If you talk to Ohio State fans, they will probably tell you the only reason Michigan football has beaten the Buckeyes four straight times and won the national championship in 2023 is because of the "greatest scandal in sports history," as they like to put it.
That's paraphrasing but you get the gist. Ohio State fans think it's impossible that Michigan beat Ohio State four times in a row and won the national championship "fair and square," according to NCAA President Charlie Baker.
Connor Stalions tries to explain the facts to people
Of course, anyone with a brain knows that Michigan football won those games because its teams were loaded with NFL talent and the Wolverines had one of the best head coaches in college football history. Michigan has turned into a pro football factory.
Not only draft picks, but also NFL head coaches. Jim Harbaugh. Mike Macdonald and soon, Jesse Minter. Michigan also had an ELITE quarterback in J.J. McCarthy.
They also had the best development program in college football and owned people in the trenches on both sides of the ball. That's where the game is won, which is what Connor Stalions tried to explain to people once again on Saturday, when the TCU game -- a 2022 College Football Playoff loss -- was brought up again.
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:
— Connor Stalions (@cpstalions) July 12, 2025
We lost because we turned the ball over & had a poor game tackling. And TCU played well. Congratulations. The same way we won the…
The narrative is that Michigan lost to TCU because the Horned Frogs were tipped off about signals. Stalions responded to a story posted by CBS Sports, writing, "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."
I have argued numerous times that the TCU doesn't mean anything. If "changing" signals was the only reason for the result of the game, Ohio State could have beaten Michigan when it changed its signs before "The Game" in 2022.
Stalions called the effort to connect Michigan football success to alleged sign stealing "funny." Here's the full quote:
"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."