Before anyone – perhaps outside of the University of Michigan football program – had ever heard of Connor Stalions, Peter Amos had guided industry-leader CoachComm to be prepared for college football’s technology inflection point.
Six years later, that moment seemingly has arrived for college football – and the third-party company that has for decades carved space as the No. 1 provider of communication and headset equipment throughout the sport has pre-positioned itself to help teams make the transition.
Stalions, the controversial, suspended off-the-field staffer of Jim Harbaugh’s third-ranked Michigan Wolverines program, allegedly has personally and surreptitiously spied on the hand-signals of myriad programs throughout the Big Ten footprint and beyond. The plot, which has been exposed more with each passing day, if not more frequently, involved Stalions or his accomplices who filmed scheduled or potential Michigan opponents’ sidelines and then worked to parse those teams’ preferred signals.
The latest in the Michigan scandal can be found here in this latest FootballScoop report, including the documentation required by the Big Ten Conference for all sideline personnel with a team box area and also the exact form required to be on the official team headsets during gameday.
As the drama has unfolded, Michigan has found itself at the nexus of a three-tiered investigation: the NCAA already had launched into probe into Harbaugh's alleged recruiting violations that have been charged from Harbaugh's behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic; the school fired then-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss amidst a murky look into Weiss's alleged behavior that also has involved Michigan computer property; the most recent look into Stalions's alleged machinations.
Suddenly, in-helmet communication has reemerged as arguably the topic du jour throughout the sport.
Stalions’s alleged scheme has potentially impacted at least a dozen Big Ten programs. Sources confirmed to FootballScoop that it also stretched into the Southeastern Conference – particularly as it pertained to scouting both Georgia and Tennessee.
“I think a lot of people are frustrated,” Amos told FootballScoop. “To say that we have worked for several years on this project, as long as we have, quite frankly, the developmental seeds for us started back in 2017.
“We built into the system the capabilities to expand into this area, so that the customer would have the seed of technology he needed to do this thing when it came time for player-to-coach communication.”
Two years ago, as first reported by FootballScoop's Zach Barnett, an NCAA game was played with in-helmet communication. The 2021 Bayou Classic that pitted rivals Grambling and Southern against one another utilized the technology for the long-running clash between the two storied HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) contest.
Plenty of coaches argued that time already arrived.
“That's why there should be, 100 percent should be (headset-to-helmet communication),” said Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule, a former NFL head coach with the Carolina Panthers. “They could get rid of all the stupid signs on the sidelines, we could get pictures of rock stars and all that stuff [removed from sideline signals posters], we could just play football the way it was meant to be.
"You go to a high school game, there's technology on the sideline. You go to an NFL game, there's technology on the sideline. You go to the college (game), there's nothing."
Added LSU coach Brian Kelly to ESPN, "It's silly [not to have headset-to-helmet communication]. Silly meaning my genuine feeling is that we have too many smart people that have looked at this and said we should be doing it, and we haven't taken the time to actually move it forward."
Numerous sources from multiple Football Bowls Subdivision programs who already have qualified for postseason play have informed FootballScoop within the past week that college football has moved a significant step closer to a test-run for in-helmet communications.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources indicated a proposal has moved forward – not finalized, but advanced – that would allow headset-to-helmet communication in the upcoming college football bowl season. However, coaches explained, the projected format would be to have available in-helmet communication for the non-College Football Playoff postseason contests.
The most likely iteration of the trial deployment, coaches said, would allow two players on each side of the ball to have an helmet-transmitter for direct communication with a coach.
An example provided to FootballScoop projected that on offense, both the starting quarterback and his backup would be in direct communication with the offensive coordinator via the in-helmet transmitter; a defensive coaches said he would expect the devices to be worn by a team’s middle linebacker and a safety.
One important element as explained to FootballScoop: In a bowl game, for example the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, both teams would have to agree to utilize the in-helmet technology; sources’ understanding of the situation was that in the postseason, should the measure formally pass, if one team does not wish to utilize the in-helmet communication, neither team could use it for that contest.
Either way, Amos said CoachComm has positioned itself to be positioned to immediately assist the process – but that each week that has passed further shrunk the window for implementation.
“We wanted to be prepared so that when the day came for player communication at the college level, there wasn’t an additional technology and an additional frequency to manage, which is a huge component in pro football,” Amos said. “It’s a significant element managing and keeping all those signals clean [at the NFL-level] so that everything works right.
“We made it so that basically the player communications that we’ve conceived work on the exact same frequency as coaches, so that there’s no additional management of frequencies required.”
With as much as 97 percent of FBS programs using its headsets per the company, CoachComm already has utilized a third-party independent testing system on the technology, Amos said, which revealed “extremely favorable results to the NCAA’s NOCSAE (National Operating Committee for Standards on Athletic Equipment) standards.”
“As we were developing what we knew to be a good system in 2017, we said let’s build into it the ability to carry this vision forward when the time comes,” Amos said. “We didn’t immediately build the helmet receiver waited for that, knowing that it would be here one day.
“We also planned on it being more than just the quarterback. The pros have one on each side of the ball. We developed this system so that, quite frankly, if there are other issues or developments, we could do every player on the field. We prepositioned the technology to do that.”