RETROSPECTIVE: Spurious Signals: Technology, Espionage and Football

As we officially end week one of the college football season, I thought I'd take a look back at an article I wrote about the new rules allowing in-helmet radio communication in games. After hundreds of games played over the past weekend, the system seems to be working quite well. In my observation, there was little noticeable difference visible to the casual fan, and -had TV the announcers not mentioned the change- I would hardly have noticed myself. 

Will Howard with ear-hole blocker in helmet

It seems the only minor issue may be that hearing the speaker in the helmet may be difficult for the Quarterback during offensive possessions, as they would often pause for seconds at a time cupping their hands over the helmets' ear-holes to better hear the audio. But crowd noise has always played a factor, and a Quarterback being unable to interpret the call from the sideline amidst the noise has been a part of the game forever. It's actually one of the more exciting characteristics of the sport; fans can actively impact the game by getting loud and interfering with one team's communication.

Interestingly, The Ohio State University, who plays in the enormous Ohio Stadium, seating 100,000-plus noisy fans, may have already planned for this. Their Quarterback, Will Howard, had a helmet which appeared to have an apparatus on the ear-hole to block the noise. I did not notice any other teams using such a device, and I'll be curious to see if more begin to appear in week two. Or, if ear-hole cover designs for The Riddel SpeedFlex or Schutt F7 helmets start popping up on 3D printing websites? Maybe I should buy a football helmet to craft one of my own for The Fabrication Lab. 

A few final things I noticed were that the hand signals and signs were still very much a factor, though likely not as noticeable to the spectator. NCAA rules currently cut-off in-helmet communication in the final 15 sections of the play clock. Additionally, with only one player selected to wear the radio helmet, other players would no-doubt still benefit from visual cues. So, as I predicted, any advantage or disadvantage brought fourth by the new rules, are very much determined by the humans playing and coaching the games (for now), and not the technology itself. The more talented (and better-prepared) teams take advantage of the new rules, while the rest fall short. So, in many ways, very little has changed. 

If you're interested, please give my old article on in-helmet communication in college football below a read, as well as Katie Lindendoll's intriguing article on ESPN.com, which provides a lot of critical and well-researched info on the subject...

 

Spurious Signals: Technology, Espionage and Football

For anyone who's never paid close attention to a college football sideline, it may look like a troupe of prop comics dancing all at once. The signs, props and posters are all part of a complex coding system intended to relay plays and strategies to the players on the field without tipping off the opponents. But beginning in Autumn of 2024, things will look much different. Prompted by a high-profile scandal involving sign-stealing, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) will adopt in-helmet radio communications between coaches and players.

With a presumably private line of communication between player and coach, there will no longer need to be a system of audible and visual queues to coordinate strategies on the field. Or will there? Will radio communication end sign-stealing, and even the playing field? Or, will it complicate things even more? 

In-helmet coach to player radio transmissions are common place in professional football already, and so far the results appear to be good. The National Football League (NFL) allows one player on offense (typically the quarterback) and one player on defense to hear play calls and advice from the sideline via a small radio in their helmet. Now, college football, often bound by history and sense of old-school tradition, has finally followed suit. 

As both an amateur radio operator and avid football fan, I was immediately curious about how these radio communications would be protected. How sophisticated are these radios? Is a sports team or league well-enough prepared to offer fully encrypted end-to-end communication without the possibility of transmissions being intercepted or blocked by bad actors? That may sound paranoid, but when you consider that the NFL is a close-to 20 billion dollar per-year industry, and that collegiate sports generate hundreds of millions for universities, conferences, coaches and now the players themselves, the financial pressure to cheat must be at an all-time high. Additionally, with recent legalization of online sports gambling, third parties now have another way to potentially cash-in on illicit activities involving sports. Could radio waves be a way to hack the system?

I, as an inexperienced amateur radio operator, can surreptitiously listen in on a lot of seemingly private radio conversations. With a scanner, I can pick up police, public works, commercial and aviation communications very easily. The Uniden BC125AT scanner, which retails at about $105 (USD) not only scans through all available radio frequencies stopping on any "hits" or active/open conversations, it also scans for and prioritizes privacy tone, or DCS/CTCCS, protected calls as well as "Close Call" hits that originate within a certain distance. With the Uniden, I can hear air traffic control, police, emergency services, commercial, GMRS, MURS and family walkie-talkie communications within reception distance. This would include business, event and organization, security, parking and other radio-to-radio communications. When programmed correctly, I don't even need to know there's a conversation happening, the scanner simply searches all frequencies and stops when it gets a hit.

If I take my Uniden to the airport, I can hear the gate attendant talk with the baggage crew on the runway, the pilots or airport security -assuming they are using a commercially radio or walkie-talkie. If I go to a NASCAR or Formula 1 car race, I can hear the drivers talk to their mechanics during the race. With a strong enough antenna (but still small enough to fold and carry in a small bag), I can even hear the astronauts on the International Space Station. So, I thought, what type of radio systems are these football teams going to be using to relay schemes and strategies with the potential to win or lose a game? If, I, an inexperienced amateur, can eavesdrop on police transmissions and air traffic, what protections are in place to stop an advanced user with better equipment from accessing a team's private channel? 

Thankfully, if the NCAA adopts the same security protocols as the NFL next season, players and fans can be relatively confident that no such spy-craft will be happening. A 2012 article by Katie Lindendoll on ESPN.com explains it better than I can. According to Lindendoll's article, and Dan Viglione, former employee of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the NFL's system is quite sophisticated. It involves encryption (which is illegal for amateur use), and both teams' communications are monitored by the league office. Unlike a standard walkie-walkie or GMRS radio, where transmission occurs directly from one user's radio to others, the NFL helmet radios transmit audibly, only to a central hub somewhere in the stadium and then connect the audio to a press box or the sideline. The transmission is digitally encrypted, so even if a person managed to find which frequencies were carrying the message -which is illegal, if done intentionally- all they would hear is fuzz, if anything at all.

The same happens when a coach in the press box or on the sideline talks back to the player wearing the helmet. During this process, the league monitors for any abnormalities such as jamming or spurious interference, which while possible, would likely block both teams radios, as well as other phones and devices in the area. If such a thing were to happen, officials could stop the game, and locate the culprit. 

Essentially, the helmet communications are a slightly more sophisticated version of your cellular or WiFi network. Your phone calls and texts don't go directly to the recipient, they go to an antenna somewhere nearby, forwarded to the intended recipient, and get decoded on the listener's end. And, it is very illegal to look for or attempt to decipher messages on the cellular bands. In this way, your cell provider acts like a hardwired switching board protecting your call each step of the way. (It's why you can be sure I'm not listening in on your private cellphone calls). Your WiFi network works like a mini cell service in your own home with the router acting as the switchboard. If you have your network set-up properly using WPA-type encryption and a strong password (that you don't give away readily!), the data in your home should be just as safe. 

The key factor here is less about the technology and more about the common-sense physical steps we as people take to protect our privacy. A well-secured network is only as good as the password it uses, and how well we protect that password. If our WiFi access info is written on a Post-it note, and someone else sees it, it's not the technology that failed, but the person who put the code out there for any passersby to see. Can we be sure that the staff members working for both the teams and the league are taking the appropriate steps to secure access to helmet radio communications? Who outside of the teams and officials could have the access info, or simply be present while a coach messages a player?  

From instant replay in football to the shot clock in basketball, just about every sport has adopted some sort of technology on the field of play. Whether it's for officiating or strategizing, teams and officials have slowly but surely adopted technologies invented for commerce, science and governing for the purpose of competition. While sports tend to lag behind broader society in adopting technology, the possibility to gain an unfair or illegal advantage, or to cheat, has always been present. It's no surprise, then, that as technology in sport grows so to do the vectors from which bad actors can game the system, including electronic communications.

College football seems to be the latest battlefield in the fight to keep playing field equal for all teams. A high-profile cheating scandal involving this past year's national champion, and nationally popular football powerhouse, The University of Michigan Wolverines, erupted in the mid-2023 season. A paid member of the Michigan coaching staff was caught at multiple opponents' games filming the teams' sidelines, in an apparent attempt to record and break future opponents' vocal and visual signal codes. After the revelation, many of Michigan's opponents expressed that they had long held suspicions that something was afoot, that somehow Michigan knew what plays their competitors intended to run in advance. If this all sounds a bit too outlandish, like something out of a Cold War spy novel, you clearly have a lot to learn about college football in the United States. It is that crazy. 

The Michigan scandal is still being investigated by both the Big Ten conference and the NCAA, and the result remains to be seen. Furthermore, sign-stealing and code breaking have been common place in both professional and amateur football since the invention of the sport itself. It's actually not against the rules to try and de-code a signal system during the game itself. What Michigan is accused of is traveling to future opponents' facilities and filming games where they are not involved, which is illegal. Still the NCAA regulations themselves allow for a considerable "grey area," where the line between breaking and bending the rules is often thin. 

Will radio communication lead to a more well-defined rule book, and put an end to this sort of rule-bending, or will it further complicate ethics surrounding the sport. Worse, could it lead to methods of cheating so clandestine and advanced that they go unnoticed by both fans and officials? Only time will tell, but until the results are clear, lets hope the only interceptions happening in football are those involving throwing and catching the pigskin. 

Lindendoll, Katie, “Are NFL teams hacking helmet headsets,” ESPN.com, ESPN, 2012.