Netflix’s Untold: Sign Stealer director Micah Brown didn’t understand why everyone was so fascinated with Connor Stalions, the man who came under fire for a sign-stealing scandal involving the University of Michigan football team.
“When this story came out, I honestly didn’t think it was a very good story. I was like, ‘What is the big deal? He’s doing what everybody else is doing.’ That was my first impression,” Brown tells MovieMaker.
“But then as I got to know the story more, and started to see the Ohio State angle, and there might be these different conspiracies about it, I started going, ‘Oh, okay, I get why this became such a big deal.”
In a new episode of Netflix’s popular sports docuseries Untold called Sign Stealer, Stalions sits down for the first time on camera to explain his side of the story. He became a viral internet figure in 2023 after his name and picture made headlines due to an NCAA investigation into potential illegal advanced scouting going on at Michigan.
Sign-stealing, which is perfectly legal and common practice in the world of college football, is the process in which football teams attempt to decipher other team’s hand-signals which indicate which plays they’re about to run. But advanced scouting, which is in violation of the NCAA’s rules, is when employees of a college football team visit the games of opposing teams they’re going to play later in the season in-person in order to analyze their strategies and gain an unfair competitive advantage.
Stalions’ NCAA investigation into the potentially illegal use of advanced scouting is still ongoing, including allegations that he recorded live game footage with a hidden camera in his sunglasses at opponent Central Michigan University’s game, as well as paying others to visit games and gather intel for him. Stalions denies these accusations.
Below, Brown tells us about using his iPhone to film Connor Stalions’ reaction to Michigan winning the National Championship for the first time since 1997 and explains in the simplest language why people are mad at the accused signed-stealer.
Q&A About Connor Stalions With Untold: Sign Stealer Director Micah Brown
MovieMaker: Can you explain in layman’s terms why people are mad at Connor Stalions?
Micah Brown: So the argument is, it’s not illegal to steal signs. It is illegal, by the NCAA definition, to advance scout an opponent. That’s why the Central Michigan thing was such a big deal, is because they’re saying he’s on the sidelines advanced scouting, potentially Michigan State, a future opponent that they’re going to play the same season. So when he was on the sideline there, they’re like, ‘Oh, he’s advanced scouting, because they’re going to play Michigan State.’
So that was what the big deal was. Fans in the crowd, they would say that that was advanced scouting for future opponents, and that they’re filming their signals in plain sight. Connor’s argument is that, ‘I already had the signals. I could get them from TV copy. That would just be extra, but it’s not like the primary thing that was helping me get their signals. They may go to the games and send it to me, but that’s not the primary way that I’m stealing their signals.’ That’s what his argument would be. And then his other argument is, that wasn’t me on Central Michigan’s sideline, that’s a guy that looks like me, but until you can prove it is me, I’m gonna say it’s not me.
MovieMaker: How did the journey to making this begin for you?
Micah Brown: Maverick Carter and LeBron James have a company called Uninterrupted, and they found the story and got access to Connor and called me and said, ‘Hey, we’d love for you to come on and go out and meet Connor and see if it’s a fit.’ I went out there. My first time meeting Connor was at the National Championship, and so we went to the National Championship, and I filmed him going on my phone, and we got all that National Championship stuff from my iPhone. That was it.
Then when we got done, I just kind of sat with him for a while and unpacked a lot of his POV and kind of the twists and turns of the story, read some stuff, and thought, yeah, I think that this could make a good film. There’s enough conspiracy stuff in it to keep it interesting.
MovieMaker: How did you put this episode together so quickly considering these events only happened last year?
Micah Brown: They were like, ‘Hey, this has to come out before a football season.’ It was a tall order to be able to bring it together. Luckily, I have a really, really strong team. Jamie Elias is the executive producer, and we’ve worked together on the last four projects. We just kind of sat down and we said, ‘Okay, if we were going to do this, what would we need to turn this around?’ The first obstacle is research. So we developed a plan to go, how do you learn while you’re shooting? And so we sat Connor down for a six hour interview.
MovieMaker: Why do you think Connor Stallions is so fascinating to people? What made him such a big news story?
Micah Brown: I think you have a guy who’s ex military in a football world, in a world that screams espionage, when you think about the word ‘stealing’ being in sign stealing. So then you automatically jump towards, oh, my God, this is a spy story. He’s got a spy name. Connor Stallions is very spy like. And then you the biggest football brand in college football in Michigan, on a year where they look like they have a schedule that could align for them winning the National Championship.
So I think it was just the perfect storm of all those things that made him really blow up. Once you get a meme made of you and the internet gets a hold of it, it just makes the story get bigger and bigger.
MovieMaker: I know you were a college athlete yourself, and that you also worked on various coaching staffs. What unique perspective did that give you into Connor’s story?
Micah Brown: I ran track in college at Kansas, and then I also played four years of football at Kansas. During that time, we won the Orange Bowl my junior year. It was like the biggest time in Kansas football history. I went to film school, and I was wanted to be a documentary, or I wanted to be a filmmaker, which I am. So I kind of just put those two worlds together, filmmaking and documentary. I wanted to make my documentaries feel like movies. So I came back, I worked for a coaching staff for Turner Gill at Kansas for two years doing a documentary following him.
So not only did I have the perspective of a student athlete going through it myself, but then I also saw the inner workings of how a coaching staff works and how everybody works. And then I kept getting hired by schools like Michigan State, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, all over the country. So I would see how different people worked, and how different coaching staffs put their game plans together and the efficiencies there.
When it came time to doing this documentary, it was really important, because there was a lot of football jargon that if you didn’t understand football, you wouldn’t necessarily know what is important and what is not. How do you appeal to somebody to make something so complicated easy for somebody that’s not a sports fan to understand? But nuanced enough that a coach could watch it and be like, ‘Oh, he’s actually saying something.’
MovieMaker: Were you familiar with the process of sign-stealing before you made this?
Micah Brown: Here’s the the funny thing to me. Was I aware that it was happening? Yes, because logic would tell me that we have wristbands that you have all your plays on. You change them out. Why would you change them out? You’re changing them out because the opponent’s picking up on something. Why do you have a tent over the guys that are doing your hand signals? Why do you choose who’s doing your hand signals? Because somebody is watching. So there was always consciousness of, this is a part of the game. People are doing this.
Did I know anybody that was doing it for our staff? No, did I really put that together that it was actually influencing the game? No, because you could tell me that it’s a pass. You’ve still got to stop me. It’s still a physical matchup. So that was kind of our approach when I was a player.
MovieMaker: What was the most challenging part of making this film and what was the most rewarding part?
Micah Brown: The most challenging part, definitely, is the timeline. You’re you’re trying to do a very, very complicated story, make it digestible for the everyday fan, on a very, very tight deadline where you can’t really afford to miss, you know? So you get into a stage where, if something is confusing, cut it. There are a lot of twists and turns you could go. There are a million different theories out there. Trying to make something that would be satisfying answers for people, but not so in the weeds of feeling like you need to tell every single interesting point — that was the most challenging.
The most rewarding part was, honestly, I loved working with Spring Hill and Uninterrupted. That was a really great experience. I felt like on something that should have been really stressful, it really wasn’t, because we had good people who were kind and understood, you know, the complications of the story, and so that made it really fun. And in working with Connor, I thought that was a really positive experience, working with somebody who wants to work with you and is willing to help you make it good.
It makes for a great experience. And so I wish him all the best. I know there’s things that he’s going to like about the film. There’s things that are going to be hard to hear. But I feel like, overall, we were fair.
Untold: Sign Stealer is now streaming on Netflix.
Main Image: Connor Stalions pictured in Untold: Sign Stealer courtesy of Netflix