In college football, stealing signs is part of the game

The six players, graduate assistants and coaches grouped on the N.C. State sideline during a recent game against Florida State looked as if they were performing some sort of bizarre mime act. All at once they were participating in a weird set of calisthenics, looking every bit like a mix of third base coaches and aircraft marshals.

Welcome to a strange world of college football play-signaling that has morphed into a game of low-level espionage and spy-mania, calling into question the ethics of coaching staffs that have become adept at code-breaking and sign-stealing.

David Cutcliffe, Duke’s head coach, stands firmly on the side of integrity in college football, and that includes the gray area of stealing signs.

“In honesty, I think there are big integrity issues. What message are you sending to your players if that’s what you’re trying to do to win the game?” Cutcliffe said. “A lot of that’s done, I’m sure, with young coaches. . . . What are you telling them if they get into the business?”

After talking to several coaches within the ACC, Cutcliffe appears to be in the minority.

“I think it’s part of the game,” said UNC’s Larry Fedora. “If you’re going to signal, then you’re taking the chance of someone stealing those signals. So you have to have a sophisticated enough system that that doesn’t happen. I think that’s your responsibility.”

Maurice Scherrens is the president of Newberry College in South Carolina. Previously, over a 12-year period, he taught a sports ethics class at George Mason University.

“Unfortunately, to the coach who believes the objective is ‘winning at all costs,’ they do not see these moments as ethical moments. They have rationalized them as part of the game,” Scherrens wrote in an email. “And for them, the ‘best possible outcome’ is a victory – no matter how it is achieved.

“Whether it is faking an injury to stop the clock or pointing the wrong direction when the basketball rolls out of bounds, for those who believe these are not ethical moments their actions will continue to be based upon achieving the victory.”

Sending in plays

As with any sticky situation in sports, one has to know how we got to the point where one team stations someone in the press box with binoculars specifically to spy on the other team’s signals or matches videotape of plays from a previous game with the signals that team sends from the sideline to the quarterback.

Sending plays onto the field via signals was not an issue in football through the 1960s because most teams allowed the quarterback to make all play calls. Then, sometime in the 1970s, all coaches began calling the plays and primarily used a substitute player to relay the play call to the quarterback, who would call it out to his teammates in a huddle.

There is at least one old-school coach remaining in the college game. Paul Johnson has been at this for 20 years, first at Georgia Southern, then Navy and now Georgia Tech. He always has called his own plays from the sideline, then sent a running back on a relay mission to the quarterback. He likely gets a kick out of today’s shenanigans on the opposite sideline.

“I think a lot of it is window-dressing. . . . It’s just people having fun with some of it,” Johnson said. “We don’t try to get too caught up in all that.”

A big part of that is because Johnson’s teams continue to huddle before nearly every play. In a trend that began in the 1990s, many college teams now run a fast-paced, no-huddle offense. Without a huddle, teams must relay plays to the field via a series of signals.

As soon as it became apparent that teams were stealing those signals, the sideline theatrics became more elaborate. The way N.C. State sends signals is similar to most teams. Backup quarterbacks Josh Taylor, Dylan Parham and Woody Cornwell wear different colored vests and all three send signals simultaneously. To their side is a graduate assistant coach who also sends signals by waving his hands. The graduate assistant sometimes holds poster boards with various pictures of anything from current rock stars to NFL players. Behind them, two others hold a banner that provides a shield to press box lurkers as well as advertisement for Adidas, believe it or not.

Stealing signs legal

Most of the signaling is decoys. The quarterback is trained to watch only one of the signalers. In case you were wondering, all of this activity is practiced daily, lest a signal be missed in a game. Jimbo Fisher said his team has used the signals system in every practice of his seven seasons as head coach at Florida State.

Much like in baseball, where it is common practice for teams to attempt the theft of signs flashed by the third base coach to the batter and runner, college football teams can legally – by NCAA rules – steal the signals of opponents. The only rule that prohibits such thievery states that no video or audio recordings of sign-stealing is permitted.

A season ago, Washington State coach Mike Leach went public with accusations that Arizona State was illegally stealing signals and demanded a Pac-12 Conference investigation, which found no wrongdoing.

Most coaches believe it goes on – legally and illegally – but keep quiet on the matter, perhaps fearful their tactics might be found out. N.C. State’s Dave Doeren said sign-stealing is primarily done by teams with a greater number of support staff and by a team’s staff that has the extra time to conduct such activities.

“There’s no rule saying you can’t do it,” Doeren said of sign-stealing. “We don’t practice it. I know people do it. We see people on the other side, taking notes and looking at different bodies and trying to figure out who your signalers are and all those kind of things. They can spend their time doing that, I’d rather coach our players.”

Other coaches do not see it that way.

“You’re in a competition,” said Clemson’s Dabo Swinney. “You’re competing and you want to get every edge that you can. If you have an opponent who’s basically screaming out, ‘Hey, we’re running the ball,’ well, that’s an advantage. It’s just part of the game, and deception is part of the game as well.”

One way to eliminate the problem would be to go the way of the NFL, which uses wireless communication between a coach and his quarterback. That is an expensive venture, and basically attempts to legislate morality, according to Cutcliffe.

“Pride yourself on being a coach on the sideline or in the box who can evaluate what’s happening without the aid of seeing a replay (or stealing a sign),” said Duke’s Cutcliffe. “That’s coaching. Through years of doing this, that’s what good coaches do.”

Others would argue that part of good coaching means deciphering, decoding and stealing signs from the other sideline.

This story was originally published November 22, 2016 at 12:33 PM with the headline "In college football, stealing signs is part of the game."