Ann Arbor — It doesn’t make sense, none of it. Not the new job halfway across the continent. Not the strange fit. Not leaving behind decades of the carefully orchestrated at Utah for the sheer unknown of it all at Michigan.
“I’d have been pissed off at myself down the road had I not taken the job,” Kyle Whittingham says.
Because no matter how good Whittingham had it for two-plus decades of doing more with less at Utah, he needed this Michigan job. Needed to finally see, beyond any measure of doubt, what would happen when less became more. When everything he possibly could want or need was a phone call or conversation away. When competing in the best conference in college football — one that has grown exponentially more difficult to navigate beyond rival Ohio State — with all the pressure and expectations that come with it, meant challenging himself like never before.
What happens when a man who has pushed himself to the limit his entire life — from competing with the elite of college football despite a financial hand behind your back, to becoming an Expert Level 7 skier, to his daily, 90-minute workout regimen that currently sits at 6,500-plus days and counting — is given everything he needs to push it one step further?
He takes a job sight unseen.“Didn’t need to see it,” Whittingham told USA TODAY Sports in a wide-ranging interview earlier this month. “Knew what it was, knew the challenge, wanted the challenge.”
Who does something so drastic, so out of character and routine, that it’s hard to reconcile the obvious ends of the equation? The same guy who believes in feeding the wolf.Force yourself into the unknown. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Expand and stretch who and what you are.Either retire after Utah and Whittingham couldn’t agree on terms to continue his employment, or take a no-brainer opportunity in the great unknown. There’s no powder in Michigan, no slopes to fuel his offseason sanctuary. No long rides through the desert on one of his many motorcycles, or the calming, healing landscape of the wide open West.Everything has changed and everything is different, with the exception of one critical thing: He's still a ball coach. Still the same guy who orchestrated eight 10-win seasons at Utah, trailing only Dabo Swinney (13) in active coaches with 10-win seasons. Still the guy who did more with less.And now here comes more with more, strolling into his life and just daring him to take a chance.
He could’ve bent to Utah’s contract demands at the end of another 10-win season, and been comfortable finishing his career in Salt Lake City. In the safe, comfortable known with the successful program he built, and the full life he lived outside it.But he has never chosen easy over difficult, and he sure as hell wasn’t starting now. So he’s not a Michigan Man, so what? The guy who last fit that mold won a national title, and left two NCAA investigations in his wake before escaping for the NFL.
Make no mistake, Michigan needs a no-frills sheriff as much as it needs a balls-to-the-wall football coach. And before you believe Whittingham, 66, was brought in to do the dirty work to set up the next guy, think about his obsessive workout routine.
The weightlifting isn’t as prevalent as it once was, but the cardio and core work of sit-ups and pushups is still going strong. Everything, he says — while staring deep into another potential soul to convert — revolves around core strength and stretching.
Every single day, except Sundays, since July 1, 2008. Even the Almighty took a day off every seventh.Whittingham woke up that July morning nearly two decades ago, and felt like a bag of rocks. Needed to change, needed to challenge himself.
So the streak began and the next thing you know, six months passed and Utah finished 13-0 in his fourth season, the first of those eight double-digit win seasons. Which leads him back to preaching and converting. There is no coincidence in life, he says. There’s work, and there’s the payoff. Fit body, calm mind, and a deep passion for what makes you tick. All of it, from powdery slopes to unchartered trails to an overloaded backside blitz, feeds the wolf.
That’s how you do more with less than any other coach in the game over the past two decades. “I feel like I’m 18,” Whittingham said. “As you get older in life, you lose flexibility. You’re all stoved up, and you can’t, you know, move. That’s a problem.”
And who knows if he’s talking the laws of physiology, or coaching in the ever-changing college football landscape? But it doesn’t really matter at this point.
“The expectations here are high, and they should be,” Whittingham said. “But I adapt to change well. So here we go, new chapter.”
They filed into the Big House earlier this month for the first public sight of Whittingham’s Michigan team. The last of 15 spring practices, the Maize and Blue game — with all of 13 points scored — was about as exciting as an enema.Not long after the event that was more introduction than finished product, Whittingham took to the podium at his postgame news conference and finally explained what he had been telling his team since Day 1. Players win games. Full stop.
Coaches will develop and put players in the right position to reach their ceilings. But nothing gets done, championships aren’t won, without players at the point.
“If you’ve got your top 10% of your team that works their butt off and trains hard, everyone else seems to follow suit,” Whittingham said. “Set the bar, demand everyone else live up to it.”
A continent away and on vacation in Europe, former Utah All-American linebacker Stevenson Sylvester heard what Whittingham said and the world moved to 2007, the year before Utah won a school-record 13 games and embarrassed big, bad Alabama in the Sugar Bowl to cap the unbeaten season. Beat them so badly, in fact, that Tide coach Nick Saban, of all people, created what would become the typical postseason refrain after SEC losses: The game didn’t mean anything.
Only it meant everything for the 12 months of development at Utah, from the time the Utes beat Navy in the Poinsettia Bowl in December of 2007 — and Sylvester saw Whittingham sprinting at him through the mass of postgame humanity on the field. The Utes had lost 14 games in the three seasons since Whittingham replaced Urban Meyer, including the last two to bitter rival BYU.
It wasn’t exactly playing out how everyone thought it would, and Whittingham finally embraced an uneasy truth: Coaching wasn’t all about control. So he shook hands with then-Navy coach Ken Niamatalolo, and raced to find Sylvester.