Should Michigan State football cancel future games with CMU?

The Connor Stalions investigation at Central Michigan continues and Michigan State football still needs answers.

The “investigation” at Central Michigan continues. According to an in-depth interview with Alan Haller posted on Monday by Graham Couch, the Connor Stalions investigation could impact Central Michigan’s relationship with Michigan State football.

Here's a story with a couple nuggets from the interview with Alan Haller that didn't make the column.

– On the investigation into whether Connor Stalions was on CMU's sideline at MSU.

– And this season's MSU football opener possibly staying on Saturday.https://t.co/uWZRymniAl

— Graham Couch (@Graham_Couch) May 20, 2024

In case you missed it somehow and were living under a rock during this past football season (I wouldn’t blame you), a picture surfaced of a Central Michigan staffer who looked eerily similar to Michigan sign-stealing kingpin Connor Stalions. It looked as if the Central staffer was wearing a disguise with sunglasses (during a night game) that looked to have a red light on them (for video-taping purposes). There was supposed to be a deep investigation into who this mystery staffer was and now eight months later, we still don’t have word.

If it wasn’t Stalions, it feels like it would’ve been fairly easy to debunk nor would it have taken this long to figure out. No one has come forward as the mystery staffer which leads us to believe it was, in fact, Stalions.

During this Couch interview with Haller, the Michigan State AD talked about how this investigation by Central could impact the relationship between the two schools. And that’s fair seeing as Michigan State paid the Chippewas to be there only for them to knowingly have a sign-stealer on the sidelines.

Why would head coach Jim McElwain let this happen? Well, he claims he didn’t know anything about it — which is a problem in itself — and he was also an assistant under Jim Harbaugh at Michigan a few years earlier. So why not?

But this whole eight-month-long “investigation” with no answers begs the question: should MSU cancel its 2027 and 2030 games with CMU?

It seems like it’d be a petty move, especially because the Spartans would have to find a new non-conference opponent, but if Central is not going to cooperate in this investigation and actually provide answers, why should Michigan State pay it to come to Spartan Stadium? Maybe if they chose to play in East Lansing for free (would never happen), it’d be fine, but the chances of that are zero.

Central Michigan needs to speed up this investigation because it shouldn’t have taken eight-plus months to figure out who a staff member was if it wasn’t Stalions. And if it was, the appropriate people need to be fired. Until that happens, these future games should be put on hold.

If no one is fired after this, I say cancel those future matchups or make Central pay back the money they made from the 2023 game.