'Tipped Off': Connor Stalions issues forceful response to Sonny Dykes' 2022 CFP claim

This week, On3's Brett McMurphy shared a report about the 2022 CFP matchup between Michigan and TCU, specifically as it relates to the sign-stealing saga.

According to McMurphy's report, TCU head coach Sonny Dykes said he was tipped off about Michigan's sign-stealing scheme and changed all of the play calls before the game.

“We had some intel that (the sign stealing) was going on,” Dykes told On3 from Big 12 media days. “Look, everybody does it to an extent, but we had some intel that it was kind of next level there.”

“We changed some signs, we left some the same,” Dykes said. “We found out early enough (before the game) where we could change a lot of our signals and then we had some dummy signals and some things where we checked a dummy signal to a signal that we knew they knew."

Dykes' claim suggests that TCU simply outsmarted the Wolverines ahead of that CFP matchup, leading to a 51-45 victory for the Horned Frogs.

But not everyone is sold on the story that Dykes is attempting to sell, including former Michigan football staffer Connor Stalions - the man at the center of the sign-stealing saga.

A day after the report was released, Stalions took to Twitter to set the record straight in what is perhaps his most forceful and detailed response since the saga first became public.

You can read the full response from Stalions below:

To save everybody’s time so we can move on from the same recycled story from Coach Dykes, I’ll provide some more details and we can wrap this up:

We lost because we turned the ball over & had a poor game tackling. And TCU played well. Congratulations. The same way we won the…
— Connor Stalions (@cpstalions) July 12, 2025

"To save everybody’s time so we can move on from the same recycled story from Coach Dykes, I’ll provide some more details and we can wrap this up:

We lost because we turned the ball over & had a poor game tackling. And TCU played well. Congratulations. The same way we won the Natty (when I was not with the program) because we blocked well, tackled well, and took care of the rock. Welcome to the game of football.

Since people are so intrigued by signals…The entire Air Raid communication system is the offensive coordinator signaling to the QB, then the QB signaling to the Receivers. USC, TCU, etc. It’s all the same. They’re all the same signals too. And TCU kept everything from the coordinator to QB the same, but had dummy signals & some new signals from the QB to Receivers. But that didn’t matter because I’m watching the coach and seeing what they changed in real time. Similar to Ohio State “changing their signals.” They changed their route concepts & some run concepts — not their formations & pass protection signals, which is all I cared about.

To say anyone “fooled” me is admitting that you have no idea how signal deciphering & protecting works. No team has ever “changed” signals — meaning they don’t recycle the same signal to have a different meaning because that would confuse the 18-year olds on the field more than it would confuse me. They simply create new signals. And if I see a new signal, I’m not guessing what it means. There were games where I relayed information 0% of the time, all the way through 99% of the time. No one is forcing you to signal. Rutgers & Minnesota huddled (didn’t signal). Nebraska didn’t signal until the 2nd quarter when they were down 14-0. Even we, Michigan, didn’t signal on offense.

If you don’t want teams to steal your signals, then don’t signal. Any team that signals on offense is trying to force the defense to signal so they can steal it. There’s really no other advantage unless you’re trying to prevent a sub, or it’s 2-minute. If that weren’t true, you’d see the entire NFL go up tempo to find advantages. But you don’t. And it’s still going on today in college with coach comms. Notice how teams still signal — it’s because they’re going up tempo.

The continuous attempt to correlate signals to any wins & losses at Michigan is funny. There were 7 games in my time at Michigan where I knew almost every signal the whole game: 2021 MSU, 2022 MSU, 2022 PSU, 2022 OSU, 2022 TCU, 2021 Georgia, and 2021 Wisconsin. We lost 3 of those games because we didn’t tackle well, and Georgia was historically good. We won the four other games because we dominated the line of scrimmage & tackled well. Blocking, ball security, tackling, run fits & coverage tools. That’s football. This is not rocket science."

There's certainly a lot to unpack in Stalions' lengthy statement, but it's clear that he's not buying the story from Dykes. And he's right - the end result of that game was more about Michigan's costly mistakes than anything Dykes did with his play calling signals.

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