Something is ‘off’ between the Big 12 & its football teams; a ‘sign stealing’ 2.0?

A problem that has lurked under college football since before the start of the season surfaced when Texas A&M played Arkansas at AT&T Stadium on Sept. 28 when the new coach-to-quarterback communication device was exposed to a potential hack.

According to Big 12 and Big 12 school officials, the conference was alerted of this potential problem and notified the equipment managers and director of football operations of its member universities. Not everyone received, or read, the memo. Literally.

In a recent meeting with the athletic directors of Big 12 schools, many of them claimed they had no knowledge of this development.

Texas Tech officials were concerned enough about this potential easy access of sensitive information to ask the league to explore if it found anything that suggested teams were using this “data breach” of sorts to gain an advantage. Think of it as a potential marriage between the Houston Astros and the Michigan Wolverines.

The access to this sort of live information also has value to gamblers, where wagers in real time on specific plays is possible in the growing world of micro betting.

On Wednesday, according to a league source, the Big 12 planned to issue out what amounts to an “integrity report” to Tech, and the rest of the league, that it found nothing to suggest any of its programs either accessed, or used, this potential information for competitive advantage. The plan was to issue the report on Wednesday afternoon.

By Wednesday at 7 p.m., Texas Tech officials had not received it. They were notified it was coming. Something about all of this does not add up. Since this is college football, it’s doubtful that this report will douse a conspiracy theorist with an iPhone.

The concern among multiple Big 12 schools is whether teams “cheated.”

The communication devices to the quarterback’s helmet were approved by the NCAA in the offseason, in part to help prevent the type of sign stealing that the University of Michigan under former coach Jim Harbaugh was punished for last season.

Harbaugh, who is now the head coach of the LA. Chargers, has denied all allegations of sign stealing.

The communications company that handles the in house devices at AT&T Stadium became aware that the technology tools used by Arkansas and Texas A&M were vulnerable to outsiders listening in. The company that manufactures the helmet communication pieces, GSC out of Wahoo, Neb., told teams that a software update was needed, and coming, to rectify the problem.

The Big 12 told its member schools to change the frequency consistently throughout its games until the software update was complete. The solution was duct tape over a crack in a car window.

What the league discovered is that while the devices that are used in college football are the same as the ones used by NFL teams, the level of encryption at the pro level is greater.

The “problem” that Tech, and other schools in the power four of college football, had in this scenario was that it was not sure if opponents were “listening in” to gain an advantage. The Big 12 “looked into it,” while telling GSC to hurry up. The software updates to these communication devices are expected to be in place for the games this weekend.

To take the communication between a coach and a quarterback and deliver it on the field to impact a play would need to be translated, and completed, in a few seconds. Believing this can happen is a big ask.

But, to have access to private conversations between a coach and a player is just more information where every word, sentence and comma, in that paranoid world has value, even if it is ultimately useless.

This problem is something that in July of this year Clemson University announced almost as an inevitability. Clemson researchers discovered that there is a “new way of stealing information from multiple computers at the same time, underscoring the need for industry to devise safeguards,” the school said in a statement.

This development, and problem, is just another in a series of challenges that college football is trying to solve as it becomes increasingly professionalized, and a bigger part of gambling.