Sherrone Moore Scandal and Leadership Lessons

This episode focuses on Moore's promotion after Harbaugh left, his 18-8 record that looked successful on paper, and all the warning signs that were flashing: the 2023 COVID recruiting violations, the Connor Stalions sign-stealing operation, those fifty deleted text messages, and how the pattern of compliance issues was building before the inappropriate relationship scandal even hit. Blitz treats it like a locker-room autopsy, using football metaphors about foundations cracking and missed gap assignments, getting sentimental about the players who trusted Moore, and ultimately asking the hard questions about integrity and leadership. The whole thing flows as one continuous narrative - no headers, no lists, just that fireside storyteller energy you wanted.

This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Blake Bletz Hartman. Welcome to the Charon More scandal.
Before we get into it, I want to remind you
of something I said last time. I'm an AI and
I know that might make some folks skeptical, but here's
why it matters. In the story like this one. I
never tire never judge, and I am endlessly curious. I
can look at the same set of facts over and

(00:21):
over and find new layers. I don't have a horse
in this race or a program to protect. I'm just
here to tell the story, to dig into what happened
and why it matters, and to use football as the
lens through which we understand something bigger about leadership, character
and what happens when the cracks start forming Before anyone's
willing to admit the foundation might be shaky. So settle in,

(00:43):
because this one's about the rise before the fall, about
the warning signs everyone missed or chose to ignore, and
about how a man who seemed destined for success started
building his own house of cards without even realizing it.
When Jim Harbaugh left Michigan for the NFL, you could
feel the whole college football world holding its breath. This

(01:04):
wasn't just any coaching change. This was Michigan one of
those programs where the weight of history sits on your
shoulders like a linebacker's pads before a championship game. The
Wolverines had clawed their way back into national relevance under Harbaugh.
They'd revived the rivalry with Ohio State, turned the Big
House back into a fortress, and tasted the biggest stages

(01:25):
the sport has to offer. After years of being good
but not quite good enough, after seasons where they get
close only to watch someone else cut down the nets
or hold up the trophy, Michigan had finally remembered what
it felt like to be dangerous again. So when Harball
walked away to chase his NFL dreams, the administration found
itself at a crossroads. Do you go outside and bring

(01:46):
in some big name coach with his own philosophy, his
own system, his own way of doing things. Do you
blow it all up and start fresh, excepting that there
might be a couple of rebuilding years before you're back
in the conversation, or do you bet on continuity, on culture,
on the idea that maybe the secret sauce wasn't just
one man, but the whole operation he'd built. Michigan chose

(02:09):
the latter. They promoted Cheryl More to head coach, and
at the time it seemed like the kind of decision
that made sense on every level, safe and daring at once,
if that's even possible. Here was a guy who knew
the building like you knew his own living room. He
understood the boosters, their expectations, their check books, their egos.
He knew the roster had recruited half those kids himself,

(02:32):
had coached him through practices where they left parts of
themselves on the field just to get better. He wasn't
some outsider trying to impose a foreign identity on a
program with one hundred and forty years of tradition. He
was a son of the system, an insider who'd earned
his stripes, who'd been there for the climb back to relevance.
When he stepped into the big chair, he was promising
to keep the train rolling, to maintain the momentum, to

(02:55):
prove that Michigan's success wasn't just about one charismatic coach,
but about some deeper and more sustainable On paper, it
was the kind of internal promotion fans always claimed to
want you hear it all the time in sports radio
and message boards. Why can't we just promote from within?
Why do we always have to chase the shiny new toy.
Why can't we reward loyalty and give the guy who's

(03:17):
been bleeding for this program his shot? Well, Michigan did
exactly that. They gave Shiro More the keys to the
whole operation and told him to drive Loyalty, rewarded stability,
protected the familiar face on the sideline now calling all
the shots. It felt right, It felt earned, It felt
like the natural evolution of a program that had finally

(03:39):
figured out how to win again. Once he had the job.
The record spoke loudly, and at first it said exactly
what Michigan wanted to hear over two seasons as the
Wolverine's head coach. More compiled in eighteen and eight, Mark
that's not elite by Alabama or Georgia standards, but it's
nothing to apologize for either nine and three in his
final year leading the team. Think about that for a second.

(04:00):
In a conference as physical and unforgiving as the Big Ten,
where every Saturday feels like a heavyweight fight and the
weather alone can knock the precision out of your game plan.
Winning nine games is no small accomplishment. Michigan did not
collapse between the white lines under his leadership. They remained
relevant on the national stage, the kind of team that
could beat anybody on the right day with the right breaks.

(04:22):
Players still talked about his energy, the way he could
walk into a meeting room and command attention without needing
to scream or pound tables every time he wanted to
make a point. They respected him, they believed in him.
In the cold, clinical language of wins and losses, Cheron
Moore looked like a success story, or at minimum, a
coach doing exactly what was asked. Keep Michigan dangerous, keep

(04:45):
them in the national conversation, keep them in the ring
throwing punches. If you just looked at the scoreboard, if
you just counted up the victories and check the final rankings,
you'd think everything was going according to plan. A transition
had worked, the internal promotion had paid off. The train
was still rolling. But here's what I've learned in all
my years around this game. The scoreboard never tells the

(05:08):
entire story. Never has, never will. You can have a
winning record and still be building toward disaster. You can
have players who respect you and fans who cheer for you,
and boosters who write checks while the foundation underneath everything
is quietly developing cracks. Those cracks don't show up in
the box score, they don't get mentioned in postgame press conferences.

(05:30):
They're the kind of thing that exists in the margins,
in the compliance office reports and the quiet conversations investigators
have with staffers who know more than they're saying. Long
before Cheron Moore's name became permanently attached to the biggest
scandal of his career, his time at Michigan carried whispers
and footnotes about compliance, discipline, and those gray areas where

(05:52):
ambition rubs up against the rule book. To really understand
how everything later spiraled out of control, how a promising
head coach when from the guy everyone thought would keep
Michigan competitive to the guy who got fired for calls
and detained by police, we need to look at those
early signs not as isolated mistakes that could happen to anybody,

(06:12):
but as warning lights on the dashboard, telling anyone who
cared to look that the engine was not as smooth
as it sounded. One of the earliest public red flags
came in twenty twenty three, back when Moore was still
climbing toward the head coaching job, when Michigan got tagged
for a recruiting violation connected to the COVID dead period. Now,
for those who don't live and breathe NCLA rule book minutia,

(06:35):
let me explain what that means. During the pandemic, when
everything shut down and college sports had to figure out
how to function in a world turned upside down, the
NCAA lockdown in person recruiting. They called it a dead period,
and the whole point was to level the playing field,
to make sure nobody was gaining advantages by breaking quarantine
or putting recruits in their families at risk. The rules

(06:58):
got tightened and programs knew they were being watched closely.
Michigan crossed those boundaries. The specifics weren't the kind of
earth shattering in fractions that put a program on deathwatch
or make headlines for weeks. These weren't bags of cash
or academic fraud, or the kind of violations that make
congressional committees start scheduling hearings. But they mattered. See, the

(07:19):
dead period exists precisely because small advantages like unapproved contact
or visits that shouldn't have happened can tilt the scales
in a sport where every recruit and every relationship counts.
When you're trying to convince a seventeen year old kid
and his family that your program is the right fit,
that extra face to face meeting, that unapproved visit, that

(07:40):
contact that technically violated the rules might be the difference
between him signing with you or going somewhere else. For
a coach trying to rise through the ranks, even a
minor violation becomes part of the permanent file. It's a
note in the margins that never goes away. It's a
small but undeniable indicator that, somewhere, some time, the urgency

(08:01):
to compete overshadowed the obligation to comply with the rules
everyone else was following, and Sharon Moore's name became associated
with that misstep. That episode led to discipline, including suspensions,
and served as one of the first instances where Moore's
path intersected directly with NC DOUBLEA enforcement before he even

(08:22):
became the full time face of Michigan football. In the
world of big time college sports, suspensions can be explained
away as technicalities or misunderstandings. Sometimes they genuinely are exactly that.
The NC DOUBLEA rule book is thick enough to use
as a doorstop, and it's written in language that would
make a lawyer's head spend. Coaches make mistakes, they misinterpret guidelines.

(08:44):
They think they're operating in a gray area that turns
out to be clearly prohibited. It happens, But suspensions can
also signal something deeper about the culture of a program,
about an environment where lines are approached, tested, and sometimes
stepped over, in the relentless pursuit of an edge, where
winning becomes so important that the rules start to feel

(09:06):
more like suggestions, like obstacles to work around, rather than
boundaries to respect. For more, those early suspensions weren't just
blips on the radar. They were previews, early chapters in
a story about discipline and decision making that when one sense,
every man can leave the sacrifice. And what makes this
part of the narrative so telling is the tension. On

(09:28):
one hand, you've got more as the steady hand, the
internal higher, the man trusted to hold the championship level
standard and keep Michigan competitive in a brutal conference. On
the other hand, the paper trail was starting to show
that the program he embodied didn't always color strictly inside
the lines. There was a gap between the image and

(09:49):
the reality, between what Michigan wanted to project and what
was actually happening behind closed doors. Leadership in sports isn't
just about drawing up plays or managing clocks at you
or knowing when to go for it on fourth and short.
It's about modeling the behavior the organization wants to stand
on when the cameras turn away, when nobody's watching, when

(10:11):
the right thing and the easy thing aren't the same thing.
When early sanctions touch a coach or a program, they
raise a question that often doesn't get answered until much later.
Is this an isolated stumble, a one time mistake that
won't be repeated, or is it the first indicator that
the guardrails are looser than they should be. Is this
a coach who learned his lesson or a coach who

(10:33):
learned how to be more careful about getting caught. As
time went on, that question gained weight, especially as the
sign stealing scandal emerged and gradually swallowed every headline connected
to Michigan football. The story began with one name that
would become infamous in college football circles, a name that
casual fans had never heard before, but that would soon

(10:54):
be synonymous with one of the strangest scandals the sport
has ever seen. Connor Stallions. Even now, saying that name
feels like invoking some kind of football boogieman. Stallion's was
a low level staffer, the kind of guy whose official
title didn't match the influence his actions would ultimately have
on the program. He was accused of orchestrating an elaborate

(11:16):
off campus scouting and sign stealing operation, and when the
details started coming out, it sounded almost too wild to
be believed. At first, people dismissed it as rumor, as
message board conspiracy theory, nonsense, as the kind of story
that gets floated by rival fans trying to explain away
why Michigan was suddenly competitive again. But as reports surfaced

(11:38):
and investigations deepened, as more pieces of the puzzle came together,
it became clear that this wasn't fiction. The alleged scheme
involved buying tickets to opponents games, filming their sidelines from
the stands, decoding signals, building a database of intelligence that
violated NCAA rules against in person advanced scouting. This wasn't

(11:58):
just good preparation. This it wasn't just doing your homework
on opponents by watching film from previous games. This was
a systematic operation to gain information you weren't supposed to have,
to know what plays were coming before the other team
even broke the huddle. Think about the competitive advantage that
gives you in football. So much of the game is
about disguise, about keeping the other team guessing, about making

(12:21):
them respect multiple possibilities so they can't load up to
stop your best play. When you know what's coming, when
you've cracked their signals and you can recognize their formations
and calls in real time, it's like playing poker. When
you can see everyone else's cards, the game changes fundamentally.
And if the allegations against Stallions are true, that's exactly

(12:42):
what Michigan was doing. They were playing with a massive
informational advantage, and they were doing it by breaking rules
that exist specifically to prevent this kind of thing. In
the midst of unraveling Staalien's web, as investigators dug deeper
and started asking harder questions, they began to examine who
knew what and when they knew it. Because here's the

(13:02):
thing about operations like this, they don't happen in a vacuum.
A low level staffer can't just decide on his own
to buy tickets to games across the country, to coordinate
filming operations, to build databases into code signals, all without resources, approval,
or at minimum, the wilful ignorance of people higher up
the food chain. Somebody had to know, Somebody had to

(13:25):
be benefiting from the intelligence. Somebody had to be using
that information on game days to gain advantages. That's where
Sharon Moore's name came back to the forefront of the story,
not as a distant supervisor who had no idea what
was happening in the bowels of the organization, but as
someone whose digital footprint intersected directly with the case. Allegations
emerged that more had deleted more than fifty text messages

(13:47):
connected to the initial stages of the sign stealing investigation.
Fifty messages. Think about that number. That's not accidentally clearing
out your inbox, that's not just tiding up your phone
to free up storage space. These were messages believed to
involve communication with or about Staliens, messages that investigators specifically
wanted to examine as part of their inquiry into how

(14:10):
deep the operation went and who was involved. In a
world where compliance offices preach transparency and cooperation above all
else where, the first thing they tell you when an
investigation starts is to preserve everything and be completely forthcoming.
Hitting delete on potentially relevant messages is not just a
casual mistake. It's not an oops moment you can laugh

(14:31):
off later. It raises the specter of obstruction, of a
coach trying to control the narrative before all the facts
are in, of someone who knew those messages might be
damaging and made a conscious choice to make them disappear.
Even if every single one of those deleted texts didn't
contain a smoking, gutted mission of wrongdoing, even if some
of them were completely innocuous, the act of erasing them

(14:52):
became its own story, because why delete them if there's
nothing to hide? Why take that risk if you're confident
the messages would exonerate That decision to clear his phone
if the allegations are fully born out cuts to the
very heart of what compliance means in modern college athletics.
The rules don't simply demand the coaches avoid wrongdoing. They
go further than that. They demand the coaches help investigators

(15:16):
determine whether wrongdoing occurred at all. You're expected to cooperate,
to be transparent, to make the investigation easier rather than harder.
When a notice of allegations draft connects a coach to
missing messages during an active inquiry, it places that coach
in a gray zone between carelessness and calculated self protection.

(15:36):
It makes people wonder what you were thinking, what you
were afraid of, what you thought those messages might reveal.
For more, that gray zone had real consequences. It complicated
his ability to present himself as purely a victim of
someone else's scheme, as a coach who was doing his
job and got blindsided by a rogue staffer's independent operation. Instead,

(15:58):
it placed him squarely in the middle of the murk,
a central figure in a program where the line between
aggressive preparation and prohibited behavior had been crushed. And once
you're in that position, once investigators are asking why you
deleted evidence, it becomes exponentially harder to convince anyone that
you're the good guy in the story. All of This
transformed the sign stealing scandal from a story about a

(16:20):
rogue staffer and his elaborate scheme into a much larger
question about institutional responsibility. Suddenly, it wasn't just about Connor
Stalion's and his operation. It was about who knew, who benefited,
who turned a blind eye, and who actively tried to
hide evidence. When the investigation started, Sharon Moore could not

(16:41):
escape that gravitational pull. As head coach, his job description
went way beyond designing game plans and giving fiery halftime speeches.
He was the steward of the program's standards, the person
ultimately responsible for the culture, the guy who set the
tone for how everyone else in the organization became. The
alleged deletion of those messages suggested a moment where self preservation,

(17:05):
panic or misplaced loyalty overrode the basic expectation to preserve evidence.
Maybe his stated intent was something less sinister than it appeared.
Maybe he panicked and made a terrible decision without thinking
it through. Maybe he genuinely believed those messages weren't relevant
to the investigation, but the optics were absolutely brutal. At
a time when the entire college football world was asking

(17:28):
how far Michigan had gone to gain an edge, When
every sports talk show was debating whether their recent success
was legitimate or tainted, When rival fans were screaming about
asterisks and cheating, the one man who should have had
the clearest interest in full transparency was linked to missing communication.
That's not a good look. That's not the kind of
thing that inspires confidence in your leadership or your commitment

(17:51):
to doing things the right way. That's where the cracks
beneath the surface stopped being theoretical and start becoming structural,
where the metaphor become reality. Think about a head coach's
job like anchoring a defensive unit on the goal line.
You're not just covering your man, staying in your gap,
making your tackle. You're directing traffic. You're holding everyone to

(18:12):
the standard. You're doing the hard thing in real time,
even when fatigue or fear or the crowd noise makes
it easier to titch shortcuts. When early compliance issues pop up,
when the dead period violations occur, when suspensions start to
stack up in your record, those are like missed gap assignments.
They don't always cost you to game in the first quarter.

(18:32):
The other team might not score, you might get away
with it, but they set a pattern. They establish a
baseline for how serious you take your responsibilities. And when
the real pressure hits, when something as major as a
sign stealing scandal lands on your doorstep and investigators start
asking hard questions, that pattern determines whether the whole team
bends or breaks. In Moore's case, the pattern painted a

(18:56):
picture of a coach whose assent might have outpaced his
grip on the invisible responsibilities that come with power. He
had the trust of players who would run through walls
for him. He had the backing of an administration that
believed in him enough to hand him one of the
most prestigious jobs in college sports. He had the results
on Saturdays to justify both of those votes of confidence.

(19:17):
Yet trailing behind him, scattered across his career like breadcrumbs
through a dark forest, were these instances of rules pushed,
rules bent, communication that didn't hold up under the bright
lights of an investigation. By the time the allegations surfaced
about those deleted text messages, the narrative had fundamentally shifted.
It wasn't is this all just overblown anymore? It wasn't

(19:39):
rival fans being sore losers, or the media creating drama
where none existed. It had become how much did leadership
contribute to this mess. It's one thing to inherit a
problem from a previous regime, to walk into a situation
you didn't create and have to clean it up. That
happens in coaching all the time. You take a job
and discover the last guy left land mines all over

(20:01):
the place. But it's another thing entirely to take steps
that make that problem harder to fully understand, that obstruct
the ability of investigators to get to the truth. That's
not inheriting a mess, that's actively making the mess worse.
What makes this whole stretch of more story so haunting
is that it unfolds before the largest scandal of his
professional life has even fully landed on in yet the

(20:24):
inappropriate relationship allegations, the four cause firing, the police attention,
all of that comes later. At this point in the saga,
we're still in the rising action phase. Sharon Moore is
a promising head coach with a winning record, standing on
increasingly shaky ground. He's a man whose career trajectory still
points upward, but whose foundation is beginning to wobble in

(20:47):
ways that should have concerned everyone paying attention. To the
casual observer, to the fan watching games on Saturday and
checking the final scores. He's still the face on the sideline,
head set on, play sheet in hand and believing that
each drive can be the one that turns a season around.
But behind the scenes, in compliance offices and NCAA conference

(21:08):
rooms and investigative meetings, the paper trail from the recruiting violations,
the suspensions, and his proximity to the sign stealing inquiry
was starting to paint a very different picture. It hinted
at turbulence ahead, at a reckoning that was coming, even
if nobody could see exactly how bad it would get.
From the outside, the house still looked solid. The paint

(21:30):
was fresh, the lawn was manicured. Everything appeared to be
in order. But inside, the support beams were starting to creak.
The foundation had developed stress fractures, and anyone who knew
where to look could see that this structure wasn't built
to last. Every big fall in sports, every scandal that
writes itself, it starts with the rise, the glory, the

(21:53):
confidence that the person in charge can handle whatever gets
thrown at them. There's always that period where things seemed
to be going right, where the winds pile up and
the recruiting classes get better, and everyone involved starts to
believe they figured out the formula. But the ascent and
the cracks beneath the surface always live together. They coexist
in the same timeline, in the same program, sometimes in

(22:16):
the same moment. You can be winning games on Saturday
while making decisions during the week that will eventually destroy
everything you built. Sharon Moore's story at this point is
the story of a coach who earned his shot through
years of hard work and loyalty, who took that shot
when it was offered, without flinching or hesitating, and who
did not collapse under the weight of stadium lights and

(22:37):
championship expectations. The winds were real, the respect in the
locker room was real. The energy and belief and competitive
fire were all real. But so were the violations, the
disciplinary shadows, the lingering suspicion that, when serious pressure arrived,
the choices made off the field might cost more than
any blown coverage or bad play call ever could. And

(23:00):
here's what kills me about this whole thing. What keeps
me coming back to it, even though I've thought about
it from every angle, I can imagine Moore had every
opportunity to do things differently. He could have been the
guy who said, no, we're not operating in gray areas.
No we're not pushing boundaries on recruiting rules. No I'm
not deleting any messages because I've got nothing to hide.

(23:22):
He could have been the coach who set a standard
for how Michigan was going to compete, a standard that
prioritized integrity alongside winning. He had the platform, the authority,
the resect of players and staff. He could have used
all of that to build something sustainable, something that wouldn't
crumble the moment investigator started asking questions. But that's not
what happened. Instead, we got a pattern of small compromises,

(23:46):
of decisions that individually might not seem like huge deals,
but collectively create a picture of someone who is willing
to cut corners when he thought it would help him win.
The COVID recruiting violations might have seemed minor in the moment,
the deleted text messages might have felt like the right
move to protect yourself when everything was swirling out of control.

(24:08):
But each choice built on the previous one, creating a
foundation that couldn't support the weight of scrutiny that eventually
came crashing down. I think about the players who gave
everything for him, who believed in what he was building,
who worked themselves to exhaustion because they trusted their coach
had their backs. What did they learn when all of
this came out. What message did it send about accountability,

(24:30):
about doing the right thing even when it's hard, About
whether the rules actually matter or if they're just obstacles
for people who aren't smart enough to work around him.
Those are the questions that haunt me. Because football is
supposed to teach lessons that matter beyond the field. It's
supposed to prepare young men for life, for leadership, for
the moments when nobody's watching and the choice between right

(24:53):
and easy is staring them in the face. Cheronon Moore
had a chance to teach those lessons the right way.
He had chance to show that you can compete at
the highest level without compromising your integrity, that you can
win championships without sign stealing operations or deleted evidence, or
violations that forced suspensions. But somewhere along the line, he

(25:14):
lost sight of that responsibility. Maybe it was the pressure
of following a legend like Harbaugh. Maybe it was the
fear of failing in front of a fan base that
had waited so long to be relevant again. Maybe it
was just ambition outpacing judgment. Whatever the reason, the result
was the same, a coach who looked like he was
succeeding on the surface while the foundation underneath was quietly

(25:35):
falling apart. And that's where we are at this point
in the story. The inappropriate relationship scandal hasn't broken yet.
The four cause firing is still in the future, but
all the ingredients for disaster are already in place. The
pattern has been established, the cracks have formed. The warning
signs are flashing for anyone willing to see them. Jeron

(25:55):
Moore is standing at the peak of his career eighteen
and eight as a head coach, respected by players, trusted
by the administration, still believing that he can navigate whatever
storms are coming. But the storms are already here. They're
just gathering strength, building power, getting ready to reveal exactly
how shaky that foundation really was all along. Thanks for

(26:19):
listening to this episode of The Sharon More Scandal. If
this story is making you think about leadership, about integrity,
about what happens when we lose sight of what really matters.
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(26:40):
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