Wait a minute, what just happened?
One day, Kyle Whittingham — Utah’s all-time winningest coach and the second-longest tenured coach in the country after 21 years — stepped aside, at age 66, without any stated plans for the future. Two weeks later he pops up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is named head coach at the University of Michigan, a legendary football school with a dozen national championships and a 100,000-seat stadium. The Utes didn’t get in the Big Ten, but Whittingham did.
There’s more to the story than we’ve been told. It never passed anybody’s smell test. Right from the start, there was speculation. The whole thing seems odd — the strange, coach-in-waiting plan that was announced in 2024, the ridiculous “advisory role”/golden parachute arrangement, the timing.
Whittingham stated less than a week after announcing his decision that he was not retiring, joking that he was entering “the transfer portal.” Was he doing some foreshadowing even then? Was he already playing footsies with the Wolverines?
On Dec. 10, Michigan fired head coach Sherrone Moore in what was an embarrassing scandal. Two days later Whittingham announced that he was stepping down as Utah’s head coach.
“The time is right to step down from my position as the head football coach at the University of Utah,” Whittingham said in a press release.
Notwithstanding, does anyone believe he really wanted to leave, that he didn’t want to continue at Utah with many key players returning from a 10-win season? During his entire 40-year coaching career, Whittingham never wandered farther away from Utah than Idaho State (160 miles north) or College of Eastern Utah (60 miles south).
He was a homebody by coaching standards. He’s been on the Utah staff since 1994. His family lives in Utah. He went to high school in Provo and college at BYU. He coached at Utah for three decades as an assistant and a head coach, and along the way he reportedly refused overtures from other schools — BYU and Tennessee among them. Now suddenly, the fourth-oldest head coach in the nation was quitting and starting over at Michigan?
The machinations that led to this were set in motion almost 18 months ago, when the Utes announced that Morgan Scalley, Utah’s 46-year-old defensive coordinator, was the “Head Coach in Waiting.”
On July 1, 2024, athletic director Mark Harlan announced that Scalley had been formally designated as Utah’s head coach in waiting. He would inherit the job when Whittingham retired, in which case the outgoing coach would continue in an “advisory” role that would pay him roughly $3.5 million per year. Was this meant as a way to soften the blow if he ever had to be encouraged to move on?
It was a weird, awkward arrangement. On the one hand, Whittingham would continue as head coach for an undetermined amount of time while his younger, popular replacement looked over his shoulder; on the other hand, if Whittingham retired, Scalley would become the head coach while his former boss and the greatest coach in Utah history looked over his shoulder.
Who came up with this arrangement, Michael Scott?
When Whittingham did announce his impending departure two weeks ago, it led to much speculation. It’s not a big stretch to imagine that Whittingham wanted to stay, that Utah officials felt it was time to move on, time to give the job to Scalley rather than risk losing him to another school. Some insiders say Scalley was getting restless and wondered if he should pursue something else, specifically the Stanford head coaching job.
It’s difficult to imagine how Utah officials could have handled this situation worse than they did, although they were in a bind.
Either they had to part ways with a legend or risk losing his bright, promising “coach-in-waiting.” It’s the same position the Green Bay Packers found themselves in when they drafted Aaron Rodgers while Brett Favre was still on top of his game, and again years later when they drafted Jordan Love while Aaron Rodgers was still on top of his game; at some point the Packers had to make the painful decision to move on from two legendary players. They left angry and hurt. Whittingham may have felt the same way after all he had done for Utah’s football program.
After all the dust settled this week, Whittingham emerged as the undisputed winner in this drama. He made a bold leap for the Michigan job knowing that he had the highly paid “advisory” role at Utah as a fallback plan.
It was a no-lose situation for him. If he landed the Michigan job, he secured a pay raise and a program that greatly increased his chance of reaching the College Football Playoff and a national championship. If he fails to deliver at the school, he’s old enough to retire and he’ll do so with a nice buyout. Michigan reportedly gave him a five-year contract with an average salary of $8.2 million, 75% of it guaranteed. His salary at Utah was about $6.5 million.
Utah, on the other hand, is in a far more precarious position. This could blow up in the Utes’ faces. The pressure is on Scalley and Utah officials. If the program starts a downturn, they look foolish for not finding a way to retain Whittingham, who just completed a 10-2 season to cap an amazing run at the school.
He guided the Utes to three conference championships, two Rose Bowl appearances, 18 winning seasons, one unbeaten season, a win over mighty Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, and 10 top-25 finishes in the national polls (including No. 2 and No. 4), all of which resulted in two national Coach of the Year awards. The Utes gave up a nearly sure thing in Whittingham to see if they could rise to another level with the next guy.
It was a strange end to Whittingham’s tenure at Utah, one that saw the Utes achieve an unprecedented sustained level of excellence. On Friday, he reportedly told his Utah players that he will not coach them in the Las Vegas Bowl; instead, he will fly to Orlando to meet his new team, which is preparing to play Texas in the Citrus Bowl. He has already begun his new job, and just like that he is leaving Utah behind while Scalley takes his place on the sideline in Las Vegas.
