval Academy instead because Bo Schembechler and Bill Belichick went there.
“I’ve grown up my entire life with a vision to coach football at Michigan," Stallions told the organization.
From there, Stalions told contemporaries that stealing signals (not illegal in its own right) was his way to get his foot in the door with the Michigan coaching staff.
“Pre-covid, stole opponent signals during the week watching tv copies then flew to the game and stood next to [then Michigan offensive coordinator Josh] Gattis and told him what coverage/pressure he was gettin,” Stalions wrote in a text obtained by SI.
Gattis spent 2019-21 as Michigan's offensive coordinator, and won the Broyles Award as the nation's top assistant coach in 2021. He left for Miami in 2022 and was let go after one season. Gattis is now the offensive coordinator at Maryland. And, it should be noted, stealing signals off the TV copy is not illegal, but records now show that Stalions apparently directed efforts for others to attend games of Michigan opponents in person beginning in 2021.
“I’m close with the whole staff,” he wrote elsewhere, claiming particularly close relationships with Michigan linebackers coach Chris Partridge and special teams coordinator/safeties coach Jay Harbaugh.
But Stalions saw his efforts completed over this past three seasons, efforts we've learned a great deal about over the past week, as a means to an end.
SI reported Stalions wrote a Google doc "between 550 and 600 pages long" outlining his blueprint for leading the Wolverines football program, which he referred to as "the Michigan Manifesto."
“Any idea you could ever have there’s a place where it belongs in the document. It’s super organized," Stalions texted a friend.
"Basically the way I see it, there’s a future Ohio State head coach and staff out there somewhere preparing for it whether they know it or not. And we have a group of a half dozen actively planning s--- 15 or so years out. And another dozen or two on board. So by the time it’s ready to rock, we’re all on the same page and we quickly make Michigan the ultimate standard.”
Stalions also attempted to make himself useful to the Michigan staff by marketing a theory that the staff should target players in the recruiting process whose high school GPAs out-performed their test scores, indicating their work ethic would out-pace their natural abilities on the field. And he formed that theory by, allegedly, surreptitiously obtaining the high school GPAs and test scores of 500 Navy football players, which could have been a violation of the Privacy Act.
In all, the story paints the picture of a young, aspiring coach who was motivated to do whatever it took to embed himself with the Michigan staff as a means of furthering his coaching career in Ann Arbor.
Along the way, he was allegedly allowed or directed to spearhead one of the biggest on-field scandals in college football history, one that could have lasting consequences for the program he dearly loves and one that will absolutely derail his plan to be Michigan's head coach 15 years from now.