It might be possible, haven't looked into that throughly though. Apart from the initial Command 0 packets mostly, the rest are asynchronous, so you can really get a bunch of different udp packets at anytime, based on whatever needs to be resent or whatever to keep the sequence count aligned. Which is why SC UDP is such a mess and sort of confusing at times to deal with.
But you could join the game and keep requesting certain packets to be sent your way by host, and keep requesting them, so that you never really join the game but at the same time in you're still in it. Which basically makes you invisible while still being able to see everyone in the room and see their chat.
Theres a bunch of ways to mess stuff up in SC udp that I'm sure would cause problems for starting a game.
Good idea though

, evil indeed