Secret filming, spy claims in sports aren’t new but are hard to prove

At the height of the Michigan football sign-stealing scandal last month, with coaches in the Big Ten pushing for Jim Harbaugh to be punished, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey was asked how he might handle the same situation in his league.

‘I don’t wish that on anybody,’ Sankey told reporters.

But, in fact, there was a situation in the SEC fairly recently when accusations of spying were well known within the league. After speculation had run through the coaching fraternity that one of the league’s men’s basketball programs was using a secret camera in its arena to film opponents’ practices, the topic was brought into the open at a men’s basketball coaches meeting following the 2017-18 season, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. Those people spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the meeting.

An SEC spokesperson confirmed to USA TODAY Sports that the conversation took place in 2018 after the SEC office was ‘made aware of general concerns about video cameras in basketball arenas related to visiting team practices and informally received information involving an individual institution. Uncorroborated information is typically shared with an involved institution, which occurred during the off-season period.’

The SEC did not name the institution, but according to six people affiliated with different SEC programs, Auburn was the team at the center of the spying allegations. With head coach Bruce Pearl in the room, however, nobody wanted to stand up and point the finger directly. During a tense moment, according to those people with knowledge of the meeting, then-South Carolina coach Frank Martin implored his colleagues to stop with anonymous sniping and say what they wanted to say.

“The SEC wanted someone to turn them in so they could put a name behind the accusation,” said one person who was in the room at the time. “Nobody would do it.” 

Plus, proof was scant. There was no Connor Stalions-type smoking gun of wrongdoing, and the SEC typically prefers to keep such family squabbles in-house. After three seasons at the bottom of the SEC standings, Auburn had just tied for the league title and reached the NCAA tournament’s round of 32. The Tigers’ success only heightened the sense of suspicion.

‘Word was out not to do anything in their building,’ said one former SEC assistant.

USA TODAY Sports submitted a list of questions to Auburn about the allegations. USA TODAY Sports allowed four full business days, but Auburn did not respond.

The SEC’s statement to USA TODAY Sports noted that member schools agreed, after the spying allegations surfaced, to a change in the men’s basketball manual for the 2019 season. The new procedure required a member of the home team’s game-management staff to notify a member of the visiting team’s traveling party about the location of all video cameras, which had to be powered off with a cover applied to the lens if one was available.

The episode illustrated how espionage, and the paranoia that comes with it, is not just contained to one sport. Though most of the famous spying scandals have been attached to football — the New England Patriots became embroiled in Spygate when a member of their staff was caught filming the New York Jets’ sideline from an improper location — there’s actually a long tradition of it in college basketball.

That’s mostly because it’s so easy to do.

Spying suspicions abound during road-game practices

Whenever a team goes on the road, it is typically granted a 90-minute practice in the arena where the game will be played. In the old days, some coaches would send a staffer to sweep the upper deck and make sure nobody suspicious was hiding in a dark corner or peeking through curtains.

But now, digital eyes are everywhere. From security cameras to permanent TV cameras to cameras used for tracking technology, a coach can easily access a stream or video of whatever is happening in his arena, with one or two clicks on his laptop. That makes for rampant opportunity to cheat. One current Division I men’s coach told USA TODAY Sports he doesn’t even worry about it anymore because he assumes his team is being watched every moment of a walkthrough on the road.

“I would say that every coach who goes into an opposing gym to practice is going to be paranoid that someone has a camera on somewhere or that somebody’s spying,” said longtime coach and ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla. “I would say it probably doesn’t go on all that much, but most coaches aren’t going to (show) much inside the other guy’s gym. They’ll do their walkthrough in a ballroom at the hotel and go to the arena just to get shots up and get used to the environment.”

Chris Caputo, the head coach at George Washington and a longtime assistant under Jim Larranaga at Miami and George Mason, said there have been a few occasions during his career when he felt like perhaps an opponent knew something it shouldn’t have known based on how it defended a particular play. He theorized that the growth of support staffs in major programs, combined with the prevalence of discreet cameras, would naturally increase the odds of someone crossing the line. 

“The bigger these staffs get in basketball in particular, you have young guys who are manning the technology and they’re eager, they’re inexperienced, they’re competitive,” Caputo said. “They’re willing to do whatever to feel like they’re doing a good job in the scouting. I’m not saying it’s happening, but there is an environment where it could happen.”

But it’s not just a recent phenomenon. 

Would spying truly give basketball teams an advantage?

In 2003, shortly after it was revealed that Baylor coach Dave Bliss had portrayed murdered player Patrick Dennehy as a drug dealer in an attempt to cover up NCAA violations that included Bliss paying for part of Dennehy’s tuition, an internal inquiry found potential evidence of Baylor taping opponents at shootaround. 

According to a report in the Dallas Morning News at the time, a former administrative assistant under Bliss said that a live feed of Kansas State’s practice inside the Ferrell Center had appeared on a television in the athletics department. It’s unclear what became of that allegation, which never made it into the NCAA’s official inquiry into Baylor. Bliss received a 10-year show-cause penalty from the NCAA and was essentially banned from major college basketball. 

“If that happened – and that’s the key word, ‘if,’ – I’d be disappointed,” former Kansas State coach Jim Wooldridge told the newspaper at the time. “Did they gain an advantage? I don’t know.”

Baylor won the game.

Tom Penders, who was a head coach at six Division I programs over 33 years, said he knew “for a fact” that he had encountered situations during his career where his practices were being filmed. Asked how he knew, Penders said assistant coaches of those opponents eventually admitted it to him after they’d left for other jobs. But rather than complain or turn someone in for violating the rules, Penders took a different tack.

“After that, we’d start going in for our walkthrough the night before and put in phony plays, out-of-bounds plays we’d never use just to screw with them, because we knew who was filming us,” Penders said. “We’d get off to a 12-2 start and they’d burn timeouts because we threw curveballs at them.” 

It’s unclear how much of an advantage coaches could gain from watching an opponent’s walkthrough. In football, having an opponent’s signals could be a real difference-maker in helping a defense get aligned properly or knowing which players are important to cover. But basketball is more about concepts, which generally don’t change much from game-to-game, or sometimes even year-to-year. There aren’t many secrets. 

On the other hand, there are specific situations — for instance, knowing a new out-of-bounds play — that could theoretically make enough of a difference to flip the outcome of a big game and be the difference between making the NCAA tournament or not.

“You might be able to save yourself four points and win the game by one,” said Jimmy Dykes, the ESPN and SEC Network analyst who was the women’s head coach at Arkansas from 2014-17. “That’s the payoff. The pressure to win is intense, man. The lines of integrity can get blurred pretty quickly when you’re seriously in the battle, the heat of the season, and every possession is precious.”

Though Dykes said he wasn’t aware of any specific evidence tied to spying allegations, rumors “circulate in the college basketball family” constantly, and he considers it unethical behavior. 

“Half the teams I cover are very cautious, and the other half don’t give a rip because they’re not running anything they don’t already have on film,” Dykes said. “But I’ve had teams tell me, ‘We put in a brand new out-of-bounds play we ran through, and the first time we call it, they jump a pass and get a steal.’ Those are real concerns.”

Spying claims are hard to prove

Ultimately, though, those types of accusations are difficult to prove and even harder to police. They also might just be wrong. One Division I assistant told USA TODAY Sports about getting a frantic phone call from an administrator because one of the cameras in the arena had a red light on, and one of their opponents threw a fit when they noticed it.

‘It was just an accident,’ the assistant said. ‘That’s the last thing (the head coach) would have allowed.’

But when everyone has their guard up, anything is cause for suspicion. Despite the 2018 meeting that should have served as a warning to stop spying (if that’s what was going on), one SEC coach told USA TODAY Sports he still won’t do anything on the road that would reveal information about plays or lineups and just uses the time to shoot. Any actual preparation would occur in a hotel ballroom that would be completely private — presumably, anyway.

As for the Auburn situation, the SEC never had any basis to sanction the school or even launch a formal investigation. Nothing was proven.

But one coaching staff did try to test the theory.

According to someone with direct involvement in the plan, who spoke with USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity, their team began a game at Auburn with a signal to run a specific play that they had worked on inside the arena the evening before. As the coaches expected, Auburn’s bench recognized the signal and called it out for their players to defend.

‘There’s no way they could have known,’ said the coach, who no longer works in the SEC.

The reason he came to that conclusion was simple, he said: Before the shootaround at Auburn, they had never run the play or used that signal before.

Follow Dan Wolken on social media @DanWolken