Kyle Whittingham is on the hot seat at Michigan ten months into a five-year contract, and the funny part is he’s the only person in the building who hasn’t done anything to deserve it.
Michigan hired Whittingham away from Utah last December specifically because he wasn’t exciting. Twenty-one seasons running one of the most boring, durable programs in the sport; a résumé built entirely out of not screwing it up. After the Sherrone Moore mess, that sounded like exactly what Michigan football needed. Now the Wolverines are 4-3, 1-3 in the Big Ten, fresh off a 13-6 overtime loss to Indiana in which the offense produced 224 total yards, 57 rushing yards on 42 carries, and zero touchdowns, and the hot-seat chatter has started anyway. Ten months, it turns out, is not enough patience to extend to a coach Michigan hired specifically to be patient with.
That’s the whole joke. Whittingham was brought in to be the bridge between the Harbaugh era and whatever comes next; a bridge’s entire job is to hold still while everything else moves across it. By that standard, he’s doing exactly what he was paid $8.2 million a year to do. It’s the people who designed the bridge who are already walking off the job site.
Start with the guy who signed off on the blueprint. Athletic director Warde Manuel sold the hire himself back in December, calling Whittingham a leader of “exceptional character.” By June, with the Sherrone Moore wreckage still fresh, Manuel was telling reporters Whittingham had already “stabilized the program” — not at Utah, in Ann Arbor, in real time, mid-crisis. Manuel will not be around to see how that turns out. He’s stepping down as Michigan’s athletic director on December 31st, before Whittingham even finishes his first season, in a buyout tied entirely to the Sherrone Moore investigation and nothing to do with a 4-3 record. Michigan is a program that’s spent this year settling things in court and in severance checks, and Whittingham’s record is the one piece of that mess he didn’t create. The administration that promised him time didn’t actually have any to give; it just had a press release.
None of that makes the Indiana loss forgivable. Facing third-and-goal from the 1-yard line with the game on the line, offensive coordinator Jason Beck called a bootleg pass instead of a quarterback sneak. Tommy Carr, the grandson of former Michigan coach Lloyd Carr and the man Michigan inserted at quarterback after benching sophomore Bryce Underwood about six games into the season, got sacked for a 13-yard loss on the call. It was the kind of play-calling decision that turns a mediocre week into a referendum.
Beck, who earns more than $3 million a year and followed Whittingham over from Utah, has absorbed most of the fallout. Coach Meech didn’t wait for the postgame press conference to make his feelings known:
https://twitter.com/McfaddenCoach/status/2114078588249190506
Whittingham wasn’t ready to throw his guy overboard, not yet. “Right now it’s not the time to panic,” he said after the loss. “We’re a play away from 6-1 or 7-0.” He was considerably less charitable about the larger body of work, calling it “not good enough,” which is the kind of sentence that manages to defend and indict the same person in six words.
Fans calling for both of their jobs have gotten loud enough that message boards are mounting a campaign to fire Whittingham himself, ten months into a five-year deal, right alongside the coordinator he’s defending. Former Michigan coach Biff Poggi pushed back on that instinct: “The worst thing we can do as Michigan supporters is abandon the players and coaches when they struggle.” Poggi no longer works for the program; his advice costs the administration nothing to ignore.
The dark joke is that outside analysts keep reaching for the exact same bridge language Michigan already built on purpose. CBS Sports has floated Whittingham, at 66 and five years into a job he just started, as a possible “one-and-done.” Analyst Josh Pate goes further, calling him a “bridge” coach outright — someone who could be replaced the moment this rebuild stalls, signed contract or no signed contract. Nobody in Ann Arbor seems bothered that the stability hire is now being discussed in the same disposable terms as the era he was brought in to end.
Michigan will have a new athletic director before this college football season is even finished grading itself, and that person will inherit a five-year deal signed by someone who won’t be there to defend it. The bridge is still standing. Nobody who built it is sticking around to find out if it holds.
