Did Michigan get the man they need? Or did they settle for the first clean candidate willing to take the job? Time will tell.
Maybe Michigan and Kyle Whittingham will prove to be a perfect pair.
For the past two decades, both are good for just about eight wins a season, at least when they aren’t cheating.
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To be clear, I’m not aware of Whittingham being accused of breaking the rules on or off the field. I assume everything he did in 21 seasons at Utah was on the up and up.
Veteran columnist Marcus Hartman writes the OHSAA, Ohio State, and sports at large for Press Pros Magazine.com.
Whittingham, who was hired as the new head coach of the Wolverines on Friday, put together a College Football Hall of Fame-worthy career out West to be sure. But predicting how well his past translates to a new school in a new region at a different level of competition is difficult.
Yes, Urban Meyer was a smashing success at Florida and later Ohio State, but that was 20 years ago, and Meyer was at Utah for only two seasons.
Upon further review, Utah played at three different (but also ultimately similar) levels of the FBS in Whittingham’s tenure and never dominated any of them despite all of them being fairly ripe for domination.
Winning the Pac 12 from 2011-23 (which Whittingham did three times) was kind of like winning the Big Ten — if Ohio State had stopped being Ohio State and instead dropped to the level USC has maintained since Pete Carroll beat the NCAA posse out of town in 2010.
The Utes finished 13th and tied for third the past two seasons in the parity-driven new Big 12, and even back in the Mountain West days Whittingham won one conference title in six tries.
The NCAA concluded Michigan was cheating for at least most of the 2021, ’22 and ’23 seasons via a sophisticated advanced scouting scheme (and also found the program guilty of recruiting violations in a separate NCAA infractions case). The Wolverines went 40-3 in that span after averaging eight wins a year from 2005-2019, but they ended their longest Big Ten title drought and stopped Ohio State’s longest stretch of success in The Game so they got something out of it.
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In ’23, Michigan even capitalized on one of the weakest four-team College Football Playoff fields to claim its first consensus national championship since the 1940s. Since then the Wolverines are 17-8.
When Sherrone Moore was fired for having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member, the odds Michigan would upgrade were high even if the timing wasn’t ideal.
They appear to have done that, but that doesn’t mean they should be planning on annual playoff appearances, either. Whittingham likely raises the floor for the next few seasons, but what is the ceiling?
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Does Whittingham’s physical style work as a change-up in the Pac 12 and Big 12 better than as the fastball in the Big Ten, where at least half the teams in the league also want to play that way?
This marriage of desperation has been hailed across the nation by Michigan homers and many in the national media, but they are focusing on different aspects of the hire. While outsiders praise the Wolverines for hiring “an adult” to “clean up the program,” the locals seem assured glory days are soon to be back.
I can’t help but be skeptical.
Maybe a change of scenery will do Whittingham well, though if he still had his fastball, it seems like he would still be at Utah.
Nonetheless, it will be nice for the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry if Whittingham makes Michigan less contemptible than the Maize and Blue have been the past five years.
The famed Ann Arbor arrogance likely isn’t going anywhere, but Jim Harbaugh’s teams never acted like they had been there before (they hadn’t). Moore’s teams spent more time rehearsing trash talk after allowing a first down than how to stop the counter play.
And did Urban Meyer’s short stint at Utah pave the way for Whittingham’s success for the next 21 years?
Perhaps they spent more time planning what they would do when they lost (protect the midfield ‘M’ Ohio State apparently never planned to stomp on) than figuring out how to complete a forward pass. But respect has been lacking in The Game for a few seasons.
Here’s hoping that changes with truly good men (both former Meyer assistants) leading each program.
Beyond that, Day appears to have broken the hex Harbaugh put upon him with the classless “born on third base” barb in 2021.
Perhaps upsets are about to go out of style again in the rivalry, a trend from 2005-2017 that typically always favors Ohio State.
I also have a theory — and this is pure theory on my part, but I think following what happens on the field and in recruiting closely for 20 years qualifies me to throw one out there — building a winner at Michigan will only get harder with Pat Fitzgerald at Michigan State, Matt Campbell at Penn State and Ohio State potentially refocusing more recruiting energy on Ohio and the Midwest to avoid getting sucked into too many expensive national name, image and likeness recruiting battles.
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MSU and Michigan are rarely good at the same time, and the last run of good Spartans football was based on recruiting the type of players Michigan relied on heavily for years. I don’t see Fitzgerald making MSU a national contender, but if he raises Sparty’s floor with a lot of hard-nosed kids from Michigan and Ohio, well, there won’t be as many of those for Whittingham to lean on.
I suspect Campbell will ramp up PSU’s recruiting efforts in Ohio and the rest of the Midwest compared to James Franklin, so that could drain the pool even more.
(Yes, this might also hurt Ohio State, though the Buckeyes traditionally get the pick of the litter in the Buckeye State — if they don’t wait too long to make their choices on in-state talent.)
To be a playoff regular, requires a strong high school recruiting and finding the right transfer talent. Michigan did a great job of in the portal in its first few years.
The Wolverines seem to have more resources pointed at roster optimization than in the past, though that still did not yield a top 10 class for 2026. And we don’t know how much Whittingham has or will embrace spending for top talent when he had a developmental program at Utah.
Sometimes it comes down to how an oblong ball bounces on a given Saturday. But we frequently assume a coach who does more with less, as Whittingham did at Utah, should have more success when he goes to a program with more resources.
But how often does that actually happen? And did these greater resources help Michigan over the past 20 years before the cheating?
They have not consistently signed top 10 classes since the end of the Lloyd Carr era, so there is no reason to see that changing.
Of course, hires that look great on paper frequently fail, and hires nobody saw coming sometimes end up great.
Nobody knew how Jim Tressel would fare at Ohio State, but many thought Luke Fickell would have much more success than he has at Wisconsin.
Bottom line: If Michigan believes it is going to be back in the national title hunt with Whittingham, that seems like wishful thinking.
If he prevents the program from circling the drain in the aftermath of the Harbaugh-Moore debacle, well I guess that’s something.
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