What actually happened
On 15 August 2025 the NCAA Committee on Infractions issued its decision in the Michigan case. The committee found eleven violations. The former head coach received a ten-year show-cause order beginning in 2028. The staffer at the center of the scheme received an eight-year show-cause. The current head coach was given an additional one-game suspension. The program was fined in a formula tied to postseason revenue, which reporting has put above thirty million dollars, and avoided a postseason ban and vacated wins. The school announced it would appeal, so some of this may move.
The details that matter for everyone else are not the penalties. They are the method. The scheme was in-person scouting of future opponents, recorded on consumer phones from the stands, by people with tickets bought under other names. No equipment was planted. No network was breached. Someone watched the sideline and wrote down what the signals meant. That is available to any program with a graduate assistant and a travel budget.
What helmet communication covers
Since the 2024 season, FBS teams may use coach-to-player communication through the helmet to one player on the field, identified by a green dot. The feed cuts at fifteen seconds on the play clock or at the snap, whichever comes first. It is optional; one team may use it when the other does not. The same rules package allowed sideline tablets for in-game video.
That is a real improvement for the play call to the quarterback and the defensive signal-caller. It is not a signal plan. The other ten players on the field still get information from the sideline. Tempo offenses still signal. Special teams signal. Substitution packages are visible from the stands. Anything that happens after the fifteen-second cutoff is signaled. And FCS programs are not covered by the FBS rule at all.
The four parts of a plan
1. Decide what is worth protecting
Not every signal matters. A staff that tries to encrypt everything will not do it by the fourth quarter of week three. Sit down in the summer and decide which calls, if known in advance, would cost you a game: typically the defensive check system, the tempo package, and two or three offensive concepts. Protect those. Let the rest be read.
2. Make the signals expensive to learn
Multiple live signalers with one live and the rest dummy, rotated by series rather than by game, is the baseline. Change the live signaler on a schedule only the coordinator knows. Use wristbands for the calls that matter most, with the band changed every week. None of this is new. What is new is doing it on purpose, every week, with someone owning it.
3. Control the film of yourself
The cheapest way to learn a team's signals is its own broadcast. Review your sideline on the all-22 and the broadcast cut as if you were the opponent: which signaler is live, how long the signal takes, whether the coordinator's hand goes to the headset before every pressure. The fix is usually a towel, a huddle of bodies, or moving the signaler five yards. Assign one person to do this review every Sunday.
4. Watch the stands
The Michigan scheme depended on a person with a phone in a particular seat. Your game operations staff and campus police already walk the stands. Tell them what to look for: a person filming the opposing sideline rather than the field, for a full series, from a seat with that angle. Most of the time it is a parent. Occasionally it is not, and the credential or ticket tells you who bought it. Hand that to compliance; do not confront anyone.
The part nobody puts on the whiteboard
Signals leak from inside more often than from the stands. The former assistant now at a conference rival. The quality-control staffer who interviews elsewhere with your install on his laptop. The booster who sits in on Thursday meetings. The group chat with 60 members. A signal plan that ignores the people who already know the signals is a plan for the wrong threat. This is the half of staff tradecraft that gets the most pushback on the first day and the most thanks on the last.
What to do this week
- Name one person who owns the signal plan. If the answer is the coordinator, it is nobody.
- Write down which five calls you would most hate the opponent to have. Protect those first.
- Watch your own sideline on last week's broadcast for one series. Note what you can read.
- Brief game operations on what filming-the-sideline looks like, and who to tell.
- List who outside the current staff knows the current signals. If the list is long, change the signals.
Sources: the NCAA Committee on Infractions decision of 15 August 2025, as reported by CBS Sports and the Associated Press; helmet communication rules from the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel, April 2024. Penalty figures were under appeal at the time of writing.