The depths of the Michigan football sign stealing scandal are still coming to light, with a report on Tuesday from ESPN alleging that suspended staffer Connor Stalions purchased tickets to games outside the Big Ten in additional to in-conference, and these games all featured potential CFB playoff teams.
Did this Tennessee fan tell people about the Michigan sign stealing scandal before anyone else?
This fan had details back in December of 2022!
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
As people comb through the internet records of Stalions and others to find links to the sign-stealing, old posts from an anonymous Tennessee fan from the Winter of 2022 are surfacing — and they’re absolutely fascinating in context.
A user named “ArniePalmieAlert” posted on December 1 of 2022 that one of his brother’s friends was hired as a scout by Michigan, and as part of his job he was tasked with attending a Tennessee game and stealing the team’s signs.
The poster is not only is the first person to discuss sign and play stealing, but also the only person so far to directly implicate Jim Harbaugh, saying that according to his acquaintance nobody is supposed to ever discuss the plan directly with the head coach.
Then on June 17 of this year, ArniePalmieAlert came back, this time to offer more info on the scheme. He explained that the mutual friend was paid to fly around to games, sit behind the home team bench — taking video and making notes of their signs and plays. He added that it appeared Michigan was “pulling out all the stops” on their sign stealing sceme.
Keep in mind that this second post from June was still FOUR MONTHS BEFORE the Yahoo! Sports story that revealed that Michigan was being investigated.
So either this message board poster was able to accurately predict the largest cheating scandal in college football of the last decade, or he really did have inside information about what was happening behind closed doors.
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